Well, here we are.  Christmas has come and gone.  Christ was born, and we celebrated.  The kids sang "Happy Birthday" in the children's sermon, and we looked at the little baby in the manger sitting on top of our mantle.  Nothing wrong with that at all.  But now we come to Lent, a very different season.  A season of prayer and fasting leading up to our recognition of the death and resurrection of Christ.  It can be a very solemn time, a time of meditation and preparation.  Very often, I see folks looking inward at this time of year.  We all "give things up for Lent", but very often, we do it for selfish reasons.  We give up chocolate, because we need to lose some weight, or television, because we know we could use that time better anyways.  But in the end, Lent isn't about us!  It's about remembering Christ's sacrifice and sacrificing ourselves.  The things we give up should be things that we will miss, and our sacrifice should be to the glory of God and the service of others.  We're going to be doing a whole series about this at Centerpoint this year, talking about giving up things to God that we would like to think are ours.  We've got some great stuff coming down the pipe.  But here's what I'm personally doing:

Not only is Jars of Clay my favorite band, they're also some pretty cool guys doing some great work in Africa, and I'm more than happy to support this effort.  When blood:water mission was founded in 2004, they set a goal of building 1000 wells in Africa, and they've already raised enough money for 617.  That's great, but that means there's still almost 400 to go.  So the concept is simple: drink water for forty days and donate the money you save on coffee/pop/beer/anything else you might drink towards building wells for those who don't even have clean water (not to mention any of the other things I just mentioned!)  You can get more info & resources here.  Technically, this doesn't start until Sunday, and ends on Maundy Thursday, but I'm going to go ahead and do it for all of Lent.  Would you consider doing the same?  It's a great cause, and it's something that I think most of us will really notice is gone during this season of preparation.

Dozens of people post their set lists every week at Fred McKinnon's blog.  Check out more set lists here.

Centerpoint Church 2/22/09

Opening Set
    -Love The Lord - G - (Lincoln Brewster)
    -Mighty To Save - A - (Reuben Morgan, Ben Fielding)
    -Amazed - D - (Jared Anderson)

Closing Song
    -Holy Is The Lord - G - (Chris Tomlin, Louie Giglio)

As much fun as I had leading at Old Fort last weekend, it felt great to be back at Centerpoint today.  We kept it pretty simple, musically.  We did use the PraiseCharts click track again for "Love The Lord", and we did a little playing with our usual arrangement of "Holy Is The Lord".  All in all, the band played very well this morning and kept the energy going.

We had a guest teacher this morning to finish out our current series.  The message was called "A Great Commitment to Great Community".  Very to the point and clear.  I liked it a lot.

Looking forward to our Lenten series starting next week.  I believe God is going to move in a big way these next few weeks.

Hey everyone - made a couple of minor changes to the blog design tonight, but they reflect bigger things happening behind the scenes:

1.  There's a shiny new subscription link up there in the corner where the old RSS link was.  I've been working on getting FeedBurner going on this site for a little while now, and I'm proud to say it's all done now.  The new subscription link will let you use FeedBurner to get updates by RSS or Email.  If you're already subscribed on RSS, that feed is still good too, but you might still consider updating.

2.  There's another new little box at the bottom of the righthand column.  It looks like this:

That's because The Musician's Mind is now using the Creative Commons license.  In case you're not familiar with Creative Commons: Basically, it just lays some ground rules for the way others can use the content I create on this site.  It's actually a good thing for everybody.  I've been considering it for a while, but a great post on churchcrunch.com today, I decided it was time to get it done.  If you want to know more about it and exactly what it means for me and for you, just click on the little box.

Check out more set lists at Fred McKinnon's Blog

I had the opportunity to lead worship at Old Fort Church this past weekend - I played drums there during high school and it was great to have a chance to get back up there!  Here's what we played:

Old Fort Church 2/15/09 (8:30 & 9:45 AM)

Pre-Service
    -Turn - Db - (Paul Colman)

Opening Set
    -Your Grace Is Enough - A - (Matt Maher)
    -From The Inside Out - C - (Joel Houston)
    -Unashamed Love - G - (Lamont Heibert)

Offering/Closing Song
    -Center - E - (Charlie Hall)

I'm headed back to my old stomping grounds this weekend.  I'll be leading worship at Old Fort Church on Sunday morning, so I'm going to up tonight to catch up with some family and friends and sing with them.  If you're in the Tiffin area, you should totally come say hi!

I'm a little late this week, but this post is still part of Fred McKinnon's Sunday Set Lists.  Check out more sets here.

Centerpoint Church 2/8/09

Pre-Service
    -Love The Lord - G - (Lincoln Brewster)

Opening Set
    -I Am Free - C - (Jon Egan)
    -Holy Is The Lord - G - (Chris Tomlin)
    -Everlasting God - G - (Glenn Packiam)

Closing Song
    -Love The Lord - G - (Lincoln Brewster)

We kicked off a new series this week called "A Great Commitment" - It's a short series (three weeks).  This week we talked about what it means to have "A Great Commitment to The Great Commandment".  Good stuff.  We used an in-house dramatic reading to open the message that involved five folks reading from the ten commandments and holding "cue cards" that contained the text of the great commandment.  It seemed to go well.

Musically, we tried a couple of different things this week.  We taught "Love The Lord" as a new song (it was so perfect for the theme I really didn't have a choice!), and tried something we've never done before with it: a click track.  I've used clicks before, and so have several of the folks on my team, but we've never tried one at Centerpoint.  The Praisecharts site that we get most of our music from has recently started creating some really nice click tracks that add synth and string textures to the mix, so we decided to give it a shot.  Fortunately it ran very smoothly, and we'll definitely be using more of these in the future.

I thought the whole service ran very smoothly on Sunday, but the congregation seemed a little tired.  Sometimes I think you just have those weeks!

This post is part of Sunday Set Lists on Fred McKinnon's blog.  Check out more set lists here.

Centerpoint Church 2/1/09

Opening Set:
    -Forever - G to A - (Chris Tomlin)
    -Marvelous Light - A - (Charlie Hall)
    -We Fall Down - E - (Chris Tomlin)

Offering Song:
    -Dive - D - (Steven Curtis Chapman)

Closing Song:
    -Here I Am To Worship - E - (Tim Hughes)

We had another powerful time of worship yesterday at Centerpoint.  We were blessed to celebrate three baptisms and hear a powerful testimony of God working in one man's life.  Pastor Dave also wrapped up his current series, "Choosing Your Spiritual Path" with a message about getting started on the Christian walk.  It was all a very moving service for me, even without taking any of our music into account.

We did have a very good service musically.  I planned a fairly straightforward set, since I knew we'd have lots of visitors for baptism.  We also pulled out an old Steven Curtis Chapman song, "Dive" to play during the offering (between baptism and the message).  It went really well and was spot on with the rest of the service content.

God was really moving yesterday at CP.  I feel blessed to have been a part of it!