trey taylor

healer

// July 9th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // faith, video, worship

Over the last month or so we’ve done a new song called ‘Healer’ a few times, its a beautiful and moving song. I’d picked up a little of the story behind the song from different people, and then today I ran across this video on Brad’s blog. This is totally worth your time. Take a few minutes and watch this testimony (top video), and see the power of worship. This could easily change your perspective. It’s hit especially close with us because of what’s going on with our friends little girl Alli.

This video is the full song recorded live for the new Hillsong album, ‘This is Our God.’

7 reasons the church needs artists

// June 3rd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // church, creative, worship

I ran across this yesterday on Tony’s blog and I loved it so much I wanted to pass it on.

7 Reasons Why the Church Needs Artists

1//Only through art can we know God more fully. A person encounters God as an artist before he encounters him as a theologian. We have reduced God’s primary interests to truth and goodness. We must remember that beauty is a primary of interest of his.

2//We must see God’s world more truthfully. Only seeing one theme is insufficient. Artists must help people see both the brokenness and the promise of renewal.

3//We must embrace God’s salvation more completely. Art as morality dictates that we should create more than just “religious” art. Everything is to be redeemed. Everything is worthy of artistic representation.

4//We must worship God more humanly. Because of the image of God, humans make art. Humans create. No other organism on earth does.

5//We must believe God’s promises more confidently. We are blinded to the glory that is here now. With art, you encourage and enlarge hearts to believe the impossible.

6//We must proclaim God’s kingdom more powerfully. Truth has bigger muscles in art.

7//We need to meet God. The primary place where we experience God is in our imagination–the intersection of our mind, emotions and will.

sacrament weekend

// March 18th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // church, creative, worship

With the craziness of Easter right around the corner, we started doing something low key on the weekend before.  Our idea was to take a weekend and make it all about the Sacraments.  Last year we incorporated water baptism also, but this year we decided to really focus on communion and make it as intimate as possible. Low lights, candles, acoustic worship, and an abbreviated message centered around the last supper. Billy and Nate lead worship with a small band and they did an amazing job. I love that these weekends are the opposite of what this coming weekend will be.  Bright, energetic, and loud – I love that contrast. It turned out beautiful, here are a few shots my boy Marcus took…
      

collide

// February 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // church, creative, technology, video, worship

If you’re in the church media field at all you should already be into the new magazine Collide (if not you really should be). But you may not be into the blog yet which is also really great, especially the latest that Scott McClellan posted. And their design work is amazing, check out the new issue’s cover here.

automatic worship

// January 12th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // worship

Over the Christmas holidays my brother-in-law told me that earlier in the week he had gone into a grocery store and on his way in he ran face first into the glass doors of the store.  Boom!  He said that he had expected them to open for him and his face and pride were paying the price of his assumption. 

This got me thinking, (later of course I laughed for awhile) I’d have to say that I’ve done this a lot… spiritually of course.  How many times have I walked into a worship service and just expected the band, the show, or the lyric to open the doors of heaven for me.  How many times have I just expected that my energy and effort is not needed to experience true worship.  That simply me walking in the door triggers some mystical censor and boom I’m in the presence of God.  No work on my part, no pure motives needed, just simply by walking in the door its suppose to happen, God will just unfold everything simply because I walked in. I realize that if God wants it to be that way then it can, especially for people whose attention he’s trying to get, but us “seasoned” and “mature” folks should know better.  Worship is all about God, all about us giving Him the attention and energy that he deserves, its not about warm bodies singing songs in unison.  I’ve heard this before and I’ve even probably said it at some point, “when I worship it feels like God is no where near me and when I pray the ceilings are brass” yada yada yada. Maybe its because we are standing outside the door, stuck in uneventful worship because the doors of heaven don’t just fling open because you walk toward the door, they fling open because you grab the handle and throw them open.

igniter tracks

// November 6th, 2007 // No Comments » // creative, video, worship

If you haven’t heard about the new line of product from Igniter Media Group (one of the top church media producers by far) you need to check it out, its called Igniter Tracks and I can’t wait until they release later this month. They are starting off with 2 volumes with 7 songs on each, every song includes incredible video with lyrics, as well as three audio versions to chose from the last being a click track for the band to play along with to stay in sync with the video. Their stuff is always extremely creative and very cool and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. You can preview “Jesus Paid It All” here, and you can preorder both volumes here.