Back in the saddle…

It’s been a quiet few months on the blog front as my family and I are safely on the other side of a huge transition.  The past few months have been both the most exciting and most faith testing I’ve ever experienced professionally or personally.  Leaving Kensington Community Church for the new adventure in Central Arkansas that I believe God called us to meant saying goodbye to family, countless friends, and my dream come true first church ministry job that I’ve written about here many times.  However, God has been tremendously faithful and the transition to my new position at New Life Church.tv has been blessed.  We’re loving life in Conway, AR, have been blessed with a perfect house in a great neighborhood, and are connecting with more and more new friends daily.

I’ve yet to write much about NLC.tv but I’ve been sent lots of questions about the church and my new role here.  NLC.tv is nine years old now and has campuses in Conway, Greater Little Rock, Heber Springs, Fort Smith, plus a new internet campus that launched this past winter.  A fifth physical campus is coming this fall with the exact location to be announced formally in the next few weeks.  The church officially averages around 7,000 people per weekend between all of the locations and is growing significantly every year.  In fact, it isn’t talked about around here very often but I think it is worth mentioning that NLC was recently ranked as the fastest growing church in the country by Outreach Magazine (you know, those impossible to verify, totally crazy survey things that magazines like to do).  All of this to say, it seems that in ways I’ve never personally experienced before, God’s hand is directly on this place and moving in supernatural ways.

My official title is Audio Director which means that I’m attempting to carrying the flag for the audio brand of NLC.tv.  That translates into leading the volunteer teams who mix all of our services, building best practices and procedures for our team, building bridges between audio and the other creative artists on the larger team, getting behind the console myself every once in a while, optimizing and maintaining the audio systems campus wide, and dreaming/implementing new & upgraded audio solutions as the church continues to expand and grow.  Wow.  Putting that all down on the screen looks pretty daunting!  It’s a big elephant to eat at the outset, but it seems already that each week we make big progress towards the path of audio bliss wrapped around the mission of NLC.tv.  My time at Kensington helped me to learn I was made for a challenge like this and I’m excited to use all of the gifts I’ve been given to help shape a ministry still in its formative years.

I’m part of an exceptional creative and worship team.  Being able to work with and learn from gifted leaders such as Neil Greathouse, Brandon Shatswell, and many many more makes me so thankful that God brought us here.  The talent pool I’ve experienced both on and off the stage is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, especially given the size of the teams necessary to pull off services between so many venues and the fact that teams are by far majority volunteer-based.  The artists on stage are tight musically, humble, and self-motivated.  For example, the drummers and bass players got together this week by their own initiative on a weeknight to work on parts and consistency between themselves so they could be a stronger contributor to the whole.  I’ve never seen buy-in to this degree and it is contagious to the rest of the teams.

I have lots to write about over the coming weeks as I dive into this journey.  I’ve already spent hours tuning PA’s so they are more transparent, cleaning up and organizing stages, stripping the cabling and starting over in order to properly label and make things more volunteer friendly, console repairs, implementing audio for video processing chains & audience mic’ing, etc etc.  I have committed to documenting the steps along the way for the same reason as why this blog was started originally over 3 years ago…communicating with my team.  Anyone else who happens to come across the site is welcome to follow along on what is sure to be an adventure for all of us…

Here we go!