What's on My Mind at the Moment » Christianity

Incredible Week – Day 4

sunnythomas — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:12:12 +0000

Today was the day. Six weeks ago, it was an idea. Five weeks ago, I heard about the idea. Today, Town Hall for Hope became a reality. With all that happened today, it is going to take some time to gather my thoughts and post them here. So for now, here are the pictures. Enjoy!

The day begins with the sun rising above the TV truck and the generators.

Dave Ramsey about to lead the combined team in prayer. Awesome!

Dave Ramsey's team getting prepared to take questions from Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Dave Ramsey doing his sound checks.

More sound checks.

Inside the LifeChurch.tv Video Suite

Another Video Suite picture.

From inside the auditorium.

Dave Ramsey going "Office Space" on a microphone. You'll have to watch the event to understand this picture.

Incredible Week – Day 2

sunnythomas — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:42:27 +0000

Things really heated up today for the Town Hall for Hope event. Some members of the Fox team and Dave Ramsey’s team arrived today. The staging arrived. Lights started to get mounted. The LED wall was assembled. Here’s some pictures. Enjoy.

Incredible Week – Day 1

sunnythomas — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:28:22 +0000

The team dove into it today. They removed our cameras from the auditorium and removed the lights around the foot of the stage. Fox will be utilizing their own cameras. We’re adding some TVs in the Green Room and in another room that the Fox team and Dave Ramsey’s staff will use. We’re also lining up the electricians and a boom lift that we’ll need tomorrow. I’m told at least sixty more lights will be added to our existing lights. A larger stage will also get installed tomorrow.

We received a very detailed outline of the event from Fox today, which they call the Operations Book. They think of everything. They even had a plan for an emergency evacuation of their crew, if necessary.

I’m very excited to see things start to take shape tomorrow.

Incredible Week Begins Now

sunnythomas — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:25:24 +0000

If you haven’t heard, LifeChurch.tv Oklahoma City Campus will serve as the broadcast location for the Dave Ramsey Town Hall for Hope event. This event will be streamed to 6100 locations in the US and will be broadcast on Fox Business Network. It will be broadcast live on Thursday, April 23.

We’ve been interacting with Dave Ramsey’s folks for about 3 weeks and after a few face to face meetings, hundreds of phone calls, and millions of emails, it all comes down to this.

I can’t wait. I am so excited to see how God is going to use this. I am thrilled to play a very small part of what maybe the largest webcast in history.

There are a lot of people working on this event. This week, I’ll be writing on what the Tech Team is involved in. So stay tuned. If you feel led, please pray about this event and pray for Dave Ramsey’s team and LifeChurch.tv team.

LifeChurch.tv adds its 14th campus

sunnythomas — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:27:39 +0000

After months of planning, today, we had our first experience at our 14th LifeChurch.tv campus in Owasso, Oklahoma. Owasso is a suburb just north of Tulsa. This is a portable campus that meets in a elementary school on Sundays. The Owasso campus becomes our 3rd campus in the metro Tulsa area. It joins the existing Tulsa and South Tulsa (Bixby) campuses.

The Tech Team, along with many others, put a ton of hours in to get everything setup. Their hard work has paid off. We saw over 450 people at our sneak peek experience this weekend. What’s really exciting is we saw 9 people come to Christ today. Next Sunday is our official grand opening. If you live in the Tulsa area and are looking for a church, feel free to check us out.

Here are some pictures of the Owasso campus launch.

In Nov. 08, the Tech Team does their first site survey of the school where the campus will meet.

In late Jan. 09, the Tech Team installs trussing that will remain at the school.

Our new road cases, complete with the LC logo.

The volunteers assemble the trussing that gets setup every week.

The trussing goes up.

The completed stage.

My favorite picture.

LED Walls at the LifeChurch.tv Tulsa Campus

sunnythomas — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:43:34 +0000

I paid a visit to the LifeChurch.tv campus is Tulsa today. I’m so glad I did. The campus team did an awesome job with the lights. They used Martin LC 2140 LED panels provided by Integrity Lighting. Here are the pics. Enjoy!

Expanded Lobby and Auditorium Opens at the Edmond Campus

sunnythomas — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:18:43 +0000

One of the largest LifeChurch.tv campuses just expanded their auditorium and lobby. If you’ve visited the Edmond, Oklahoma campus you know that the old lobby was woefully inadequate. It wasn’t really a lobby; more like a glorified hallway. The Tech Team was responsible for installing sound speakers in the new auditorium sections, the lobby and outside of the building. We also installed TVs and stage light fixtures in the lobby.

Many people worked hard to make the new space look awesome. Here are some of the pictures I took this past weekend.

After the Insane Week

sunnythomas — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 03:54:40 +0000

Thank you so much for your prayers and kind words. I survived the insane week. Actually, it was a great event for me. The tech team did really well. I am so thankful to be working on a team with some very gifted and dedicated people. There were some challenges in supporting this event. One of the challenges was having to setup and teardown the tech gear in four different locations around town. The other challenge was getting a three screen rear projection system to work on a stage that was never designed for that.

As you can see from the pictures below, it didn’t just work, it was awesome. In case you are wondering, we rented a Catalyst Media Server to display the images and manage the projectors. Click here for more info on it.

Enjoy the pictures.

Setting up. Complete with popcorn and Dr. Pepper

My favorite picture.

Leadership Summit – Day 2 – Key Takeaways

sunnythomas — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:51:28 +0000

Here are some of my key takeaways from the second day of the Leadership Summit at Willow Creek Community Church.

Session 5 – Craig Groeschel – IT: How Leaders Can Get IT and Keep IT
In this session, Craig talked about his new book IT. He talked about how some leaders and churches have IT and some don’t. He talked about how churches share the same systems, like worship and teaching, but they produce different results. The difference is IT. Craig doesn’t know what IT is, but he describes it as something in addition to the power of the Holy Spirit.

Here are some of the qualities of organizations with IT:
- Laser focus
- They see opportunities where others see obstacles
- Willing to fail
- Led by people with IT

In Craig’s talk, he also asked some important questions:

- What are you doing that you need to stop doing?
- What has God called you to do that you are afraid to do?
- What are you going to do to get it?

Session 7 – Catherine Rohr – Risk Taking, Barrier Breaking, and Bold Leadership
In this session, Catherine Rohr, founder and CEO of Prisoner Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) was being interviewed by Jim Mellado, President of the Willow Creek Association.

PEP helps prisoners who are about to get out of jail by training them to use their entrepreneurship skills for legitimate businesses when they are released.

In this session, I was impacted by how passionate and bold Catherine Rohr is when it comes to PEP. Am I like that with what God has called me to?

Those were my takeaways for the second day. As you can tell, I got a lot out of this year’s Summit. Like in previous years, I need to take a few weeks to continue to process through what God was trying to teach me.

I did like the changes that Willow made with the format of this year’s summit. It was great idea to eliminate the Saturday sessions. I’m looking forward to next year’s Summit.

Pictures from hike in Arizona

sunnythomas — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:10:32 +0000

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to visit the LifeChurch.tv campus in Mesa, Arizona. I was pretty excited to go. I had never visited the campus or the state for that matter. While I was there, I had the opportunity to go on a hike at Pinnacle Peak in Scottsdale with a friend, Jim Tomberlin. Jim is one of the experts in the multisite church movement. I had the privilege of working with Jim at a previous church. Here are some of the pictures from that beautiful park. If you want to see more pictures from this place, just connect with me on Facebook. I have more posted there.