From the Mind of MandoRon

Hello all!  It had to happen eventually… I missed last week’s setlist after probably 9 months straight.  If you’re insanely curious, let me know.

Today was week 2 of the Orange series on parenting at GracePoint.  Our children’s pastor, Rochelle, delivered a great message and challenged the parents to pick just one thing to work on with our families.

The only thing better than the message was the music.  The music rocked!  Period.  End of story…  Carmen and Christina do a great job leading worship together.  And the Bruce/Kevin combination on guitar is always incredible.  They work really well together.  I had the great pleasure today to mix front-of-house for the band.

The music:

• Show Me What I’m Looking For by Carolina Liar (walk-in)
• Tell the World by Hillsong
• Undo Me by Jennifer Knapp
• See His Love by Kim Walker-Smith
• Finding Who We Are by Kutless
• Hope Now by Addison Road (offering)
• Undo Me (exit)

Show Me What I’m Looking For is one we’ve used a few times this year.  It’s “secular” but it has a great message.  And Carmen sings it so well.

Tell The World…  The K-3 kids joined the band for this one.  They did an awesome job singing and dancing.  Unfortunately, they didn’t sing very loud and the mic’s didn’t do much good.  We bumped this all the way up to the key of D since that is how the kids usually sing it.

Undo Me is currently my favorite song in the repertoire.  We used it for the first time a few weeks ago.  Carmen is incredible on it.   Not sure it’s a perfect fit during the worship set, but I couldn’t pass it up.  We need to find some more Jennifer Knapp songs for her to sing.  Rod was laying down some very tasty organ on this, as well.

See His Love is a GP favorite.  Christina is always incredible on the vocals, and Bruce added a smokin’ guitar solo at the end.

Finding Who We Are was a new one this week.  The band did a great job on it.  In hindsight, it’s probably not the best thing to use a new song as the last one in the worship set since people can’t sing it very well yet.  Easy song to learn though.  The band played/sang this in D to work with the female vocals.

Hope Now seems to always be well received.  It’s not one of my personal favorites, but everyone else really likes.  Kevin sounded great on the acoustic guitar.  (Aside:  His acoustic-electric guitar tone is one of the best I’ve ever heard.  I offered to buy it off him after church.  He declined.)

That’s about it.  For more Sunday Setlist, be sure to visit Fred’s Sunday Setlist blog carnival.

Feel free to leave a comment.  Let me know what you thought of the new song, Finding Who We Are.

So I’m spending a few days in the same hotel as the American Christian Fiction Writers National Conference.  Why?  Because my wife is attending, and the thought of goofing off in in Colorado for a few days really appealed to me.

Andrea and I have been talking a lot about the christian fiction industry lately.  There are a lot of similarities between the christian fiction and christian music industries. 

The key ingredients to marketable christian fiction seem to be: (1) gentle and uplifting, (2) set your novel in the past, (3) capitalize on what’s been done before, and (4) above all, follow the rules.  Romance appears to get you a nearly automatic book deal.  I’m dying to expound on this more, but I’m amazingly going to exercise restraint.  It’s perfect fodder for a Stuff Christians Like blog post.  Jon started to go there with this one, but didn’t dive fully into it.

Walking around the hotel with all of these novelists has got me thinking that I should try my hand at fiction.  So I’m going to write a short story for you today and publish it tomorrow.  The current plan is that it will fall into the Historical Vampire Fiction genre.

Hello blogosphere!  I have a prayer request for you.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned it before but my wife, Andrea, is pursuing a writing career.  She recently finished writing her second novel, Redbud Mamas, and we are headed to Denver tomorrow in hopes of finding a publisher and agent at a Christian Fiction conference.  (The first novel is current unpublished and she doesn’t think that anyone would publish it as a first novel.  Maybe someday…)

She has received some very good feedback from other authors on this second book, so we think she has an excellent chance.

But I would still like to ask that you pray for her, and that she will be succesful in finding someone who wants to publish it and also in finding the perfect agent to work with.  (Please feel free to pray for me as I goof off while she’s working.)

Thanks in advance!

Hello Blogoshere!

What an awesome morning at GracePoint!  Today was the last day of the “Elevate Series” and there was a big offering to purchase the old Cinemas West building.  I don’t know if I’m supposed to say how much yet…  Trust me, it was huge!

There was only one service, the 11:00, but we also added a 30 minute mini-concert before the service.  Well, it turned out to be a little less than 30 minutes…

As a new first, one of our male vocalists had to leave in the middle of soundcheck this morning due to a family emergency.  Our other male vocalist could have covered the other songs on a normal day, except he was fighting a cold and had limited range and stamina. 

So we had to cut a few songs, reorder a few things, and ended up with 21.5 minutes of “planned” music for the 30 minute mini-concert.  We started about 6 minutes late and still ended up 2:30 short.  So Gil improvised and had a few of the musicians rock some solos.  Tommy ripped off an impressive 45 seconds, or so, of Van Halen’s Eruption.

On to the rather long setlist!

The pre-service “mini-concert”:

• All Fired Up by Pat Benatar
• Never Going Back to OK by The Afters
• Undo Me by Jennifer Knapp
• Understand by Jeremy Camp
• Become Who You Are by Mainstay
• Lifeline by Papa Roach

And the service:

• We Shine by Fee
• Speaking Louder than Before by Jeremy Camp
• Pull Me Out by Bebo Norman
• God With Us by MercyMe
• Jesus Paid It All by Kristian Stanfill (offering)
• Undo Me by Jennifer Knapp(exit)

The music was awesome!  And I should know since I was mixing sound this week…

Undo Me and Lifeline were both new ones for us.  Carmen absolutely rocked Undo Me.  We’re going to have find some more Jennifer Knapp stuff for her to sing.  Lifeline was awesome too.  I had never heard it before Tommy suggested it.  Definitely a keeper.

In case anyone cares… the cut songs were Beautiful Day by U2, Awakening by Switchfoot, and My Glorious by Delirious.

The band: 1 male vocalist, 1 female vocalist, (1 absent vocalist…), 2 electric guitars, bass, keys, and drums.

For more Sunday Setlist action, check out Fred’s Sunday Setlist links.  Have a great week!

GO POKES!