Grace United Methodist Church Announces second annual Centerfest Christian Music Festival
Mt Juliet, TN, September 8, 2007 - On Saturday, September 8 the second annual Centerfest, Middle Tennessee’s premiere outdoor Christian music festival, will descend upon Mount Juliet from 10 AM to 9 PM.
Centerfest will be a day full of music by nationally and regionally known Christian bands representing many genres of music including rock, pop, hip-hop and metal.
Centerfest will feature both nationally and locally known contemporary Christian bands and artists. Dove Award nominated artist John Reuben will headline the festival. Since 2000 Reuben has released six albums on Gotee Records; the first four albums sold over 200,000 copies. Reuben was recently featured on NPR's popular All Things Considered online music feature and his humorous music videos have received several hundred thousand plays on YouTube.com.
Also featured is Arkansas hard rock Tooth and Nail Records artist Spoken, a Dove Award nominated hard rock band whose seventh album will be in stores on September 25.
The eclectic KNAPSACKHEROES! will also appear. KNAPSACKHEROES! is a band from the Nashville area who is making a name for themselves with an exciting live show and original blend of pop music. The band is currently in the studio working on a full length CD with producers who have worked with artists including Mute Math, Switchfoot, Faith Hill, dcTalk, Newsboys, Phil Keaggy, David Crowder Band, Rebecca St James, and many others. They have played at Warmth in Winter for the past two years.
Other
artists include: Redflecks, Brothatone, The Capture, Salient,
Waterside, Natural Habitz, The Last Goodbye, and Spoken Word Praise. Hear their music at www.myspace.com/centerfest.
In addition to the music there will be activities for people of all ages, including a kids section with games and other options.
Centerfest will open to the public at 10 am. Music will begin at 11 AM and continue until 9 PM. Tickets are $8 in advance for individuals and $6 in advance for groups of 10 or more. Those tickets are available at www.centerfest.net, and the church office. Tickets will be $10 the day of the event.
Food and drinks will be for sale that day at reasonable rates. No food or drinks will be allowed into the event. Attendees are welcome to bring blankets, tarps and lawn chairs.
Centerfest is an interdenominational outreach of Grace UMC meant to serve the greater Middle Tennessee area. All churches, groups, and individuals are encouraged to come.
Centerfest
will take place at:
Grace
United Methodist Church
2905
N Mount Juliet Road
Mt
Juliet TN 37122
For
more information on the CENTERFEST Christian Music Festival visit
www.centerfest.net.
pleased to announce that jonathon and myself are going to be developing and putting on a new youth ministry podcast through the YouthWorkerMovement. we're hoping to put together a series of podcasts to help ym's gain a greater understanding of solid theological & spiritual ministries as well as practical nuts and bolts in implementing.
youthworkermovement is a networking and resourcing initiative of the united methodist church & the foundation for evangelism.
this past wednesday i spent an evening with some of my girls participating in what has become a ritual gathering for them. last year they got together in mondays, this year it's wednesday, where they descend upon one of my dad's man-room (over developed tv room with leather couches, you get the idea) to watch laguna beach.
apparently this is quite the phenomenon of a show. cynic would say that this is a teenage reality show with little teenage reality. the teens are real, the relationships are real if you are okay with producers saying "go call this person" "invite these people to this party" "go ask so-and-so about their relationship." oh, and it's in laguna beach orange county which is like no other persons reality in the world. this all frames some odd scenes of conversation & physical encounters that create uncomfortable moments that wouldn't necessarily happen in real life.
to my girls credit, they were very aware and emphasized their disgust with certain personalities that were mean spirited. a gasp for a scene where some of the girls used some mean passive aggressiveness to show they didn't accept other girls. a few laughs at some "bushism" type grammar, in the effort to sound smarter. the guys, other than being the next top model are pretty regular teenage guys. you can tell some of them don't care to get caught in some of these conversations where the girls ask pointed questions, that stuff only gets them in trouble or shows true intent.
why this is such a phenomenon of a show? i have no idea. surely youth cannot relate to these people. the drama possibly, every teen has their own drama that is the end of the world for them, but not the surrounding set. i say the surrounding set is important because at the end of the show they did a cribs type tour around all the teens homes.
my fear is that this becomes a reality that our teenagers will continue to perpetuate false pretenses on life, body image (fear this more as these are teenagers, not adult supermodels), status of success, and healthy conflict resolution. my hope is that this is a transparent reality show that youth see as being far from real.
otherwise, it was nice to hang out with some of the girls
we are back now, we got up at 5:30am and shuffled the youth into vans and set off for home a little after 6am. i'm glad to be back home, however, erin hasn't done her wedding errands yet, so i am waiting at the church for a little bit longer till i get to take that nap that i think many of the youth ministers and youth are already basking in.
yesterday we ended our week with some real high notes. the roofing project i was working on was finished a little after lunch time. the other groups made great progress on houses that still have a long way to finish, but the people they were working with were so appreciative of what they did. that appreciation seemed to be the going sentiment along the whole coast. we had people wanting to do things for us all the time, from cooking lunches to giving plants. anything to show how much they appreciated the help. since my group was close to finishing, i actually went around to the sites took some pictures and gave out ice cream or popsicles. it was fun to see all that everyone was doing. we've found the ice cream popscicle break is big idea for those hot work days.
after our pizza dinner we walked to the beach for our final worship and sharing. it was symbolic of our last time to really take notice of the community around us. i also asked the youth to grab a piece of debris along the way. that became our little altar on the beach. sharing was cool, the place was just right and it felt good to just be in the presence. hunter and others gave out nail cross gifts as rememberance items for the time spent. i've received countless nail crosses in my days of youth ministry, however, i think this one will take on meaning that i won't soon forget.
once darkness fell we headed back to the church and had some great time of fellowship, laughter and telling the stories of the week over again. the seniors and college guys did a great job in giving out awards this year. i was laughing so hard most of the time, many times before the award was even given. best award goes to bob strobel. for your hendersonville folks, you should inquire as to the story behind that. we closed with a video that johnathan and i made. the same stories, but in video, it was a little rough, but everyone enjoyed it. after that it was cleaning up and bed time for me. i hear that a number of folks stayed up later to play 4square. the 4square games were quite intense this week, last night was no exception.
up early and we are back home again. in the on going saga that is my july. i'll leave sometime sunday for lake junaluska for a youth leadership event with our conference council on youth ministries which three of our youth are on. i'm hoping to have a good catch up with paul and talk bloggers convention/conference stuff along with a miriad of other great things. will be back wednesday night and then off to our mystery trip on friday (which i am really looking forward too).
it's late, my computer is moving incredibly slow, maybe it's the 500plus pictures i downloaded from don, probably... anyways, i leave you for now with my first experience of this day. andy and ryan dressed with i think rachel and ashlea's clothing doing a mission trip song to the tune of "don't cry for me argentina." more updates & pictures later. don and mike both took some great pics that i'd love to share.
i am uploading pics onto kodakgallery, it's under my church email if you wish to look for them.
day 4 of our mission to long beach was a much easier. i'm feeling a lot less tired. i wonder if it was because we took a half-day of work to chill out, check out the local culture, hang on the beach or just do nothing. either way, i'm feeling way good right now, but still it's late and i need to get to bed soon.
the bobs showed up at my teams worksite yesterday after lunch to help with some interior repairs of a room while the rest of their team pitched in on the roof. they finished that by lunch today, i believe a group from florida who is part of another mission's group is going to now finish the room by hanging the sheet rock. other work teams are finishing projects each day. some are rather light as far as the techincal side goes, some yardwork, some painting. however, we are finding that the littlest things are needed to allow people to get back into their homes and live life as close to how they used to be. the only casualty so far has been logan, who decided to try his power drill on his finger. i bandaged him up with what we aptly named "man-daid." spirits are up for two more days of work, 7 more for one of the bob's who is staying through next week with our adult team who is arriving on saturday.
we had a great worship last night at the catholic church. it's right on the coast and suffered heavy damage. what is left is the roof of the sanctuary, no walls or interior. the rest of the building is in parts of reconstruction like many buildings. tonights worship was equally cool, we had it in the church sanctuary which is really cozy and majestic. the youth did a great devotional, i was taken by it. we had a visitor from the community share with us in worship tonight. teresa, who we met at the historic society meeting here on monday, came to give us some articles and pictures. she also shared how big an impact all the groups have been and every little bit helps. one thing she shared in conversation was that it took around 10 years to recover from camille, the general guess is that this will take over 20 years to begin to regain some normality.
i am incredibly proud of this group of folks. the youth are great, no major issues, they work hard, they take worship seriously and they are embracing a role of listening and being a part of this community. it was important to make sure that we were not coming down here to 'fix it' there is way too much devastation for that. but we can help out a bit here and there and show that we support and remember these communities, long after the news cameras have left.
on a side note: i took our half-day to head over to gulfside assembly grounds, a united methodist retreat center for the southeast jurisdiction. the history of gulfside is that it was the only retreat center that welcomed the black community, ciona and jay have some great stories about the grounds. 
i was moved to visit and took with me mike, one of our youth ministers. sad to say, there isn't much to see. check my flickr for some of the pics, i'll add more later. it was eerie quiet all around the beach in waveland and that goes for gulfside. there is an office trailor for umcor and mississippi conference relief efforts, some housing units and fema trailors, but the rest is scorched earth, foundation slabs and sights that one can almost see how it used to be beautiful.
for those from hfumc checking out the pics. i'm trying to get more pics from all the worksites to post of more than just the dozen at my site.
our third day, we worked.. we worked hard. going to bed now.
we have now been in long beach just over two days. we arrived without incident and got settled in without any problems on saturday. as you get closer to the coast you can start to see signs of the hurricane still. once we turned right onto hwy 90 (the coastal highway) we saw a lot of the devistation we could have imagined.. however, i don't think we could have imagined it going on and on as it did. the featured picture is of the bank.. you can see what is left is the vault. there are two banks like this within a block or two of us. i think the fast food sign is taco bell, but i could be wrong. if you want an account of a pastor that did a helicopter fly over, this is a must read to understand some of what we are seeing.
sunday we woke and stored our things away and participated in the early morning worship service & sunday school after that. i had a little moment to speak to the congregation. i think i did okay, my intent was to share some stories of my connection to the church and introducing our team to them with some added humor, i think at my expense, but i can't recall every thing i said. the afternoon was our scheduled field trip to new orleans. we went into downtown, french quarter area, to be more like tourists than anything. one can get the idea of some of the scope of the vast size of the affected areas. as you drive into town on i10 you pass apartment building after apartment building, subdivision after subdivision, and shopping area after shopping area that is just empty completely and totally empty. there might have been a scattered fema trailer here or there, but by and large not enough to notice as life coming back into the area.
we got back to church a bit late for dinner with the church's youth group, who just returned from a mission trip to mountain top. some of the church members had cooked up a great spread of hotdogs and hamburgers. we chilled out with some of the church members and listened to some of their stories, not all had to do with the storm, but many did. many of the stories had to do with the recovery momemts, ala. "it was a big deal when sonic opened" or "i just sat at the traffic light." one story i enjoyed hearing was about the recovery of the dupont plant down here. living so close to one i had a particular interest and could imagine the size of the project. however, it seemed so much more in size and technical detail that i ever could have imagined. we had a late worship and some changing of our work detail later on which made for a caotic evening. but all ended well.
first day of work for my team was interesting. we went to a wonderful ladies house. the wife of a methodist pastor. her house was torn up by one of the tornados from the hurricane. because the water came in from the tornado she was able to get insurance money (albeit two months later) and she speaks highly of fema (something you hear more of than not). all we did for mrs. jo was move some of her big funiture back into her home as it's done interior construction now. this was going to enable her to start to bring in her memorabilia (which she had some cool stuff). she was so very grateful for our half a day of work that she bought us some ice cream sticks and then brought a spaghetti dinner to the church to show her appreciation. because we knew we were having a half-day we went back to the church to change and have lunch. a couple of other groups stopped by for lunch where we heard some good things, especially from "gator house" more on that later i'm sure. we headed to our second project where we got up and sweaty with a roofing project with our brazil team. the kids worked crazy hard, today in our groups. when we returned we heard much of the same. one group had to end early as they ran out of materials. most everyone had a full day, which was a bit of a question yesterday evening. tomorrow is another big day so i'm heading to bed, more photos and updates to come.
in a few hours i'll be on the road again for mission trip #2. this time it's our senior high mission trip. we have traditionally gone to asp for summers, but this year we've detoured for the sunny beaches of long beach mississippi.
we have in tow 50 plus youth and adults in what i hope will be a time blessed with new friendships that we can continue to develop over the years. we will be working with fumc in long beach, which has just been a blessing. they have enabled themselves to be a housing and central unit for rebuilding in their area. for individuals and community alike. more on this to come as they have wi-fi there.
i ask for prayers, for safety, the challenging of spirits, and opening of hearts. i am feeling that this is going to be just a wonderful blessing for us at hfumc, i hope it is to the people of long beach.
today (yesterday) we had our last day on the work sites. i had hoped that we would finish our projects around our house early and we could help out the other team. however, somewhere around noon time myself & i think some of the youth hit that wall of exhaustion. the girls (who got the afternoon shade) finished off the back of the house while us "men" continued to plug away with the underpinning. we wrapped up with just some small projects to finish for a later group and said our goodbyes to mrs. juanita.
over to the first team, we found the group hanging out on the front porch. apparently as the work got more technical on a few of the team could work on the flooring, so the others caught up on their "my sweet 16" & "next." we took in a sonic break before getting back to camp. spent the evening in reflection of how our lives have changed from this week & then helped put together a piece of a scrapbook that the homeowners will receive in a banquet at the end of the summer.
today was a day of rain. being that we had an outside project we were unsure what our team would get into. turns out we just joined in with our other team who was looking at a large task ahead of them. turns out the home they were given to work on (the first day they were just finishing a prior project) was to repair the floor of a home that had broken across the floor joists. never have i seen so many floor joists break at the same spot. could be termite damage, but i'd have to get the family experts involved to figure that on out. we finished removing the hardwood flooring, made easier since it was installed without a sub-floor. still no small task.
another piece to the home was the hallway. turns out after looking underneath the house it had no floor joists. eventually we cleared the room, the rain moved out and we returned to our home working on underpinning and painting. the highlight of our day was using our new "man tool."
returned back to pick up the other group to find out that much progress has been made with the flooring. i jumped in to help with the last board only to tear it up trying to bang it into place. hunter tried to help me feel better by saying hamilton sabotaged me not clearing out all the old nails & then he tried again saying he measured the board too long.. either way, we pulled that one back out and went home for the day.
at camp the evening highlight was alex spitting a cricket. i tried to give her coaching on how to properly spit a cricket.. she did well, placed third behind some boy and one of the adults. way to go!
arrived to sos perfectly fine. a little late because of some unscheduled bathroom stops (maggie in the words of predators fans "it's all your fault"), but nothing major. there are a lot of youth here, we're among 180 folks which makes for some raucous noise at times.
our first day on the worksite was either spent waiting on materials or finishing up a house that has been worked on since the beginning of summer. grayson our fearless got us going with a prayer then divided up work tasks. sarah and adam spent time in the back of the house priming and painting a room remodel. michael spent time in the front of the house finishing some trim paintwork and power washing parts of the house. myself and brianna worked to clean up the guestroom which has spent the past weeks housing all the building materials and tools. afterwards we got into painting the exterior of the house and finishing some soffit work. once we finished our work day we gathered for dinner and chapel and then got a late night to go check out the riverfront fireworks show. funny thing about that was that other groups followed us home because apparently we knew the way home.. i'm glad we got lucky not missing any turns. props to the shotgun driver hunter for his excellent night eyes in navigating.
more pictures to follow
All churches and youth
groups are invited to the first annual CENTERFEST Christian Music Festival at
Grace UMC in Mt Juliet!
CENTERFEST takes place on Sunday, July 30,
from 2 PM to 9 PM at Grace United Methodist Church (2905 N Mount Juliet Road,
Mt Juliet TN 37122).
Solomons Wish
7eventh Time Down
KNAPSACKHEROES!
Andale
Seven System
SHIROCK
Beckah Shae
touch.
Concert festival is $7 or $5 for groups of
20 or more. To reserve advance tickets call 615-754-6034.
Food and drinks will be for sale at the
event.
For more information, and to hear music by
CENTERFEST artists, visit www.myspace.com/centercoffeehouse.
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Mark Yaconelli: Contemplative Youth Ministry : Practicing the Presence of Jesus (Youth Specialties)
Kenda Creasy Dean: Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church
Kenda Creasy Dean: The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry
Mike Ratliff: Sacred Bridges: Making Lasting Connections Between Older Youth and the Church
Drew Dyson: Faith-Forming Junior High Ministry: Beyond Pizza 101
Recent Comments