Last week I was lucky enough to join 40 friends from the Disciples Youth Ministry Network on a retreat at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, AZ.  Our keynote speaker was Mark DeVries, a hilarious presenter hailing from Texas by way of Nashville.  He’s also the founder of Youth Ministry Architects and he tailored his normal spiel to an audience just of vocational youth ministers (rather than his normal combined audiences of church boards, volunteer youth sponsors, etc.).

I got some video and audio of the event, but I’m not sure yet how that will take shape.  I originally thought of doing a promo video for next year’s retreat, but I’m not sure I shot a broad enough subject for that.  More tk, hopefully …

Canon 7D

Another fun experience from last week was getting my new camera – the Canon 7D.  I’d been planning it for over a year (after originally planning for the 5D Mark II – until the 7D came out and trumped it with price and EF/EF-S lens mounting capabilities).

“Destination Weddings” are funny phenomena for me as a minister and as a photographer.  While this event wasn’t a wedding – it was a “Destination Retreat” — so much so that I had Amazon ship the camera directly to the retreat center rather than sending it to my home and having to carry it through the airport to Phoenix.

The 7D shoots HD video, which I’m eager to comb through and learn more.  I got some video and audio of the event, but I’m not sure yet how that will take shape.  I originally thought of doing a promo video for next year’s retreat, but I’m not sure I shot a broad enough subject for that.

Two Cathedrals

Heidi and I don’t normally watch TV – but we will go through complete series on DVD.  So, while first dating and being engaged we went through all seasons of Northern Exposure.  Now we’re on to The West Wing.  When I returned home from the retreat, Heidi and I watched the final episode of Season 2: “Two Cathedrals.”  It was incredible.  So well done!  (Especially compared to the cliffhanger ending at the end of season 1).

Here’s the closing scene from the episode, with music “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits:

So my last post wasn’t complete. I’d worked for most of this summer on the new site for Chicago Theological Seminary and the servers just weren’t cooperating. I guess that’s what we get for hosting a PHP/MySQL content management system on an IIS/SQL Server configuration.  I’m still wrapping up the video tutorials that explain to the CTS staff how to manage the content on the site.  (That’s what I was doing in the above picture).  But I’m proud to say that … it’s alive!

Other reasons the weekend was busy:

The Episcopal Church of St. Benedict in Bolingbrook, IL held it’s Family Festival this weekend.  I’ve never been as happy to get up at 5:15am to go take pictures of meat cooking:

And the night before, I returned to my field ed. parish, the Church of the Holy Nativity, for their U2Charist worship service.  It was my first time back at CHN — and it’s been too long.  They’re a great group of people: