more will be revealed

Wow…how did a month go by since my last post? It’s amazing how quickly time goes as I get older! I’m going to set a goal of posting once a week, even if it is something short, just to get into the habit of sharing my thoughts, ideas, questions, musings, and memories. Each of us on the Coastland team is or will be blogging regularly, so look forward to continued thoughts on that topic.

Our Easter celebration at Coastland was awesome! A bunch of people came out, more than we normally have on a Sunday (something very uncommon for church plants), and God definitely showed up big time. We were able to give our Easter offering to an Ethiopian church in downtown Tampa. Leaders from the church were there to accept the offering, and we’ll be partnering with them in the future, to help them focus outward in reaching the 3,000 Ethiopians living in Tampa. I found out yesterday that our offering was 10x what they normally receive, so that should be a huge boost for them to be able to serve their city even more!

I’ve been staying quite busy in a number of different areas with Coastland, but mostly with the media aspect of the church. I’m slowly but surely learning Final Cut Pro 6, and will soon dive into the latest version of Motion. I shoot and edit all of our videos right now, most of which are interviews or man-on-the-street, but I definitely want to branch into more creative ventures that will come alongside the weekly message. You can check out the videos at Vimeo.

Another big project that is almost ready to be launched is a redesign of the Coastland website. We’ve teamed up with my good friend Mark over at AntistaticDesign to build us a custom site running on ExpressionEngine. I hope to have that live in the next few weeks.

Outside of work, I’ve gotten into mountain biking, thanks for my friend Eric. Right down the road from where I live is Alafia State Park, which has some of the best MTB trails in the state of Florida! I’m riding a Redline Monocog 29er, which is more or less an oversized BMX bike: single speed, no shocks, lightweight design, and those monster 29″ tires to roll over anything in my path.

The first time I went I hooked up with another group of guys and ended up following them down some seriously difficult trails, one rated a black diamond. They couldn’t believe I went down them my first time out because I was riding so well AND that I was riding a bike as “hardcore” as the one I was on. I’ll be honest…I felt pretty cool. I still have to check out the 3 other nearby locations that have trails, something I’m really looking forward to.

Today was our last “practice” Sunday at CoastlandTampa, it being the 4th week we’ve met at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in their Grande Ballroom. And yes, “Grande” has an “e” on the end. It’s that awesome. All of this means that next Sunday, February 10th, is our official grand opening, crazy-go-nuts launch day!

Each week since we’ve been meeting in the Crowne, we’ve tweaked and added and adjusted and fixed so many different things. From the signs directing people to our meeting area (which we initially purchased at FastSigns but have since hooked up with another vendor for a super deal), to the flow of the service, to adding a full band this week (this made a HUGE difference in atmosphere!), to stepping up the quality of the videos shown during the service.

Sunday morning service is basically my baby…the room is my responsibility so it falls on me to make sure everything is ready to go and that things are done right and well. I’m so thankful we’ve had these practice weeks to learn and experiment and figure out what works well, because I definitely needed it! I’ve been meaning to share about our room setup and equipment (for any church planters out there along with those curious), and I’ll get to that this week sometime. But I wanted to share a key part of each service: our videos.

Each week we show two videos during the service: a man-on-the-street interview that is related to the topic of the morning, as well as what we call a Jesus Story…someone telling their story of how Jesus changed their live, of course connected to the topic at hand.

The MOTS is shown right before the message, and the Jesus Story is shown in the middle of the message. Before coming to Coastland, my video work was fairly minimal, though I knew I could learn and do it well (after all, Input and Learner are in my top 5 strengths!). So each week for the last 3 weeks, I’ve shot and edited a good deal of video and I’ve learned and improved each week, something quite satisfying to see.

Here are some videos I’ve shot and edited. I’ll get into how they were made soon. For now, take a look and let me know what you think.

Australian missiologist Michael Frost talks about what it means to be the missional church, addressing the 2007 Presbyterian Global Fellowship Conference in Houston, TX. It’s a 50 minute video, but well worth it!

I went skydiving yesterday with my dad, mom, and brother at Skydive Space Center in Titusville, FL. We each did a tandem jump from 15,000 feet! Here’s the video of my jump:

I think I’m hooked. : )

UPDATE

Here are some pictures from the jump:

More can be found here.