On Unleash

This weekend was absolutely the best 3 days of my life. Actually, it wasn't even the weekend. But that's okay. Went to Unleash at Newspring church in Anderson, SC. It was an 18 hour each way road trip with my favorite people in the whole world.

Newspring's campus is amazing. Perry Noble, their pastor, has talked a lot about how the church ought to be the most creative place on the planet, and that secular organizations should be looking at the church and asking, "how can we do that?" instead of the other way around. His church is an excellent example of that concept at work. Original architecture and definitely a contender for the most creative kids ministry ever conceived. The church bleeds excellence. From the 600 volunteers at the conference to the 109 staff members that pour their hearts into their ministries.

The conference was divided up into 4 teaching blocks, 2 main sessions taught by the Man Perry Noble and then 2 break out sessions ran by staff members on various topics. As valuable as the teaching time was the space in between, some of it occupied with the free chick-fil-a lunch but the rest with literally being able to wonder around everywhere and absorbing absolutely everything possible.
I'm not going to lie, my face literally started twitching from smiling.

Worship was unbelievable. Newspring is the first church i've been to where i was satisfied with the way the audio was mixed. They had not-too-huge line arrays but lots and lots of subs. And with a D-Show for both FoH and monitor world, everything about everything screamed that they mean business.

We stopped by Elevation Church's main building in North Carolina on the way back. Their graphic arts guy was bomb enough to give us an impromptu full-on tour of the place. Looking back on it, the contrast between Elevation and Newspring might be the most awesome part of the trip. Newspring is an example of a church with a 13.7 million dollar annual budget, with a very deep bucket of resources and some 15,000 total attenders.
Elevation on the other hand, just turned 4 years old and have 1/3 of the members. They have a lot less staff members and have focused a lot of their attention on stretching everything they have as far as possible. Their facility was impressive in its own right, not for how huge it is or for nice equipment, but for how they've utilized what they have. Example, their graphic designer is one guy. Newspring has a team of 9 full time employees complete with an internal 2-week turnaround on all requested work. I saw more graphic arts in the 45 minutes that we were in Elevation than the 10 hours that we spend at Newspring church. He also gave us all t-shirts. That's sweet.

But what do you care?

Sound and Light guys, as well as musicians, are completely obsessed with gear. All of them. You can go up to a sound technician after any show and start asking questions and he will all of a sudden turn into a kid in a candy store talking about his own equipment. Its part of his job to love that. Its part of his job to know exactly how it all works together and seamlessly to produce what you paid money to see. There was no shortage of that enthusiasm at Newspring.
But on the car ride back home, I realized that over the past year or so, i've started to become pretty much church obsessed. I watch church services online. The last time I missed a sunday morning was when I was 12 years old. I love talking about church. I love hearing about church. I loved our 36 hours worth of being on the road for a one day conference about church.
If the symmetric property applies to occupation, then something becomes glaringly obvious.