Immerse Recap

First off, thanks so much for all of those who have asked how the kick-off for Immerse went on Monday. I apologize that I couldn't blog it up Monday night, but I had a retreat Tues-Wed and I just ran out of time.

I'm trying to edit some video of the worship, but that may have to wait until I can steal some time from something else!

Immerse went great. First off, the band did a wonderful job. Romack and Paul James held down drums and bass and Andrew Pulley, an Immerse guy, did piano. Andrew is very good and I'm looking forward to playing with him more. Romack and Paul were, of course, spot-on.

Not counting band and other volunteers, we had around 40 kids there. It felt great - laid back, casual, and the students were both respectful and passionate during the song set. For our first one of 2009, we were trying a couple of things...

1. New sound system. We opted for a smaller, more portable setup. I think it allowed for the crowd to hear themselves better during worship. I brought a couple of powered monitors and they worked great.
2. New stage. As you'll see below, we're on a small stage. The building we rent for this has a bigger, theater-style stage, but once of Immerse's founders built a great stage that was about half-as-tall as the normal staging. Made the service feel a lot more normal and cool that way, in my opinion.

We'll see what next week holds. I've got to put a setlist together as soon as possible and I'm hoping that I'll get the chance to get to know some of those kids better next week. For the rest of the week, I'll be posting a few video clips of the worship set...in case you enjoy watching such things. You might have to crank volume a little to hear Paul and Andrew...they both did good, but I'll probably have to bump them in the house a bit next week.