I have just finished rehearsing for 2 days in Sydney for this year’s event, which has been great as always.  It’s brilliant to be able to play with some really fantastic musicians, including Javed Sterritt (drummer for the band Holland), Trent Prees (bass player from the band Garage Hymnal) as well as old friend and keyboardist/backing vocalist Rob Brown, and great new electric guitarist Cedric Tang.

Can I recommend MKC to any men living anywhere remotely within reach of Katoomba?  Each year I am challenged about my life, especially about keeping Christ-focussed in work, church and family.  This year’s topic is “Men at Work”, and I expect it will contain plenty of useful stuff that this rather busy guy needs to hear.

We’ve rehearsed 20 songs for the weekend – including a few songs off my new album (whose release will coincide with the conference), plus a bunch of great new songs to take back to the musos at your church, and plenty of old favourites.

Hope you can make it!

In the meantime, please put the dates for the conference in your diary, and let others know who might be interested.  We are aware that many people attended the conference in 2011 with a view to seeing if it would be the sort of thing they might invite others to in future, and I hope you found that it was!

So… the dates are: July 5th – 7th, 2012.

Stay tuned for more info.

M

I’m biased, but I think my father’s talks were fantastic.  At some point, we’ll develop the resources section of the Revelation website and upload them. He challenged us from Ephesians, Hebrews and Psalm 116 about making our gatherings places of praise, prayer, proclamation and edification.

We ran about 25 workshops on a range of topics, with much positive feedback… thank you so much to those presenters.  And not to mention the people who shared a song at the Open Mic sessions – wow… what talent.

And it was a wonderful privilege to share the platform with Nicky Chiswell and Geoff Bullock, both of whom had fantastic challenges about what’s important in our lives and ministries.

It was a conference with pastors, musicians and members of congregations present, and there was something for everyone.

So, was it a revelation?

What I discovered was how much the Christian community can encourage one another around a common ministry goal.  I was so buoyed by the vibe of the people.  Some come from smaller churches where they’re busting their guts week after week to do music; others came from larger churches with the pressures of lots of opinions to navigate.  But we all became increasingly aware that our gatherings together are places in which music plays a role in planting gospel seeds deeply into our lives.

I thank God for a great first conference!  Stay tuned for info about 2012.

There are about 25 workshops on offer this year, spread over 5 workshop slots in the program, so that at any point in the program there will be about 5 or 6 different choices.

Part of our planning process has involved carefully working through all the workshop topics to allocate them in such a way that in any of the workshop slots there is always something for everyone.  For example, there will always be something on offer for non-musicians, and none of the slots contain 4 or 5 specialist topics simultaneously.

We plan to update the program on the website to show this allocation of workshops.  Thank you for your patience as we plan this brand new event to make it as useful as possible for as many as possible.

Register online today to make sure there is still space for you.  Places are filling up quickly and the conference is less than 3 weeks away!

So July 14-16 2011 is the proposed date for the conference, to be held in Adelaide.  It would have 3 evening sessions (Thurs, Fri, Sat) plus a range of daytime sessions during the Friday and the Saturday.  It’d be during school and uni holidays, so we’d hope to pick up a good number of students.  But we’re also hoping many workers will see the value of the conference and take the Friday off work.

Here’s why I want to run a Trinity music ministry conference:

• Music ministry in church is harder than ever: think no more one-size-fits-all hymnbooks, think copyright hassles, think pulling contemporary bands together from largely untrained amateur musicians.
• Church’s expectations are higher than ever: think massive growth in the Christian music and worship music “industries” and the demand for sounds that will attract a new generation.
• The cost of doing it poorly is higher than ever: think how we’ve thrown out liturgy and replaced it with more music – so music really needs to be good, given how few prayers and biblically structured patterns we have in our services.
• Holy Trinity is a big church with lots of resources that we want to share for the sake of the kingdom.

So it will be at Trinity music conference, but I’d really love to have people there from all sorts of churches.  What do you think?  Give me your thoughts… What could we include to guarantee that we’d see you there?

So what’s the big deal?  Well, first of all, this time last year we were only 3 centres, but in the meantime (after several years of planning) 2 more centres were planted at Mount Barker and Northeast – see www.trinityadelaide.org.au.  So there’s a real sense that we’re getting bigger.

But although it’s wonderful to see the numbers growing, I’m also really buoyed by the positive attitude of so many of our musicians to the opportunities that lie ahead of us.  God has really blessed us in our ministries, and we have an opportunity to bless others with what we have.  In what ways?

Well among other things, we want to run our first music conference next year.  It’s been a long time coming, but 2011 is hopefully the year we can pull it together.  The enthusiasm of the team for doing this was perhaps best illustrated by the fact that there was basically a cheer from the crowd today when we announced the plan.

Why a conference?  Well certainly more training.  I think we have a real issue with the contemporary music that we play in churches today, that it really does put considerable strain on our volunteers, and it also is hard to get training for anywhere else.

But more than training, we need Biblical perspective.  Today’s talk from Paul Harrington was extremely challenging and encouraging about God’s grand vision in Ephesians.  It was wonderful to be reminded of the part we play in this cosmic unfolding.  I wish we’d had more time to be able to delve more and more into what the scriptures say about our music ministry role… but perhaps here is where a conference will be useful.

The more I’m involved in music ministry, the more I believe that spiritual maturity of our people is not only the enabler of our ministry, but it is also the goal of our ministry.  I continue to pray that God would transform us, use us, teach us and exalt Jesus through us.