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When I began designing professionally in the early 90’s, stock photography was a tool that only high end design houses could afford. I remember seeing single photographs for over $300! Along came the internet, add in thousands of semi-pro and pro photographers and videographers, create a site where they sell their work for a reasonable price and you’ve got www.istockphoto.com. With 1,651,143 (1.4 TB) stock photographs and illustrations, this site is the place to find that perfect picture for your next marketing campaign, magazine ad, logo, whatever. I have been using istockphoto for about four years now and have had absolutely no problems, and they get better and better each year with upgrades, advanced searching tools, personal light boxes for storing files you may use in the future, and great customer service! If you are a designer, even if you just dabble – you should check out istockphoto.com

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NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), described as “The World’s Largest Electronic Media Show”, was this past week in Las Vegas. We took a group of eight people this year and had a great time. We probably walked over 10 miles a day, filled our brains with more tech talk than we could handle, ate too much, and lost some of our hearing. Some of the highlights from Vegas:

- Visiting the Renewed Vision booth, four times! I think we spent at least 2 hours total talking with these guys. They sell Mac software for worship presentation, lyrics, videos, etc. Check them out here.
- Getting a personalized tour of the Digico mixing console*
- Another personalized tour of Yamaha’s LS-9, M7C, and PM5D digital mixing consoles (we liked the LS-9 for its features and affordability)*
- A personal tour of Aviom, personal monitoring systems*
- The Technologies for Worship pavilion, where they had a live band playing through the Aviom & Digico systems – this was so cool because you could actually put headphones on and create your own personal mix via the Aviom mixer
- The Vista Systems booth, where we checked out a product called “The Spyder” – a very cool (and expensive) solution for video presentation
- The Sony booth (if you can call over 4,000 square feet of gear a booth), where the sales people only spoke Japanese, huh?
- Paying $12.75 for a deli sandwich, $10 for a warm cheeseburger, and $3 for bottled water
- Karl’s $5 bottle of Voss Water (which he didn’t want, and didn’t like)
- Catching Phoenix, an amazing rock cover band, at the New York, New York
- Riding the Desparado at State Line
- Riding the Roller Coaster at New York, New York
- Some really funny stuff on the ride home that I can’t remember because I was so tired

*Special thanks to Greg Smith and the gang at Spectrum Design Group for walking us through the demo’s at NAB

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John Piper has famously stated: “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t” (Let the Nations Be Glad, 11).An important corollary understanding of this concept is to see the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:35-40) as primary, and the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) as a hugely important means to that even greater end. The love for God enjoined in the Great Commandment is vertical in its focus, purely God-centered and -directed, and is eternal in its scope (hence is in fact worship); the Great Commission, on the other hand, is by definition man-centered and -directed and (as Piper says about missions) “a temporary necessity.”

In addition, when we consider that the culmination of the discipleship process involves “teaching them to obey all that [Jesus] commanded [them]” (28:20), we should take note that, according to Jesus himself, the most important of those commanded things is in fact the Great Commandment!

Hence the ultimate consummation of the Great Commission is teaching disciples to be whole-hearted worshipers.

Quoted from Worship Blog – read the entire article here.

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Lifechurch.tv, a cutting edge multi-site church based out of Oklahoma, has released it’s satanhateslife.com marketing campaign. Looks like they have secured the website along with using billboards with tag lines such as: “Lifechurch.tv is killing me”, “LifeChurch.tv makes me sick”, “LifeChurch.tv sucks”, etc – all signed with the name “-Satan”.

A pretty slick idea, a kind of fun insight into spiritual warfare (if you can use fun and spiritual warfare in the same breath). Get the real deal here – let me know what you think, leave a comment, I am sure this will be a hot one.

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