Hey Fletch

Florida Baptist Disaster Relief Update

2008-09-22T09:12:00.001-07:00

Here's a copy of an e-mail I received over the weekend

Good Morning from Texas City

Yesterday was a good day. We moved out of survive mode and into performing mode. Our kitchen prepared over 23,000 meals yesterday, most of that went out on Salvation Army canteens but about 2,400 meals were served by our people in the drive through line. Our volunteers got up @ 3:30 AM to do the following:

Start cooking @ 4 AM so they can have lunch (12,000 meals) ready and shipped by 9 AM.
Unloaded, sorted, and organized over 9 semi-trailers of food, drinks and paper products.
Washed over 700 cambros – That is the containers that we put the food in .
Cleaned up the site.
Went to bed @ 9:30 so they can do it again the next day.

Thanks to all of the volunteers who worked very hard.

Power is coming back on in TX City but is spotty in a lot of other cities in Galveston County. We are sending food to all of the other cities including Galveston. Two of our assessors went to Galveston yesterday. They talked to many first responders who live on the island. They are in great need. We are working with the state conventions of TX to try to find a way to help them.

HOUMA, LA

The cleanup and recovery guys and gals continue to work in Houma. Florida Baptist DR is providing the coordination of the cleanup and recovery efforts in Houma. We are also sending many teams to do chainsaw, roof repair and mudout.

OTHER NOTES

Yesterday I went to visit Lee and Dianne Newton at the hospital. Lee is the gentleman who fell and broke his leg on Tuesday. The doctors had to put plates and screws in his leg to set the bone. Lee is going to be ok but has a long recovery process. Lee was in great spirits and was continually apologizing for letting everyone down by getting hurt.

Two nights ago in our devotions, one of our people told a story about one of the truck drivers who brought in supplies. He was not a DR volunteer. He had been on the road for several days so he asked if he could use our showers. As he was starting to leave, he told one of our guys that he had been on a lot of disasters but had never seen a site quite like ours. He went on to say that our site was very different than the others because all of our people were smiling. I guess working for the Lord lets the smile in our heart come out on our face. Hopefully it does in yours today as well.

Prayer Request

Pray for the first responders of Galveston who have damage to their personal homes but cannot find the time to take care of them.

Pray that Southern Baptists will respond to the need of these responders and minister to them.

Pray for the local government officials that they make the right decisions and that we as the Body of Christ will find an open door to help.

Pray for Lee and Dianne Newton as they prepare to travel home and as Lee recovers.

Pray for the pastors and congregations of the Galveston County area. Many of them are experiencing the same thing that many pastors experienced in 2004 with the damage to their facilities and the impact on their congregations.

Fritz Wilson, Director
Disaster Relief & Recovery Dept.
Florida Baptist Convention
1-800-226-8584 ext. 3121

Thoughts from Dinner

2008-09-18T04:30:00.000-07:00

Dinner was great last night--marinated chicken breast. The worship time was led by Cliff Duren, who is the Associate Minister of Music/Arranger at First Baptist Woodstock, and one of their praise teams. They did some classic hymns, some gospel (Brooklyn Tab), but my favorite song overall was Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.

On another note I was able to meet Stephen Drake from Lifeway. We had a great discussion about the new leadership at Lifeway under the direction of Thom Rainer. I expressed to him how excited I was about the new Worship Project and how it was great to see Lifeway leading out in something as opposed to lagging behind and copying the latest greatest fad.

Timothy-Barnabas Pastor's Conference

2008-09-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

Amy and I are in Duluth, Georgia (north side of Atlanta), this week at the Timothy-Barnabas Pastor's Conference hosted by Dr. Johnny Hunt, President of the Southern Baptist Convention and Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church, Woodstock, Georgia.

We met up with my parents and they took Eden home with them for the rest of this week. They were planning on making a quick pit stop in Greenville, South Carolina, so Amy's family could see her. Pray for Amy--she's having a little mother-daughter separation anxiety.

We're here with our pastor, John Watkins, and his wife Michelle. We have heard that this is a great time of encouragement and edification. Tonight we will be having dinner and a movie in the banquet hall. I'm pretty sure that we will be seeing our second pre-screening of Fireproof. We saw it several weeks ago down in Gainesville, Florida. My review "you will laugh, you will cry, you will be reminded of a Billy Graham film you saw once at church, and you will marvel at how Kirk Cameron now looks younger than you."

Coral Snake

2008-06-08T17:51:00.001-07:00

So we encountered what we believe to be a coral snake. We didn't know it at the time, but we believe it to be venemous. It disappeared from the yard, but if I happen to see another one it will be going to snake heaven (or hell).

RIP: SkyBus

2008-04-05T09:05:00.000-07:00

Skybus Airlines, based in Columbus, Ohio, ceased operations today. They offered extremely low fares (10 seats for $10 on every flight) and flew into smaller regional airports. In January of this year they started service between my hometown of Greensboro, NC, and St. Augustine, FL--near where we live now. We did experience one of their first flights and had a great experience. It is a shame that it didn't work out. Rest in peace, SkyBus--we will miss you.

For more information:
"Skybus Shuts Down Effective Today" Greensboro, NC News-Record

2008-04-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'm now blogging into Facebook. Usually, I try to stay "on top of things." I feel embarrassed that it has taken me this long to link Heyfletch.com with Facebook. This is my first post since I activated the link--I hope it shows up.

2008-03-31T16:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-03-27T13:18:00.001-07:00

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

www.choralmusiclist.com

2008-03-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-27T11:31:00.001-07:00

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.

2008-01-19T13:49:00.001-08:00

Back on Track?

2008-01-17T18:50:00.001-08:00

Is heyfletch back on track?