I released the God of This City Loop in Aug of ’09 and I still get a lot of questions about how this mixes live. The easiest way to explain it is to just let you listen to us play it live. This is a live mix of my band (Our Rising Sound) playing God of This City this past Sunday at Life Connection Church. It’s far from perfect(my vocals stink and need to fix drum micing), but hopefully it will help those interested in the loop hear how we pull it off live.

For those who’ve used the loop themselves if you have recordings of how you’ve used it, I’d love to hear them. Comment away.

Credits:

(@twitter)

Kyle Campos (@kcampos) – vocals, guitar, loop
Kendra Rohl (@krohl) – vocals
Josh Dailey (@joshdailey)- bass
Jon Utter (@jonutter) – drums
Life Connection Church (@LifeConnection) - singing their guts out

 

 Our Rising Sound - God of This City (Live) [6:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

I’ve been praying, contemplating and brainstorming ways to cultivate worship through music in our gospel communities(small groups) at Life Connection Church. Each of our communities has a different blend of people, giftings, weaknesses, background, not to mention gathering places. We don’t have gifted musicians in every group, that’s not even a concern of ours.

But what does concern me is that the only place we are gathering to sing songs of praise to Jesus is in the corporate Sunday morning gathering. I don’t want people to think that’s the only place where that kind of thing happens. Certainly worship is much more than song and we live our lives in scattered worship 7 days a week, but I’d like to see purposeful worship through song be part of that.

I’ll cut to the chase, here’s the idea. I’m going to visit each gospel community group when they meet in some one’s home and I’m going to bring some recording equipment with me. I’ll lead the group in a few songs and get a good recording of the vocals. I’ll lead the same songs in each group so I have a bunch of tracks from each community group singing the same songs(in the same time–using click).

I’ll take these tracks and mix them into the loops we use on Sunday morning so while we are worshipping as a unified body we hear and join with the praises sung in our scattered lives and scattered communities across the valley. I don’t want this to be an audio stunt of any kind, but an example of our Sunday morning worship continuing through our lives and our gatherings outside of the church. I’m excited to give it a try and see how it works.

How have you cultivated worship through song in small groups? Is it spontaneous or planned every week? How well does it work?

This post was written by Mark and Kendra Rohl. Mark is an elder and worship leader at Life Connection Church in Phoenix AZ and Kendra sings on the Our Rising Sound band. Previously as part of the “God in Our Worst Times” blog series they shared their struggle of having their own baby and their hope of adoption. That post ended with hope and faith, but a yet unrealized miracle. By the grace of God they are now able to share the conclusion to their story, and the amazing miracle that God gave them.

God in Our Best Times

January was an exciting month for Mark and I. We had selected an amazing Christian Adoption Agency here in Phoenix called CFCA and started our 8 weeks of infant adoption/parenting classes! It felt great to be in the process and taking steps forward. We went into the matchbook at the end of June and we were told it would probably be a 6mo – 1yr wait time. We were hopeful, excited and full of faith that God had the perfect birth mom and baby for us. We spent many nights calling out to God on her behalf and praying that we would be able to form a good relationship with her, that the baby would be safe and healthy in her womb, that we would be able to share Christ with her and that ultimately she would become part of His family and ours. We could never have dreamed of how completely, perfectly and faithfully God would answer those prayers.

We receive “The Call”

On Monday Aug. 3rd we got a call from CFCA that a birth mom had selected us and wanted to have a match meeting with us to get to know us better. She was due at the end of Sept. which seemed so fast but we were so excited! We prayed and thanked God and asked that if this was meant to be that He would make it perfectly clear. Although we were both very excited we just didn’t have a peace about things and didn’t feel like this match was going to come to fruition.

The next day we were telling everyone the exciting news about our potential match and the word was out and our amazing community of friends and family were in prayer for us that God would continue to open the right doors and shut the others. Tuesday night as we were getting ready to go to church Mark got a call on his cell. All I heard him say was hospital, Tucson and as I looked at him to see his shocked face he put the woman on speakerphone

“Hi, this is Susan from CFCA Tucson and we have a birth mom here that is in labor and she has selected you from the matchbook, can you be here right away?“

What!  We were both in complete shock, we wandered around our our bedroom listening to the details she knew “healthy mom, healthy baby from the ultrasound it looks to be a girl, no prenatal, ethnicity 1/2 Italian 1/4 Irish 1/4 Hispanic.” She asked us to take a minute to pray and call her back if we were interested. We hung up the phone and just sobbed on the floor of our bedroom. We instantly knew that this was it! We threw some random things into a suitcase, got in the car and we were off to Tucson to see what the future had in store for us.

It’s a boy!

On the way there we called the adoption worker back and she said “Well the baby was just born and it’s a boy!  he is perfect,  healthy and beautiful and the birth mom would like to talk to you, is that okay?” Wow, sure I said not knowing what to say to this brave woman or how to even pull myself together to sound like a halfway sane woman myself.  She got on the phone and told me how excited she was that we were coming, how she knew from the moment she saw our match letter that we were the ones God had sent her to raise this baby boy, and the words that changed our world in an instant “I can’t wait for you to meet your son, he is beautiful.”

Our son? Could it be? Could this be the long awaited arrival of our child? The one we have been fighting for, praying for, crying out and believing for? It was too beautiful to comprehend, so full of God’s grace and peace that all we could do was burst into worship to Jesus. Worshiping Him for His goodness and faithfulness not even knowing how much more He had in store for us. The ride to Tucson was filled with lots of tears, lots of laughter, prayer, worship and conversations I will never forget with family and friends with Jesus at the center of it all. We didn’t have a boy name yet so being the tech savvy people that we are Mark downloaded a baby name app onto his iPhone to start looking at names. Mark has always loved the name Toby and I have always loved the proper version of that, Tobias. He looked it up and it means God’s Goodness. Done! That was the perfect name for this little boy.

Read the rest of this entry »

This has been a big week for many reasons, all of which I’ll blog about. But one of the simpler ones to blog about is my church‘s entrance into full Acts 29 membership. The A29 blog just published an article introducing us to the network. I’m really excited to be joining the network, there are so many pastors, worship leaders and friends here that I respect.

As far as worship music goes, we do things differently than most A29 churches I know. That’s fine for us and I don’t expect any issues with that. A29 is a pretty diverse organization with a lot of different kinds of churches. We are a Reformed-Charismatic church, reformed in theology, non-cessationist, holy spirit believing, gift empowered body of believers that sing our guts out to loud, thumping, worship music. We are a creative bunch, that use lots of video, “concert” lighting, text messaging Q&A, twitter to organize our home groups, podcasting, vodcasting, live loops…  We’re in downtown Phoenix, in a rough neighborhood that frequently has police helicopters circling our building during night meetings. My point is we aren’t your grandparent’s reformed church.

But then again…we are complementarian, we are firm believers of sola scriptura, we love Piper, Chandler, Driscoll, Keller and many of us are 4.5 point calvanists. (Not a typo, that’s 4 and a half) We practice church discipline, are introducing formal membership, preach the cross relentlessly and by that I mean the rugged cross, penal substitutionary atonement, propitiation and expiation.

We’re a crazy bunch of misfits for sure, but we have deep conviction about what we do and who we are in Christ. We’re excited to team up with the group of A29 churches here in Phoenix and share the gospel with the lost and hurting. I pray this opens new doors for our church and that we’re able to reach more people for Christ.

If you’re like the rest of the Christian hip hop community starved for good music, then you gotta check out The Rep. Dude is crazy talented, crazy in love with Jesus, and speaks crazy truth in every track. He performed live at Life Connection Church (my church) on May 8th of this year and we’re releasing a track, maybe 2, as a teaser. Go check him out on myspace and buy his new album Say No More!

 

 The Rep - Praiz Him (Live) [04:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

My dear friend Mark Rohl took some incredible shots last week of Our Rising Sound leading worship at Life Connection Church this past Sunday and I wanted to share them with you. You’d be wise to hire Mark for any of your photography needs, hit em up on Facebook or Twitter.

This performance of “True Love” by Phil Wickham was recorded live at Life Connection Church in Phoenix AZ on 4-26-09. It was recorded using this modest setup and using the short intro version of the True Love loop released here on ORS. There is a lot of room for improvement and that’s the primary(currently only) reason we record our live sets, to see where we need to improve. So this is just my band being transparent to our process, a humbling adventure but I’m proud of the progress our band has made in a short time and look forward to improving together going forward.

Credits:

Kyle Campos: vocals, guitars, loop composer
Kendra Rohl: vocals
Josh Dailey: Bass
Jonathan Utter: Drums

 

 Standard Podcast [5:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download