11. February 2010 by admin.

Well it has been just over a year since my time at Liberty began and it has been pretty much a whirlwind.

Large projects have been on our radar screen almost continuously since I arrived. Additionally we have had dozens of smaller upgrades that have better positioned our teams for a growing level of excellence in ministry. Our ministry now consists of about 35 men and women that are working in unison with each other and are committed to helping the church strive for its vision.

It has been an honor this past year to get to know the many people in our tech ministry. There are a range of personalities, gifts and talents within our ranks. It is awesome to see how God has assembled us into a team that is growing more cohesive. We have learned to pray for one another through times of joy and sorrow, such as job losses, family struggles, surgeries, baby births, school achievements, and so on. We have become a church “small-group”.

So, I am continually reminded that it is a real privilege to work in the trenches with these folks. God has many neat things in store for Liberty Bible Church and He has entrusted our little troupe with laying the technical path for the many things our church has planned.

The two goals now on our plate are to complete the technical modernization project in Sacred Ground, which is our on-campus video venue and lay the ground work as Liberty launches an off-site video venue in a nearby city to our East.

A video venue is an alternative worship location that has live worship music and a live or delayed sermon video. In addition to our main worship center we currently have a more contemporary video venue on our campus called Sacred Ground. The muli-site venue is scheduled to launch in the early fall.

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4. October 2009 by admin.

Julie and I just recently returned home from a week long missions to Sarajevo, Bosnia. We were part of a team of eight sent from Liberty Bible Church to prayer-walk around the city of Sarajevo. The following is a journal entry that I made while I was there. I trust that it will be an encouragement. Sarajevo is 95% Muslim so Christians there have an uphill climb when it comes to impacting the city. We went to encourage the Christians. Our church payed a large part in the launch of many of the churches in Sarajevo and continues to play a role there.

This has been a full week that has brought on a wide variety of different emotions within each of the people on the team. We have sensed a deep compassion for these people because of what their lives bring them each day, we have all felt pure joy to be with the Christians as they struggle to thrive in a land of aggressive religions, we have felt sadness to hear many stories of how this war impacted the people of the city, we have felt exhaustion from walking the streets of a city that wind up and down hills, we have felt great satisfaction in knowing that our team has a united approach to praying for these people and we have felt significant inadequacies in our faith as ambassadors of God to these people.

Several words come to my mind as I have observed and participated in the life of this place. I think of chaos, hopeless, meaningless, division, survival, beauty, waste, amazement, etc.

Life here is chaotic because so many people are zipping around town in little cars or walking the streets on narrow sidewalks. It is almost like there is a competition for space on the roads and sidewalks. I think of survival because these people as a whole work to survive the next day. Food is minimal, homes are small and jobs are hard to find. I think of the word meaningless because much of what these people do have little or nothing to do with eternal life. I sense division because of the many people groups and religions that exist here. If you recall, it was not too long ago that a devastating war took place because of those groups. While the war has ended, the division that started the fighting is still rooted in the culture. War is now again rumored because division is still present. I see beauty because we are in a city that is nestled in a valley between imposing mountains. The steep hills once held a glorious winter Olympics with pageantry. Down in the city the buildings show off the architecture of typical European buildings of various eras. I think of waste because all that beauty is mostly marred or even destroyed because of years of senseless shelling during the war of the mid 1990’s. Almost every building that was standing during the 90’s shows evidence of damage from that time.

But, I am amazed because, despite the waste and the division and the chaos and the hopelessness, I see a handful of Christians that are solid in their faith and ready to reclaim this land. I see young people that are full of energy and zeal for their people and a heart for reaching them for Christ. It is impossible to be with these people and not be challenged in your own faith. So, it is for these people that we are here. It is for these people that we feel the need to walk this city in prayer so that the people of Sarajevo would be have open hearts for what these few Christians have to share. We want to see this mission field cultivated, planted and ultimately harvested. We realize that this prayer walking initiative is not the end of the process but rather the beginning. In our discussions with our translators, we have conveyed that they need to continue to bathe this city in prayer. So, in a sense, we are running a very short leg of a marathon and we will be passing the baton to the Bosnian Christians so that they might continue the prayer walking process.

In summary, it is with great contentment that we can return home because we have simply been obedient to our calling here. Our team will forever remember what we have seen here and will all, in some way, return home different people. God will speak to each of us differently but we will all be impacted just the same. I look forward to what the future holds for Liberty’s involvement with the Bosnian church growth process.

I suppose it will take time for those of us on the team to process what we have witnessed during this experience. I look forward to what God does next.

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13. July 2008 by admin.

I am the technical director for my own church, Family Bible Church in Portage, IN. We are a portable church meaning that we hold our services at the local high school auditorium. As a result we have to set-up and tear down all our systems each week, which is no small task. Our technical team consists of over a dozen people that are committed to serving the Lord with excellence in an environment that can be stressful. We arrive about 2 1/2 hours before the service and set our sound and video systems from scratch and patch into the facilities existing theatrical lighting system. Then after the service we take it all down.

Our goal has been to continually raise the bar of excellence even in this unique setting. We believe in the investment in our people with constant training and skill-set development. But, more importantly, we believe that operating as a unified team with a united goal is critical for having a successful ministry. Furthermore, we want to be united with the worship team members, submissive to the leadership and consistent with the  purpose of the church.  After all, technical success is secondary to and dependent upon successful spiritual growth.

I look forward to delving into this topic more in depth in upcoming posts.

 Stay Tuned

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