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Think on this!

CHANGED from blaine hogan on Vimeo.

This music video was created for Aaron Niequist’s new song, Changed.

©2009 AARONieq Music / Willow Creek Community Church

I Love this video.  it speaks in simple ways about the awesome things that God has called us to.  “How can we worship more than singing?” is a question we have to ask regularly.

Right now, I’m knee deep in planning an Arts Reception for all the creative, musical, artistic types at my church.  My hope is to empower as many people as possible to connect with our church and use their gifts and to connect with other individuals who share their passions.  I’m extremely excited about the potential of what could come from people gifted by God to do creative things getting together to spread the Gospel, provoke thought and action, and to communicate the heart of God.

Keep me in your prayers as I can get a little overwhelmed with the minute details (that I don’t really need to worry about).  I know that God is in control and working things out wonderfully according to his plan.  If you’re in the Chicago area on August 30th, I’d love to see you there!  You can get details at WCarts.eventbright.com!

Today (Thursday) and Friday – I’ll be immersed in some of the richest teaching and dialog on leadership in the business and church worlds. I’m taking notes the old-fashioned way, but I’ll post what I can soon. In the mean time, this is what people are saying RIGHT NOW from the summit.

It’s awesome to see what’s happening here and across the country as THOUSANDS are attending live via Satellite locations.  For those who aren’t familiar with the Twitter culture – you’ll often see hash tags that look like this: #tls09. Hash tags create an easy way for people on Twitter to follow a particular topic. The above listing is a real-time stream of messages that include #tls09.

The great thing about Twitter is that it allows instant communication around topics – in a public format.  I’ve met and connected with other leaders simply by following who is talking about what topics that interest me.  I’ll write more about this soon.  Thanks for reading and always feel free to leave comments below!

NEWS NOTE: Twitter.com is experiencing what is known as a “denial of service” or “DOS” attack.  What happens is people with bad intentions purposely send a flood of requests to a site or service so that it overwhelms the system and forces the entire system to shut down.  So the site or above stream may not show up if the attack is still in progress.

Below is a continuation of my series of notes from Wonder, the Willow Creek Arts Conference 2009.  Click here for notes from Day 1. These notes are from Day 2 – the breakout sessions where we were able to pick sessions that most interested us.  Please feel free to share your thoughts or comments as well.  If you attended other workshops, share the link to your posts about them here as well!

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I’ll be posting as much as I can from the conference which is Wednesday June, 10th through Friday June 12.

These are my notes / recap of my favorite moments and quotes from today.  Oh… and by the time this post goes live, it won’t actually be ‘live’ but oh well.  It was an exciting title.  The notes are after the break.

Also, I had the neat experience of connecting to other Twitter users real time at the conference. I one of the vendors exclaimed my name when he saw me walk up to the table! He’d seen my tweets about the conference and recognized me from my picture on my profile.  Earlier in the day I connected with a stranger who happened to be in the same breakout session.  Even leading up to the conference, I found friends of mine who were also going to the conference.  It’s neat to see social networking in action IN REAL LIFE!  Now on to the notes…

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Watch Classes@Willow Video – Andrew Marin.

This is why I love my church!  Willow Creek & Andy Marin: what kind of amazing things can happen from this connection?!  I love that my church is willing to jump into the messy, controversial, never-easy, topic of homosexuality in a way that isn’t fear based or centerd on condemnation or even reacting to the current political and media events.  It’s an honest and informed discussion that I think will help our congregation(s) to mature in how we handle this key topic in our society.

Check out the video or download the audio and listen in your spare time.  The entire 4 week series will be made available online.