On Dec 12th our church we busy taking pictures of local families for Help Portrait. When I say local, I mean local local, as in families that live in the surrounding blocks. Our church has really felt convicted that we haven’t poured into the immediately surrounding community. The community we are in is a pretty rough one, a lot of broken families, drug abuse, prostitution. We’ve always felt like we were planted here for a purpose, but recently that purpose has become more concrete and we’ve started to act on it.

So the same day Help Portrait was in full swing a local company donated 15 kids bikes to us, a total surprise and huge blessing. My pastor and I started brainstorming ideas on what to do and we thought, “why not just walk through our neighborhood on Christmas day and hand these out to kids?” Wasn’t a typical church outreach plan, or typical for us either. We weren’t going to invite them to a service and make them wait to the end, or give them away to all the kids in our church. Though we love our kids too, we thought we’d demonstrate it to them differently.

We felt a greater blessing for our kids would be for them to come with us and help us give them away. So on Christmas Day a handful of families loaded the bikes into a truck and we took the caravan through the neighborhood. We met a lot of the families in the neighborhood and they greeted us with tearful thank you’s and the kids were overjoyed. About 10 minutes into it word had spread quickly and kids were running out to greet us.

It was truly one of the most amazing experiences I’ve been apart of, we were so blessed and thankful to be able to do it and share in the lives with the families around us. We really look forward to doing this every year, but also doing a lot more on a regular basis with these families. We are actively praying about where God would lead us and where and how he’d have us serve our local community. Thank you to everyone who took part in this, it truly was special.

This contest is simple. Take a pic of your home studio/recording/practice setup and submit it via the form below. I’ll collect peoples submissions over the next few weeks and compile the top 10 or so and throw a little contest. Everyone will get a chance to vote to choose who’s they like best. The winner gets an Amazon Gift Certificate for $21.84 , yes, 21 dollars and 84 cents. But it’s not about the money kids, it’s more about sharing each other’s setups and getting ideas on what works well.

In your submission include a note about the specifics of your setup. Please feel free to tweet this and pass along to friends whom you know have a home studio. It doesn’t even have to be a recording studio, maybe it’s just your practice area on a porch over looking the ocean, that might win just off the scenery.

OK let’s get started!

cforms contact form by delicious:days

As many of you know John Mark McMillan performed at our church, Life Connection Church in April. He was nice enough to sit down with us for a good long conversation. This video is just part 1 of our conversation. John Mark is an amazing guy and had a lot of great insight into music and worship. You don’t want to miss any part of the interview so make sure you subscribe to the rss feed to keep up to date when we release the other portions of the interview.

Also We’ll be doing a little giveaway here. The prize is John Mark McMillan’s cd “The Songs Inside the Sounds of Breaking Down” on iTunes. So you will get the album gifted to you over iTunes. To enter into the giveaway you need to so 2 simple things:

1. Link to this post on some other site. Could be your own blog, could be a digg submission, delicious, Facebook, you get the idea. All those nifty links are at the bottom of this post.
2. Comment on this post with a link to where you mentioned this post.

That’s all you have to do. I’ll let the competition run for 2 weeks. Now onto the video…

See also Part 2.