Alright, I Admit It.

That's right, I'm coming clean. The Swedish store which is the envy of all our small spaces has found a special place in my church stage. It always has. I'm not sure if it's the cute pictures that explain how to screw the thousands of pieces together, or the fact that the products last almost as long as my attention span. I just love Ikea. The beauty is almost exclusively in the low price of everything. When I walk in to the blue and yellow utopia I practically stifle shouts of, "YES, I'll take five of everything!!"

Last week I think I did buy five of every lantern to create our new stage set. This will carry us through the summer with a general theme of light and bright summer colors. Honestly, this stage rides a little too close for comfort to my personal guidelines of keeping it neutral and non-distracting. Just like our approach to worship styles, performance, and music selection my goal is to inspire and add to our worship experience while minimizing the attention on the band. With pops of bright red, chrome and a drum riser this is further then I will go in the future! Thankfully the lamps warm up the space and make it more bright and cheery than distracting.

My staging budget is only $100 per month, so changing every quarter allows me $400 per set and we've never exceeded it thanks to Ikea and a resourceful team.

















It's been an uphill road over the past two years building the worship arts team at Grace. Seeing more and more talented artists come forward and offer their gifts and time to engage our church in visual worship with each big project makes the long weeks so worth it. After finally finishing this involved set of engineering how to hang these panels from other panels, one of our associate pastors texted me Saturday night at 10pm. He asked me if the panels on one side were supposed to be on the floor of the stage. Answer: no. Thankfully my sister Linsi was in town visiting and after a long night of re-engineering how to fasten our panels we made them safe for Sunday.

There are two 1/16" inch cables running through pulleys fastened to angle iron on the top of the the white panels. This allows us to hang props more efficiently. Our new challenge was fastening the styrofoam lantern panels to the cable which is done by glueing two furring strips to the back of the styrofoam and running the cable through eye screws screwed into the furring strips. We crimped lead fishing weights to the cable to stop the panels from sliding down, but they didn't hold. After it fell we screwed the cable to the furring strip which seemed to do the trick.

My mockup ended up being pretty close!

Back to Creed

January has been a time to punch the reset button. January is December's veggie and juice cleanse which is probably more literal than figurative to many. As we all know January is definitely a let down month: the Christmas present credit card bills arrive in the mail, it's officially winter which means darkness and excessive snow, and the next big holiday to look forward to is Valentine's Day. Let's be honest, who really gets hyped up about Valentine's Day? Red hots are a terrible candy. Generally I think people's attitudes lean toward the negative side and we're combatting the winter doldrums at Grace by kicking it old school.

We live in an entertainment driven society that thrives on amusement. I'm not an etymologist so don't get all Harvard on me, but I do know how to use the dictionary: amuse is derived from the word "muse" which means, "to think." The "A"before it means "to not". Amuse therefore means "to not think." We're a society that thrives on not thinking. I find that kind of convicting yet very true.

This mentality finds it's way into the church where our congregations are well practiced in speculating and observing. From kicking back in the couch watching TV, to sitting in the stands at a ball game we're all great at watching other people do stuff. While worship is something we do privately, corporate worship is something we do together - collectively. It's a participatory activity. One of my greatest fears is worshiping in front of people who are watching, observing and spectating. What do spectators do? They commentate. Watch ESPN. They analyze everything: what the players are wearing, what they ate, even what they're thinking. Worship is not a spectator sport. Unfortunately there are churches and bands that perpetuate and encourage this notion by turning worship services int a rock show and may consequently leave their congregations and audiences behind them, even if they themselves are personally engaged in meaningful, authentic worship.

So this January we're pushing the reset button. Our band has worked hard and put in a lot of hours in December and they need a break and honestly the congregation needs a break, too: a change in routine, a change of pace. Have you ever rearranged your bedroom? Why? Have you ever painted one of your walls a different color? Why? We do this automatically and willfully in many areas of our life, but we are so hesitant in other areas where we might need it the most. We are people, we get comfortable and lazy. According to Dan Miller, (author of 48 Days to the Work You Love, speaker, with a background in clinical psychology) our brains are considered an "emergency organ" and naturally wants to "shut off" when not being used. You've experienced this with muscle memory. Our muscles remember tasks without us deliberately telling them what to do. He tells a story of a professor who practiced this theory on his students by changing their routine: locking the classroom door, stealing their note books and noticed that they creatively produced and excelled their best when he changed their routine.

This brings up an interesting question: is change for the sake of change itself good? There can definitely be negative change - change in a wrong direction that goes against Biblical principles, or that bring damaging or hurtful results, but small change that simply makes us think and disrupts our routine I would submit is very good. Jesus tells us in Luke 10:27 to

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"

I want my mind to be widened and my brain to be activated to take in the wonders that the Lord is doing in my life and all around me and love HIM with all of it. I want to be an activated and engaged worshiper. My prayer is that as we engage in worship corporately that we turn off the entertainment, distractions, and focus our natural desire to be amused and allow ourselves to be brought into the presence of the living God.

How in the world do we do this? It's not that hard. Remove the distractions. Our "band" this January is just me and an occasional acoustic player, or perc player. Secondly, change it. Our brains activate when we're forced to think and our routine is changed. Change the stage set - it looks different and might inspire thought or a feeling that we might not have had if it was the same week after week. We're adding in some traditional elements of worship - the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's prayer: words that we remember and preach to ourselves that make us ask ourselves, "why are we standing in this sanctuary? Why are we all singing?" Most importantly, though, we go to the scriptures. Nothing inspires or motivates worship more than direct communication with the Lord. HE is the Word.

As I've challenged the congregation, worship is learned every minute of every day as we do all things to the glory of the Lord as an act of worship. (Romans 12:1) We must teach ourselves how to worship the Lord when we're not at church. Thinking and focusing on the Lord and His wonderful works 20 minutes a week is not enough. God doesn't want us to put on our church hat when we walk through the door, He wants our hearts, our adoration and our attention. As we give Him this, Sunday morning will simply be an overflow.

Feel free to join us. Reset this January.

Here's what it looks like to kick it old school at Grace:






These stained glass frames are styrofoam with a pattern that my buddy Eric created. We projected the image to a wall, traced the styrofoam and used a jigsaw to cut them out.

Winter Wonderland

We finished it! In my biased opinion I don't think these pictures do it justice, partly because the room is so big! I'm so thankful for Brandi and Eric Freel for helping me pull this together, I'm so thankful for their collaboration and hard work.



I saw these trees at a display at Ikea, showed this pic to Eric and he fabricated the trees from styrofoam.

Goodbye Living Room, Hello Christmas...Almost

As Christmas approaches this year I'm reminded of this this time last year when I originally transformed the worship environment in our sanctuary. What I walked into when we moved here sixteen months ago was a sterile, white open space that had been untouched for over twenty years. I also discovered a surprising attitude toward the feel of the space reminiscent of, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" I soon discovered an interesting trend through the exercise of making this space fresh, new and alive. When people are used to something being a certain way for a long time and they've grown accustomed to it, they don't like when it's changed. Plain and simple! This brings up an interesting topic for me as a Christian because I'm reminded of how this looks in my walk as a disciple, and how it plays out in different areas of my life.

The idea of sanctification means that we should strive to be transformed daily, becoming more and more like Christ. My prayer is that I would love God more, be more Christ-like tomorrow than I am today! Growing is hard because it takes a process. That process includes struggle, heart-ache, failure, being stretched, admitting that I'm wrong and my pride balks at all of those things and when I avoid them because they're uncomfortable it's easy to remain complacent which negatively affects my growth as a Christian.

Within the realm of visual arts and visual worship we can't ignore the legitimacy of preference. In the same way that different genres of music appeal to different types of people the same is true for what we are visually attracted to: some like a traditional look with rich earth tones and dark wood and others like white, stark, modern minimalism. Some people even like florescent lights!

Regardless of preference, all Christians are called to holiness and I thank the Lord that He has me on a journey and is aware of where I am in that journey. It's my desire to apply this concept to our approach of worship. By simply changing the feel and the look of our environment, regardless of it perfectly matching the current mini-series we're in, causes things to be different. My goal is to creatively reach somebody's heart and create something that makes them think differently, or inspire a thought, or feel differently than they did the week before. People are visual and the secular media has a great handle on that. Just watch TV for 10 minutes and see the messages and emotions that are conveyed and invoked. Why not use the same tool and reach people the same way for the Lord? As we till the soil in our hearts we allow the Holy Spirit to make us think, convict us, and change us into the likeness of Jesus Christ.

Sorry the long explanation of these few elements I wanted to share:

Goodbye summer living room:


Hello piece of cool white trees that will soon be on stage and look pretty:


To see the complete transformation of the worship space at Grace, watch this time-lapse video:

Grace Church Revamped from Collin Stoddard on Vimeo.

Thanks for reading. May the Lord inspire you as you think creatively and differently and let Him transform your thinking! Romans 12!
Collin

The Stages of Staging

In a conversation I had with Joe Blair, the creative director at Fellowship Bible, Nashville, he mentioned the importance of doing a Photoshop mockup of every stage design prior to construction. Genius. This makes sense on so many levels: I've designed and built so many things that looked great in my mind, but once they materialized looked like garbage. My dad is an artist and graphic designer himself told me growing up that if you can draw it, you have an actual understanding of what you're doing and the final outcome will be so much better. Makes sense, doesn't it? Besides saving lots of time and money this is also good for my Photoshop learning skills. As you can tell I have a lot to learn. Hey, these are rough sketches that were thrown together, be nice!

Here are a few examples of wins and fails:

This is a pic of the actual stage - don't actually have a mockup of this one...eating my own words...



I used this mockup of Kyle's youth room to convince him that purple was a good choice. It worked.



I never actually ended up building either of these.





This is a work in progress but I need to hurry up, we're starting construction this week!



I think this is the winning candidate: Sneak peak for all for Grace people!!



Moral of the story: Make sure your next Creative Arts Pastor is a good artist.