I'm typing this in Google Docs (wondering when my off-line access will be activated) and playing around with the publish-to-Blogger feature.

My so-named Beta site for choralmusiclist.com is now up and running.

www.choralmusiclist.com

Having served as some sort of music/worship pastor now for almost 5 years, one of the joys of working with a church choir are the choral clubs. I was introduced to the Word Choral Club when I first started out. I had no idea what kind of music to use, what was out there, and how to sample music besides going to my local Christian bookstore to the choral music section. I found out that the local bookstore only carries a drop in the bucket of church music.

With the Word Choral Club, for $99.95 I would get 4 or 5 shipments a year with a box full of music--sheet music, choral collections, cd's, the works. At certain times of the year the boxes were themed, so usually in June/July it would feature all of the new Christmas musical and in November/December it would feature Easter. I went from famine to feast with the arrival of my first box. Ordering individual samples of what they sent you would have cost over $100 in the first box alone, so just on the basis of the music it was worth it. The added bonus that came with my annual membership was a certificate good towards a performance track--which, on something like a musical, runs $90. So, at the end of the year, I was really spending only $10 for a ton of music to sample.

Word Choral Club was only the beginning, because soon I joined the Lillenas club--another choral music club, with pretty much the same setup, just with different music. Now at Mount Olive, I found out that we subscribe to Word, Lillenas, Lifeway, and Brentwood-Benson. Yesterday I was going through the choral music library/closet and found two choral club boxes from last year full of music. As I have looked through I have noticed that I have a limited amount of storage space and an overabundance of old musicals and the like.

I took those old choral club boxes and walked them to the dumpster, only because I barely have room to store the music that we actually use, much less a bunch of sample copies. I also don't really have a good place to take them. It is not like I can take sample packs or old music to Goodwill. I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if there was a site where you could get rid of this stuff--to sell it (and turn your trash into cash), or donate it to a smaller church somewhere starving for what you're either going to let sit in a closet or take to the dumpster. I did a search on Google and came up with one site that doesn't look like it has been updated in 3 years. That's when I registered www.choralmusiclist.com. As of the time of this posting, it is freshly registered, so nothing is up yet. What I envision is a forum where choir directors can unload music that they don't want or need. I hope to setup a simple forum where that can take place. I know that I am not the only person that could use such a place.

mtobc.com

I want to apologize to all of my fans since I have not updated this site in quite some time. At the end of November 2007, I moved my family 538 miles from Cary, North Carolina, to Live Oak, Florida. On the first Sunday in December, I started my new position as Associate Pastor of Worship and Adult Discipleship at Mount Olive Baptist Church.


One of my first responsibilities upon starting here was to take charge of the church's website. Mt. Olive had a nice website, but it had not been updated in quite some time. I believe it was updated in October to announce the Fall Festival, but had not been updated since (i.e., to reflect that Christmas was coming, or the hiring of a new associate pastor).

Probably my largest addition to the church website was to start offering the weekly sermons available for download on iTunes. I started that in January, when Pastor John started his first sermon series of the year, and I have continued it every week since. At this point you can go on our website, link over to our iTunes page, and download any sermon from January through Easter. It took a little bit of ingenuity, but fortunately it required no additional monetary output from the church (i.e., all the necessary tools to do that were free). With the help of an open source (i.e. free) audio editing tool called Audacity I was able to edit down Sunday recordings to just the messages (due to their length and impending file size). I'm sure there's probably and easier way to do this (i.e., with a Mac), but this is free and it works.

Anway, please check out the Mt. Olive website and let me know what you think, your comments, suggestions, etc.