For as long as I can remember, Sunday Mornings meant that I had to get up early to go to church. I was raised in a home where there was just no negotiation. If the doors were open, we were going to church be it Wednesday or Sunday. When I was 8 years old and attending an old fashioned Spring Revival at FBC Morgan City a little seed was planted in my heart that began to grow. I thought I had come to grips with that later in the spring and told my parents that I had gotten saved. I remember getting baptized shortly after that in the summer. In reality I just got wet.

At the age of 13 I began serving at FBCMC running sound and what not. I knew I enjoyed it, and people told me I had a rare gift, but to me it was just something to do. It wasn’t until I was 17 that I realized this was my calling in life. I eventually found my way onto a staff at a church. At 21, after a frustrating night, I began to ask God for some direction and if need be some change. While I didn’t understand the next couple of months, he knew all a long that It was going to lead up to something pretty important, and thats when I obeyed and moved to Gardendale.

I’ve been here for a year and a half, and have been through some rough stuff. Professionally, personally, and spiritually. The events of the last year particularly started precipitating a good many number of questions. Things that I had taken for granted, felt like they were holding together by a thread. And then in December we lost my grandmother, and other issues came up at the same time, and I just began to doubt a good number of things.

I wish I could remember who told me this, but they told me that the devil lives in doubt, and let me tell you thats the God’s honest truth! Because when you start to doubt one thing thats important to you, you begin to doubt many other things, and then you are just frustrated! You walk around wanting to beat your head against the wall. Its not a very fun place to be, but its where I had to be for God to bring me back to him.

I was trying to do all of the above on my own, and failing miserably at it. And then one Tuesday afternoon, God created a divine appointment with me and Mark Ramsey after a video shoot. God created a safe situation for me to share my heart with Mark, about what was going on in my life, and it was that day Janurary 19, 2010 at 5:05pm that we decided to remove one piece of doubt from the equation, my salvation. I knew I was saved when I was 8 but I the devil had created so much doubt in my life, I doubted if it was real! That’s not really a loose end you want waving in the wind as you drive down the crazy road we call life.

Today (Feb 7, 2010) I stepped into the baptistry at Gardendale First Baptist Church, infront of my peers, leaders, team, and everyone and publicly reaffirmed that I AM a child of God and that the devil is not welcome here. I’ve made a stand, and there is no more doubt in my mind, body, heart and soul that my salvation is real, and no longer in doubt!

Thanks for allowing me to share this.

John

And what an exciting morning it is this morning. This Hope is also singing this week. There a contemporary so. gospel group and they’re pretty good.

Man it feels good to be here!!

How Many People Does It Take?

Originally uploaded by audibleworship

Apparently three. One to hold the card, one to guide the card, and one
to supervise. LOL. This was just one of many great moments last week
as we replaced the ProSys DSP with London BLUs. Pretty powerful DSPs.
We actually put in two BLU80s as Jim managed to use up all the DSP in
one BLU. We have a fairly complex network of exploded clusters through
out the room, all of which are bi and sometimes triamped. Lots of
processinf to get this system to sing like it did today! Yeehaw!
Today was actually my last Sunday at Sugar Creek. Im gunna miss this
place but Gods got big thinks in store for me at Gardendale.

–John

Change is inevitable, especailly in churches. People and churches are always in a season, and sometimes we find ourselves in different seasons.  Good and bad… Luckily mine is good.

I’ve been at Sugar Creek since October ‘06. In that time, I feel like I have done a lot for the ministries I have been involved with, including the Worship Center, which I’ve never had any direct responsibilities.  But with the students, we’ve made tremendous leaps and bounds in the world of lighting, including of taking delivery of our new Vista S1 next week. Audio wise, the guys have all gotten better with there mixing chops. I feel like that team has painted itself into a corner though. The bar has been set so high, that it’s going to be tough for just anyone to walk in and maintain that.  Good and bad.

Video has by far seen the most tremendous growth. When I first came there were a lot of different components in place, some that didn’t need to be there. The VT3 toaster has now gone by the wayside, as had the multiple DVD players, and most importantly, now gone is the days of PowerPoint (except for prompter…). We’re now using ProPresenter 3, and everything has been consolidated to that machine. The quality of visual worship has grown exponentially.

In the worship center, we finally went digital! I feel the most accomplished here because I had been after both of the guys I served under since the day I took the job.  Thats not to take all the credit because Rick did the hard part, getting they money.  I feel bad that I am going to be leaving so soon after taking delivery, but the guys have it. No doubt about it. I have all the confidence in the world.

So leaving a legacy. I just hope I left a good legacy, because I know what it was like when I came in. The guy before me had a bad legacy. I just hope mine will be a good legacy… 

So where am I going?

I’m making a HUGE move in my life. I’m moving to Gardendale, Alabama (north of Birmingham).  I’ve accepted the position of Audio Engineer/Production Management at Gardendale’s First Baptist Church. I am super excited about the possibilities that God has created with this opportunity.  I’ll be getting to focus more on Audio than any other production area, which is my speciality.  I’ll get to interface with the broadcast world, as I’ll be responsible for the TV re-mix each week for the weekly broadcast. I’ll be working along side some great people, sometime I’ll blog about the experience that I had while I was interviewing for this opportunity to serve, it was truly humbling.

I’m sure the blogging will tail off significantly more than it has in the next few weeks/months as I get my feet on the ground, but I’m really hoping to maintain this.

Please keep me in your prayers!

We’ve been using ProPresenter since July of 06.  When they updated to version 3.3 I wasn’t sure how the added features would be much of use to us because the Live Video encode/decode puts in too much of a delay.  Well, tonight, the DVD feature, and Live Video feature bailed me out of a tough situation. Our LYF Center video project got put on hold when I ripped up my ankle, but now that DiGiCo is in, it should resume and go in really soon.  Maybe even next week,  before Bryan can come in and program the control system.   But tonight I needed to run a laptop from the stage, play a DVD, and run some other slides. Now I don’t have a switcher in the LYF Center, just the Mac, and 2 projectors. Well, here’s how I set up.I took the laptop and sent it down an auxiliary video feed to FOH video booth and ran it into a ADVC-300  to tap into the Live-In on ProPresenter.I then used the DVD functions of ProPresenter to cue up the DVD clip the speaker brought in.I exported the PowerPoint announcement slides from the PPT files to JPEGs to put into ProPresenter.So now ProPresenter is acting as a 3 input switcher, and very well!1.5 hours down, 1.5 and 1 more to go on this Marriage conference… I’ve sat through more ladies confrences and marriage conferences ever since I dedicated my life to church production, than I can count. But the knowledge obtained…. 

I’m still a college student, so I get this little thing called Spring Break every year.  I asked for the week off some time ago as my parents decided to take my 27 year old brother and I on family vacation to Hawaii.  It’s been a few years since the four of us made a trip together. Easter was supposed to be relatively simple and straight forward at church, but things kind of grew on Rick, and I think now he regrets giving me time off.  This is a much needed week away from Houston for me.  I’ll try to enjoy enough it enough for everyone

This is my first post for Audible Worship. I’ve been blogging personally since my sophmore year in high school, but this is my first blog dedicated to totally audio.  I hope to keep it active, and hopefully present some ideas, and insight to all things audio.