If you are on a mobile device you can watch the movie on vimeo with this link: http://vimeo.com/m/#/12498843

Teaching on the iPad from Levi Lusko on Vimeo.

*update* If you are on an iPad or an iPhone here is a link to watch the vid on the vimeo mobile page. HTML-5 for eva!

We also had some live sheep at both of our theatre’s for the launch weekend which made the messages come to life with the sounds and smells of livestock. And to send the message that it’s not just David that is apart of God’s flock–we are God’s sheep too–we had “sheep yourself” cutouts where people could take pictures of themselves as happy lambs before and after services. No end to the fun.

A number of Pastors who were saved during that period spoke and there was music and then Pastor Chuck gave a message looking to the future–which is key–because he isn’t just sitting around remembering the past but pressing on for what is to come because he knows Jesus is still on the move!

The best part was getting to see so many friends who I love and respect–Pedro Garcia, Skip Heitzig, Jon Courson, Mike Macintosh, and Raul Ries to name a few. (In addition to my dad and brother Daniel, who I am super proud of) There was also music by Crystal Lewis, Phil Wickham and others and it was great getting to show Phil how his song, “the time is now” brought our sheep blog vid to life!

And for more info on RIPTIDE click here, you can watch a trailer for the film there on the site–which I recommend you do because it is awesome!!

I believe that there are some very practical steps you can take that will help foster synergy between the worship leader and the pastor and will help you move towards a more seamless flow in services. These are things that work for us at fresh life and every church is different and has more or less complicated needs but hopefully some of what we have learned can be helpful, however much it has to be tweaked to be implemented in your specific situation.

Of great concern, first of all, is the choice of your worship leader. A lion share of the platform time will be occupied by this individual and so you need to choose both prayerfully and carefully for the right fit. It doesn’t matter how great the message may be–if the music is bad that accounts for half of the service so choose wisely (worship leaders the same is true in reverse so u choose carefully too!) For church planters and small churches this can be really difficult because your options are limited, you might even be your own worship leader. That’s tough. In the mean time, keep it SIMPLE. Less is more. Someone who is just cutting their teeth leading worship will have an easier time handling a stripped down setup with just a 2 or 3 piece band than trying to wrangle a full stage of musicians with epic solo’s and 19 backup vocalists and a guy with a cowbell.

Once you have the right fit make sure they get the vision. How can they know if they are succeeding or failing if they don’t know your expectations? Are you frustrated that your worship leader isn’t nailing it? Do you think have any concept of what “nailing it” is to you? Have you ever gone to lunch with them and shared what you like, what you don’t, heard from them, and talked about different styles, approaches and philosophies. You might be surprised by the fact that you are both operating under different definitions of success. Maybe they have been wanting to go more rock and roll but they thought you dug the acoustic stuff. It could be that they don’t really like having dancing leprechauns and videos behind the words on the screen either, but they never thought to say anything about it. It also helps to build and foster the friendship. Spend life and time together, building inside jokes and a good relationship will only add to the dynamic and chemistry that will be evident during times of public ministry. Kevin Guido, our Creative Arts Pastor and head worship leader at Fresh Life, is one of my best friends on the planet and we have a lot of fun together, no matter what we are doing.

By far, what will help build this coherence in the service is to involve them in the sermon building process. For us, this begins months out when series ideas are being developed and brainstormed. The worship leader shouldn’t be blind-sided by what is coming down the pike but right there with you riding the wave of creativity and momentum. The next study should be inspiring them early on as you move towards it and they can be seeking God and preparing their heart as it approaches. Then each week as you gear up for the weekend (for us by Thursday) I email the outline and text and any additional thoughts on and as soon as my rough draft is done I send that out too. Sometimes there will also be a phone call or cup of coffee thrown in the mix as well if my “passion runneth over” I want him to know how the message begins, and ends, see the application and have more than enough info to craft the music around the message. This btw is why it is key that you have someone you trust and respect, and not just someone who has a great voice and can play the guitar. They need to really get it.

Every once in a while there is a special song that I will specifically request but I try to do that sparingly as it can hamper creativity if I am basically choosing the set list each week. Quite honestly, I am often blessed to find them choosing a song that I thought would fit perfectly but didn’t say anything about–those are times I give God a high-5 for having us on the same page. Other times I will be surprised by how a song I never would have thought of will really complement what God is doing in that service. (And occasionally I will feel a particular song is super appropriate for a service but we don’t want to include it in the worship per se so we will pre-roll the service with it or include it as a music bed for a video.)

This all admittedly gets more complicated when you have more than one worship leader. As of right now, we have two campuses and several different worship leaders in the mix. And so I rely on my Creative Arts Pastor to be the funnel that distributes and monitors the vision, song-selection, teams and overall implementation of what happens on the worship front in all aspects of our growing church. This limits the cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. I communicate with him and he communicates it with the others involved at Fresh Life Creative.

Like I said earlier, this is stuff that we have found helpful and if you can grab something, killer–but I’d love to hear what has worked for you at your church as well, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I have been meaning to blog about the pros/cons of the Kindle for public speaking for a while. I regularly get emails from other communicators who have seen me using it and are wondering: whether I like it and is it hard to get used to? and which size they should get? and how to get their word docs onto it et cetera. So here goes…

Let me give a disclaimer–I teach using a manuscript style of notes and although I totally have mad amounts of respect for those who can charge it with one page of handwritten notes (James Macdonald) or commit their messages to memory (Louie Giglio) that isn’t how I roll (but I secretly wish I was skilled enough to try it.) So this concept certainly won’t be for everyone. I am also a big fat nerd and love new technology and finding ways to use it to the glory of God.

Having gotten all that out of the way I will say that I was pretty freaked out by the thought of actually doing it at first–what if it turns off halfway through a message? what if the screen saver engages and I look down to see a picture of Edgar Allen Poe instead of my next point? what if Y2k shows up 10 years late and the robot overlords secretly warp my doctrine? Also there was the loss of color formatting which I used in my paper notes to quickly distinguish a quotation from Jesus (red) to an illustration (blue) with just a glance.

The day I tried it for the first time it was the fall of ‘09 and I was speaking on the East Coast and I had forgotten to bring a mobile printer with me (I used to lug around a small Canon inkjet to print my notes on the go.) I went to the hotel’s business center and the printer was black and white. It hit me that if I was going to be speaking off black and white notes anyway I might as well give the Kindle a try. At that time I had the 2nd generation kindle with the 6″ screen so getting a word doc off my mac involved emailing it to Amazon and having them pipe it to me for a charge of ten cents. The way they stripped my document of formatting in the process wasn’t ideal but it worked.

I was so freaked out that I brought my paper notes up to the platform with me as a backup plan but didn’t ever need to use them as it worked ok, my biggest complaint was that the screen was too small and so I had to change pages way too often. I went back to paper. When they released the Kindle DX in May, in addition to the 9.7″ screen, they added some great features made it a great prospect for preaching. For one thing, the DX could handle PDF’s so I didn’t have to email and pay to send my docs to it. All you have to do is have Word kick out a PDF and after connecting to your computer via USB drag the file to the Documents folder on the Kindle’s hard drive and voila–it shows up as a book.

my Bible and Kindle side by side before a recent message.

Secondly, the DX’s screen is more advanced, while it is still black and white, it can display thousands of shades of grey so you can use that in formatting your notes and it registers it on the screen as dark or lighter text. And because it is not turning your notes into an e-book you can use all the underlining, italicizing, bold type, and even boxes to give your eye key words to grab onto that you want and these rich elements aren’t stripped as they are kindle-ized.

I have been asked a lot about battery life and let me say this, the Kindle battery is a freak of nature that amazes me everyday. It only uses power to change pages and so it lasts forever. The only power guzzling feature is the wireless 3G which if you live in a remote area like Montana it roams while searching for legit service and kills the battery faster, but that can be easily turned off. I also turn off the accelerometer so my notes don’t accidentally switch over to landscape if I am walking around with it and it senses the movement.

I made a Word template that is exactly the size of the screen and found that I have to bump my font up one number from 12 to 13 font for ideal legibility. Since the first message using the DX in June of 2009 I have never looked back. The ability to tweak a message in between services without reprinting is great, on the road it is unbeatable and the type on the screen is so crisp I don’t notice any difference from paper. Not to mention the money I have saved not buying color ink cartridges and the absence of stress that comes from dealing with printers/finding printers on the go.

Some Kindle cons: you can’t handwrite a quick thought in the margin of your notes if something comes to you right before you speak.
you can’t disable the screen-saver.
you can only advance the pages with the one button on the right side–we all know swiping is so much cooler! not to mention that if that button were ever to jam during a message, you would be bummed.
the keyboard is clunky and is wasted space, couldn’t there be a way for it to be an on-screen keyboard that showed up when you needed it then disappeared?
also–grayscale is nice and all, but this is the year 2010, I’d like to see some color, baby!

In short, while I have definitely enjoyed rocking the Kindle, let’s just say I am stoked that April 3rd is only a week away. I think the iPad could be the ultimate preaching machine and I am excited to give it a whirl on Easter Sunday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

the Kindle DX in action at Skull Church

My favorite was hearing from Alistair Begg last night. He is one awesome Scotsman! His passionate and genuine conviction that the Bible is the actual word of God shows on his face as he speaks and you can’t help but feel like you are almost getting to go back in time and listen to Robert Murray McCheyne who preached, “with eternity stamped upon his brow.” Alistair is also a full on wordsmith and busted out yoda-esque pearls of wisdom like, “even the best of men are men at best.”

Getting to spend time backstage, between sessions, with guys like Alistair is worth more than gold. And you can be sure I worked on getting him to bring his radio show, Truth for life, onto fresh life radio. James MacDonald’s show, Walk in the Word, will be coming on later this year and I hope to hear some sweet scottish preaching soon too.

with Alistair Begg

My message was on David’s time hiding from Saul in the caves (I called it Beverly Caves 90210) and how he had to trust God’s promises even when they seemed super unlikely. I love preaching on David. He was just a punk kid who God used in major ways because he had a special heart. Normally in life having a heart condition disqualifies you from certain things, but it was David’s heart condition that qualified him to be used. Not that he was perfect (far from it) but he was a man after God’s own heart.

I am headed home for skull church and will be prepping my message on the flight–praying for God to move!

with Greg Laurie and Mark Driscoll

Spending time with him was a pleasure and I was especially impressed by his humility, kindness and genuine love for Jesus. No doubt those qualities are a big part of the the reason God has given him such a mega-platform, including press in the New York Times, and several appearances on ABC’s Nightline. (If you didn’t see the debate he did with Deepak Chopra on the existence of Satan–check it out on YouTube here.)

He is certainly not without his critics (those who are innovative and do much for the Kingdom never seem to be in short supply of criticism–see Luther, Nehemiah, Spurgeon, John the Baptist and others.) And even though we don’t have everything in common, I would say that we have a whole lot more in common than we do not. I definitely view him as a kindred spirit. I am stoked to see what God will do in and through his life and ministry as he continues to make Jesus famous and I hope to stay in communication with him in the future.