Calvary Chapel of Raleigh Podcast

A task that has been on my to-do list for months is to set up a podcast for our church body.

I just know that I’m ten times more likely to listen to a teaching if it’s already on my iPod because iTunes put it there when I sync’d up, and I have a feeling that many other folks are the same way.

I also know that it’s a great way to make our pastor’s teaching available to those who might never otherwise find us. I often listens to pastors from around the world who I’ve never met, just because I found their podcast.

But I was always intimidated by the technicality of it. The first thing that iTunes asks you for when you go to setup a podcast is the XML document. “What XML document?”

But I found a great tutorial and it turned out to be pretty easy!

So click here to see our new podcast on iTunes, and if you’re looking for some teaching to listen to, why don’t you subscribe?

(Oh, and if you want to hear the teachings but you just don’t want to use iTunes, they’re all available on the website here)

A couple of weeks ago we took our youth group up to Asheville for a couple of days.

We stayed at a camp ground with no electricity, which meant no amplifiers or flashy lights, just guitars and voices worshipping the King.

Check it out:

Jeremy and I went to hang out at Mike D’s house last night. We broke out the guitars and had some fun.

Watch Mike and tell me he’s not the fastest guitar player you’ve ever seen :0)

PS – Go visit Jeremy’s new blog and show him some love!

This is our church lobby this past Sunday morning. I started recording about 30 minutes before service, and stopped about 20 minutes after.

Notice a couple of things:

• There is a ton of activity after 10:00, when service starts.
• The fans look like they could cut through steel.
• Larry works very hard to make sure every person who walks through the door is greeted :0)

What else do you notice?

As promised a week ago, I have an mp3 file of the teaching on ‘worship’ I did last Sunday. Please give it a listen and let me know what you think! I’m sure there are some things you would have done differently, so let me know what they are!

Right-click here and choose ’save as’

I had the great privilege of teaching our main service this Sunday at church, and it didn’t take me two seconds to know that I wanted to teach on the topic of worship.

As luck (or providence) would have it, the mic battery went out half way through, so the sound guys or going to see if they can get me one mp3 file so I can share it with all you wonderful people.

But in the meantime, Flowerdust and Ragamuffin Soul have some fantastic dialog going on about the topic of worship.

In particular, Carlos is asking:

Question One: What do you see the purpose of a church weekend gathering is? (I emailed him and asked him to ask this question on the blog MONTHS ago :0)
Question Two: Do you believe God can engage a persons heart in a weekend service where there is a goal to help manifest this through musical worship, production, creative video elements??

This should be interesting and could be very beneficial!

So… first, a quick recap:

I don’t like the church I went to in high school.

In college I got plugged in to a much better fit, but I was so busy doing Campus Crusade stuff that it wasn’t a huge concern. I had almost all of my spiritual needs met through the many facets of the Campus Crusade for Christ ministry at North Carolina State University.

As soon as I graduated, I went overseas for about a year, and there I got a totally different ‘church’ experience: it was about 8 of us. We met in our PJs, drank coffee, worshiped under the leadership of the CD player, and then taught each other what God had been teaching each of us. This was a very good experience.

Then I came home and began working at a small, non-denominational church fellowship that attracted me because of some of the similarities to my overseas experience…. There was lots of freedom given ‘for the spirit to move’, including a time of open sharing, and a time of open prayer. I enjoyed this at first, but I also took note of a lot of drawbacks…

So, about five months ago, I sat in the office of a great pastor/friend and told him all this stuff, along with a lot of other stuff about how being newly married affected my ‘church experience’, and instead of really giving me any advice at all, he challenged me to write a 2-page paper on ‘my ideal church’ (or ‘church fellowship’ for those of you who can’t stand to hear the word ‘church’ unless it’s in reference to every believer in the whole world).

Fast-forward to today. I still haven’t written the first line. It’s not because I don’t want to. I just realized that I was way unqualified to answer the question.

Which is powerful if you think about it.

How can I pray for my church if I don’t know what I want it to be?

So I’ve been studying and praying and thinking, and although that’s still true that I’m not really qualified to answer the question, I think I want to take a crack at it this week, especially as our body is in a very transitional state right now.

But first, what’s your input?

I don’t need you to write a whole essay. But I would love to hear your thoughts!

WordPress says that there are about 100 folks who look at this site every day, but I usually only get 1-2 comments a day. PLEASE ENGAGE ON THIS ONE!

I look forward to hearing what you think…