Afterword for May 3, 2009

I really like this method of doing a little follow-up to sermons from Sunday. Hopefully I’ll be able to do these on a semi-regular basis. This Afterword is for May 3, 2009. Enjoy…and check out the sweet face I’m making in the screenshot before you click “play.” Nice.

Charlotte Observer’s article about Ephesus Church!

Read the story here: Sorry, but the link is no longer working…doggone Charlotte Observer changed the link.

Great series on design in ministry

Check out Cynthia Ware’s series on design as she interviews a designer right in the thick of things.

The podcast…

There is now officially 3 files on our podcast feed. Crazy! It’s cool stuff. We’re recording via a M-Audio FireWire Solo Mobile Audio Interface straight from our soundboard to a MacBook. Right now we’re recording the audio into GarageBand, but are looking to use Cubase or ProTools very soon. We’re also using GarageBand to do post-production on the podcast. We also have a Mac Mini on order that will become our dedicated recording device. We opted to record our audio straight to digital and avoid the extra step of either cassette (who the heck can even play one of those anymore?) or CD recording. Being a mobile church this saves us the need to store media and we can keep everything online. The reality is, the audio interface and Mini are not much more expensive than a decent CD recorder, and we’re not having to purchase blank CD media on a regular basis. It’s a nice solution that has not required too much technical expertise. Adam Wilson, our worship leader, is also able to use the interface throughout the week for recording to enhance the worship and provide audio tracks for the worship team to use in their rehearsals. Of course, right now we don’t have a backup recording option, but we will get there eventually. It’s pretty cool seeing all the Macs running in the back for our visual displays and for our audio recording. It appeals to the hidden geek inside.

Our next goal is to get our vodcasting up and running. We are currently recording via video on our Sony HDR-HC7 HDV 1080i camcorder. It’s a high end consumer-grade HD camera. It does very well in good lighting conditions, but what we’re struggling with right now is the dated lighting in the 100 year old church we rent on Sunday evenings. We’re very limited in our lighting options right now and are hesitant to invest in any lighting solutions as the building owner is in the midst of major renovations. Anything we may acquire now could become unnecessary in only a few weeks. So for now we are dialing in the options with the camera in preparation of the lighting to make the vodcast viable.

Just a little info on what we’re doing at Ephesus. The audio podcast is currently available via the iTunes Music Store, and is hosted by Podbean for free while we set up our own dedicated server which we should have running in the next month or so. A little something we may give a shot at just for fun is actually setting up a video chat with a friend of mine from the back of the sanctuary so he can experience our service from California. I’m fairly confident the quality will be very low, but it will be a real-time, low-cost opportunity to provide online interactivity with what we’re doing at Ephesus. It’s just the test bed for where we would like to see ourselves get as a global community.

Church Planting 101

Don’t I wish! We’ve had our first service and things went well. We learned some things, but that’s the whole point of having a soft launch, but overall things went really well. You could tell I had been listening to a lot of Mark Driscoll, because my first sermon had a little heft to it. You can head to the iTunes Music store and get the podcast at EphesusChurch.tv if you want to give it a listen. This week I’m starting a 3 parter on “Why Jesus?” Not sure how I’ll get Jesus into 3 weeks, but I had to do something foundational with the 3 weeks leading into Easter. I’m sure the topic will be visited again. At some point here I’m going to start laying out a few lessons learned on this journey of church planting. Hopefully some practical tidbits. There are some great books on the subject so I’m not trying to overshadow those, just some thoughts on our own experience. Something else I’ve really felt strongly this week too is the need to begin work already on planting more churches out of Ephesus. We’ve got one week under our belt what better time to start thinking about planting?

Okay, so I finally saw 300…

I finally completed my journey into manhood last night and watched the movie “300″. I enjoyed the graphic novel approach to the visual look of the film. It gave it a fresh perspective and allowed you to suspend disbelief the way you need to to get into a movie like this. Overall, it was a good movie, lots of blood, but heck look at the title graphic. And anytime you throw a LOTR guy in there, I have this strange loyalty that kicks in (for sake of full disclosure, I’m listening to the Return of the King soundtrack right now). Right at the beginning though, something jumped out at me. The way Leonidas, and apparently every Spartan warrior, is trained as a lethal killing machine. As a boy he is taught to fight and battle and not show fear or be intimidated no matter what. He becomes a warrior who earns his stripes by killing a massive wolf in the snow while in his underwear. He is portrayed as a warrior who feels no emotion, the perfect soldier, the perfect Spartan. Now, later in the movie we see he is passionate about his wife (I always dig movies that show married couples can be passionately in love, often it’s just people who aren’t married who really love each other and marriage is portrayed as where relationships go to die, not true!!), loves his son and loves his people (he becomes the Spartan king). Really the whole lead up to his initiation as a warrior doesn’t couple with the Leonidas we see later; he becomes a warrior surely, but he loves and cares for those around him too, a little out of character from what we’re told Spartans are trained to become.

Anyway, while watching this whole scene of a young Leonidas and the wolf, coupled with the narration explaining his lack of fear and emotion, only focused on killing led me to think of David of the bible. Here’s a guy who took down lions and bears. He then went on to single handedly battle a giant who had been striking fear into the entire army of Israel. Then of course went on to become one of the greatest kings in history….The point is, he loved the Lord. He sang songs, played instruments, danced! He wrote poetry and cared for people. And within the heart of this artist and compassionate guy was someone who could bare-handedly kill lions, bears and giants. That’s hardcore. He wasn’t raised in a culture of pain and hardship. He’s a man’s man who loved the Lord with all his heart, yet when the battle came he faced it. There’s a hero to look to…

Happy New Year! Correction…

I’m sorry, I made a mistake on the date of the art and music gathering Ephesus Church will be hosting. It will be on Sunday, February 24th NOT February 29th as I wrote in the original post. We will be having the event on Sunday intentionally to invite people to return the following Sunday for our first service. Please make the correction on your calendars as I know all of you have already put it down! Again thanks for your support!

Ben Eige
Lead Pastor
Ephesus Church, Uptown Charlotte
m//704.201.4264

Remake of Karate Kid

Check out this great video from No More Kings. This is the Youtube version, there’s a higher res version on relevant.tv.

It has all the original cast, freakin awesom!

Moving Forward

We had our first info meeting last week. This was the first opportunity for people to begin getting plugged in to Ephesus. We had 58 at the meeting! Very cool. There was probably close to 20 or so more who had other commitments but are interested at what is going on. We’re moving forward. The web site is in place. Right now it’s just a real basic site right now, we are moving forward on a more permanent, customized site. I’m also working on getting some more media content up. I’ve run into some technical difficulties with the first video devo, but that’s why we’re working out the details now! Anyway, it’s exciting stuff to see the momentum that is beginning to roll. The challenge is keeping it going. We’re now moving into admin mode to get the communication channels going as we move forward. Getting quality infrastructure together is tough at the start when the team is still forming. I realize that right now with no physical presence our “front door” is going to be our media and web site. I’m wanting everything to be top notch from the start, but that is certainly a challenge as resources are slim. It’s funny though, even as I write this I’m realizing God is going to make this thing happen. I know that, but it’s different from owning that truth. We need to do our best to do things with excellence and those who know me know I’m always striving for the best we can achieve, BUT God is at the center. How cliche that often seems, but when you sense the truth of that statement it’s truly encouraging. Anyway, wanted to get some thoughts up, it’s late, but I haven’t blogged in a while.

Facebook

You know Facebook’s Group function is pretty good stuff. I’ve set up a group, Ephesus Church Charlotte and have been able to upload video, communicate our vision and sent mass emails about what is upcoming. It really has some great features all for free. It’s really opening some opportunities to get an online church off the ground with very little upfront cost. This week I’ll be launching video devo’s on the group page. These will be “sermonettes” walking through the book of Ephesians and why it’s foundational to the vision of Ephesus Church. From there we’ll be able to engage in discussion on the devo and link to pertinent web pages too. Cool stuff. Later I’ll be using YouVersion to enhance the experience. If you haven’t seen YouVersion yet head this way . It’s still in beta, but promises to be a very powerful tool. Anyway, get on Facebook join the Ephesus Church Charlotte group and keep up with how God wants to impact Charlotte through Ephesus Church.