My family and I headed to Baker City Oregon on the first half of the weekend. My wife's cousin Ryan got married and I performed the wedding ceremony. It was a beatiful outdoor wedding. There were probably 400 people there. It was a gorgeous day as well.

As I was officiating the wedding, God was reinforcing the importance of marriage to me again. Sometimes we forget how important the vows are that we are taking before God when we get married. It is a very serious thing.

I was also able to take my family along with Heather's parents and brother on a 4 wheeling adventure. We were able to go up in the mountains and see God's beautiful creation. My father-n-law, brother-n-law, and myself went a little farther up into the mountains and saw a lot of wild goats. That was a pretty neat experience as well.

We had a great time. My parents from Indianapolis are here now visiting with us. It should be a great week.

What a wonderful weekend. We had the camp speaker Aaron Cavin to speak. He did a wonderful job speaking about Holiness.

We also had baptisms at the river. We had 21 people baptized. It was awesome. We are going to do it again in a couple of weeks.

We are blessed at Broadway to have other people who can lead our worship service. This weekend Scott Plumley lead the services. He did a great job.

Here are the songs that we did as a church...

-Happy Day (Steve Fee)
-Everlasting God (Brenton Brown)
-Nothing But the Blood (Matt Redman)
-Wholly Yours - Special(David Crowder)
-Holy is the Lord (Chris Tomlin)

We had a wonderful, exciting weekend.

Our church had the band "Ornan's Floor" in. They did an awesome job. I think the entire church really enjoyed them. Here is a link to their website.

We also had Dr. Jerry Thorpe in as a speaker. He talked about living a succesful life. He did an excellent job as well.

Here are the songs that were done...

How Great Thou Art (Passion Version)
Blessed Be Your Name (Matt Redman)
Jesus Paid it All (Passion Version)
Mighty to Save (Hillsong)
Surrender (Lincoln Brewster)

I can not believe it has been 10 years. 10 years of good times. 10 years of a few difficult times. 10 years of amazing times. 10 years of growing times. The best 10 years of my life.

Heather Jill Barr married me 10 years ago this day. I still remember her walking down the aisle, and as she did, I couldn't believe she was wanting to marry me.

I know there have been times where Heather wanted to kill me, but she has always been by my side, stuck by me, and has always been an encouragement to me. I seriously do not know what I would do without her.

She has made me into a better man. She has stretched me to do things, that I would have never thought I could have done. She is more beautiful to me know than the day I first saw her.

I can still remember seeing her for the first time about 13 years ago. I remember telling my friend Caloway Puckett, that I was going to marry that girl. (That was even before I had talked to her.) When I am right, I am right.

It has been a great 10 years.

Thank you for being my best friend and for sticking with me through the thick and thin. I love you so much Heather.

It is one of those mornings where I can't sleep. I woke up at like 5:30 this morning with my mind racing. I think I'm getting old.

I was thinking this morning, "what am I excited about in Life"? What keeps me motivated?

So I thought of a few things.

1. My relationship with God. I'm excited about this because I feel like I have a long way to go, and there is always something to improve on. I'm excited about knowing more about Him, knowing Him more, and doing more with Him.

2. The opportunity with my family. I am thankful for my wife and kids. On Friday I will have been married for 10 years to my wife. I'm looking forward to another 50+. I'm excited for the future with my children. I have several years to have a huge impact on their life.

3. The ministry that God has given me. I am really looking forward to what God is going to do at Broadway. God has blessed me with a great church, a great ministry, and wonderful people to do ministry with.

4. The rest of the summer. We have done some fun things as a family, church, and for me personally this summer. The rest of the summer has some great things happening here with the Connelly household as well as some exciting things at church.

What are you excited about? Please comment and let us all know what you are looking forward to.

We had a great weekend. We finished the series, "Victory in 3D".
Here are the songs we sang this weekend...

-Hallelujah, Your Love is amazing (Brenton Brown)
-Love the Lord (Lincoln Brewster)
-Glorious One (Steve Fee)
-Your Name (Paul Baloche)

We are in a sermon series right now called "Victory in 3D". This is the last weekend for it. On the first week, we handed out 3d glasses to everyone and showed a video in 3D for a sermon opener.

Here is a picture from it of us on the stage with them.

Here is the second entry of lessons that I learned from the Worship conference. One of the classes I took was entitled "Performance excellence in Worship".

Here is another nugget of information gleaned. These are a few practical ideas that came from that session.

A. Choose the right songs and right sound for your church.

1. Know your pastors philosophy of ministry. We need to
be in sync with where God is leading our Senior pastor of the church.
I need to be aligned with his vision.

2. Identify your target. Whether we want to or not,
the style of music will in many ways target a certain crowd.
If you do just hymns with pipe organ and piano, it will appeal to
a certain crowd more than others. If you do heavy rock with the
decibels hitting 110, you are going to attract another demographic.
You need to know what your target as a church is. Yes, we want
everyone to be welcomed, but the style of music in some ways will
dictate your target, because it is so preferential.

3. Choose songs that are singable. If you want
the congregation to sing along, you have to have songs that
they can sing. Although Toby Mac has sweet music, most of his
songs are not geared for congregational singing.

4. Choose songs that are familiar. There is a
balance between doing new songs and songs that the
congregation already knows. That is why you don't want to do
4 new songs in one service. At max we will do 1 new one probably
2 maybe 3 times a month. We will usually have 3-4 familiar
songs in a service and maybe one new one every couple of weeks.

B. Eliminiate dead time and distractions.

1. Plan movement on platform. Practice not having
dead time. Sometimes silence is good, but it must be planned or
Holy Spirit driven. You need to always have transitions.

2. Plan Transitions. Especially during song changes,
events in schedule changes.

C. Lead Worship not a Recital

1. Focus on connection not perfection. The goal of
the worship service is to connect our people with God, and get
them actively engaged in praising God.

2. Be aware of the crowd's response. As we are
leading worship we must know where the people are. If they are
not involved in singing, we must be aware of that, and do all that we
can to get them engaged.

3. Worship but don't get lost. We must worship as we
lead, but we also must remember that we don't want to get lost and
forget about the church. I've seen worship leaders be so involved in
the worship for themselves that they neglect the needs of
the congregation.

Just some thoughts. Do you have any thoughts on this information? Please comment if you get a chance.

This is the 100th post on this blog. I thought I would celebrate by posting about it. Aren't you excited. I am. Thank you for following along with me 100 times.
If you are sitting there right now, please applaud for the 100 post(not for me just the post). This is an exciting day. I hope this excites all of you as you read this.

I really enjoy our Home Team. We have been a group for a few months now. Unfortunately one of our couples is moving to Washington State because of their jobs. We are going to miss you Chad and Talon. It was great to have you a part of our group. I am thankful that God brought you guys into our lives.

As I went to the Saddleback worship conference, I took in a lot of information. Some of it I already knew and it was reinforced in my head. Some of it was new, and I never thought of it before.

I also get a little frustrated when I go to these things, because there is so much I wish that everyone in my ministry would hear as well.

So I am making a concious effort to try and retain some of the things that were taught and also pass it along to everyone else.

So I am going to be blogging some of the things that I learned in my next few blog entries.

Here is the the most important principle as worship team members to remember.

The fundamentals of living a life of worship and modeling a life of worship are these...

1. Regular Bible Study
2. Devotion
3. Prayer

These 3 things are essential to a life changing worship service.

More stuff is not the answer and more talent is not the answer. If you do not have those intial 3 things, then our worship and our worship services will not be as meaningful.

I know this is basic. And I know we all know this. We have to always keep this on the forefront of our minds though. Those are the things that we do not keep as priorities sometimes, yet they are the most important things.

When I was at the conference, God really placed the importance on these habits to me and our team again.

We had a great weekend of worship. Here are the songs that we did at church.

-Sing, Sing, Sing (Chris Tomlin)
-Glorious One (Steve Fee)
-Sweetly Broken (Jeremy Riddle)
-Come thou Fount, Come Thou King (Gateway Worship Version)
-Amazing Grace/ My Chains are Gone (Chris Tomlin)

This is just a follow up to the question I asked a couple of weeks ago. The question was, "Who is responsible for your spiritual growth?" There were several responses, and they were good.

Most of the responses were that the responsibilty of spiritual growth lies within each person. Ultimately God is the one that will grow us, but to allow Him to do that, we must take personal responsibility as believers to take the appropriate steps.

I think most believers know that is true. We know that it is our own responsibilty to feed on God's Word, pray, become involved and active in God's church. We also know that it is one thing to know that and another to act on it.

I think many times we default to our church. We think as long as we go to church one time a week we are good. We rely on one message from our Pastor each week to grow us. And yes we need that, but this can't be a substitute for our own spiritual growth. I have seen it were people try to blame the church for their lack of personal growth, but they never will dig into the Word of God for themselves during the week. Please do not be that person.

Be in God's Word. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 teaches us, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work."