Church Tech Arts

So this has been a lot of fun. People from all over have been writing in with their favorite quotes (or should I say mis-quotes). There are some good ones here, and to save everyone the time of digging into the comments section (and because I’m on vacation and feeling lazy and unwilling to come up with real new content), I’m collecting them here. 

This, of course, does not mark the end. Oh no. Want to be on the lookout for great mis-quotes whenever they happen. Send them in and I’ll keep updating the list. Good times! So here’s what we have today:

• “Jesus came not to serve, but to be served.”
• “We are owners, not stewards.” (from a series on stewardship)
• “But God never promised us a roseless thorn garden.”
• “And now let’s have Chris come up and play our capital campaign theme thong.”
• “Please be seated in the house of Jesus.”
• “It’s hard to be a man in a women’s department.”
  and my personal favorite for this round…
• “The disciples are kind of like a boy-band.”
  Updated 8/3…
• “Look at this picture of Steve, he’s so fat…uh, um I mean fast with his drill…” (referring to a picture of the facilities manager sporting a whole tool belt of power tools)

Thanks to Jon, Daniel, Osborn, Justin, Richard, and Bryan for those. 

As I mentioned, I’m currently enjoying 2 weeks of vacation. For me, vacation is sleeping late, sitting on the patio reading and writing and grilling out. The rest of my family is not taken in by this approach however. For reasons I’m still unsure of, I agreed to a 2500 mile road trip back to NY to visit family and friends. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about visiting family and friends, but 2500 miles is 2500 miles, and I have to drive all of them. So while I’d hoped that I could simply move my sleeping late, reading, writing and grilling to another venue, so far, I’ve not slept well, and we’ve been so busy visiting, I haven’t had much time to read or write.

Thus the lack of real content here. Not to fret, however. Once I get back from vacation (and then the 3-day staff retreat that immediately follows my vacation–yeah, I planned that on purpose!), I’ll be all refreshed and full of things to write about. We have some big changes in store for Upper Room, and that’s going to mean some really fun things to blog about. We also have some big equipment changes coming up and that will be fully documented here as well.

So thanks for reading, enjoy my vacation and if you get hungry for content, take a look at the archives. There’s all kinds of good stuff back there!

Public speaking is hard. You stand up in front of a room full of people, some of whom you know quite well, while others are complete strangers. Hopefully, you are prepared well and know what you want to say. Sometimes, however, things don’t go quite as planned. You start second-guessing yourself and asking, “Did I say this already or was that during the 9?” Or you start editing your message on-the-fly. Or there are metaphors competing in your head–which one wins? Sometimes both. Or we discover we have no internal monologue. 

I’ve not done a ton of public speaking, but I’ve done some. And I think I’ve had all of those things happen to me. So it’s with great humility that I start collecting the funny stuff that is said when we stand in front of others to communicate. Because seriously, we can’t take ourselves to seriously. (”Wait, did I just say ’seriously’ twice? Dangit!”)

• “Often, God always has a plan for the things He is doing in our lives.”
• “The $10 ticket covers the free appetizers.”
• “And in so doing, it’s a great way to hang some flesh on these concepts.”
• “I really missed you all last week, like really bad, like in the psyco ex-girlfriend kinda way.” 
• “I know some of you think that 4 months is a long time to search for a new worship director, but remember it took over a year to find someone as well qualified as me.”

This is (hopefully) the beginning of a great collection of funny things uttered from stage. To protect the guilty, we’ll omit names (I did actually utter one of those, you can try to guess which one…and Jason Cole supplied one of them–thanks man!) I think it would be great fun if you would send me your favorite “Said On Stage” quotes and we’ll start compiling them. Colin’s offered to put up a list over at FaithTools and I may well mirror that on my site as well (you can’t have too many backups of priceless material like this!).

So when you hear something funny, odd, or just a really creative use of the language, post it in the comments and we’ll start adding it to the list. We all work really hard, so share the joy!