Lincoln Brewster live in Grants Pass - 3-13-08

Being a long time fan of Lincoln Brewster and his music, I had been looking forward to his show in Grants Pass for a long time. Having interviewed him again on the radio a few days before, I had forgotten just how easy to talk to he was, and what a lot of fun too, and as it turned out he was just the same at the concert.

As I was co-MC’ing the night I had to meet with Lincoln before the show - oh the hardship! - and I actually arrived in time to catch the sound checks. Lincoln and the band were all very friendly, fun guys and we managed to get some pictures done for the Dove website.

The show itself must rank for me as one of the best I have ever been to - and I’ve been to dozens of concerts over the years. The reasons for this are threefold. First the amazing musicianship (Norm Stockton is no slouch either); second the humor of Lincoln and the fact the whole evening was so enjoyable (there was a 25 minute acoustic camp fire session where Lincoln told stories about his kids - very funny). Most importantly, the whole night was 100% God centered, which is what sets the concert apart from so many of the others I’ve been to.

The band played all the "hits", they played them superbly, the audience sand til their lungs burst, and God was lifted up.

What more could you ask for from a concert? We hope to get them back this way real soon...

August Rush

I really wanted to see this one in theaters, but with one thing and another, it never happened.

My interest had been piqued by the presence of Freddie Highmore, the British kid who’s been in everything (seemingly) since his appearance in Finding Neverland alongside Johnny Depp.

In August Rush Highmore has a pretty convincing American accent as he plays an orphaned musical prodigy who is convinced his parents are alive and out there, and that one day they’ll all be together again.

The movie also stars Robin Williams, pretty much as a baddie, who looks much like I’d imagine Bono to look in ten years time. Dublin born actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers also features as a singer songwriter.
While it is true that you have to suspend your disbelief at a few points in the movie, the musical elements (of which there are many) are brilliantly done. Some great songs and a really uplifting musical theme to the whole thing.

If you are a weeper, you WILL bawl your eyes out, but overall this is a quality movie which deserves being seen over and over.

Freddie Highmore is excellent, but my only quibbles would be some of the cello playing sequences (as a former cellist I didn’t find them convincing) and also the dvd extras are really disappointing. Would have liked more of those.

If you haven’t seen it though, you really should.

Breaking Biological Barriers

Check out this masterful commentary by Chuck Colson on a world gone mad...


"Mary Ann Andree was drying her hair in the Rio Sport and Health Club in Gaithersburg, Maryland, last month when the door to the women's locker room suddenly opened. In came a man, wearing a blue ruffled skirt and make-up.

As Andree later told reporters, "I was very upset. There is a lot he could have seen." Andree is far from alone. A lot of other women in Montgomery County, Maryland, are upset over a new law that demands co-ed locker rooms and bathrooms in all public accommodations.

Montgomery County, adjacent to Washington, D.C., passed the law last November to accommodate "transgendered people"—that is, men who perceive themselves to be women, and women who perceive themselves to be men. The law adds gender identity to the list of protected classes to the Montgomery County Code banning discrimination.

In effect, it means men will have full access to a woman's restroom and locker room. A woman taking a shower after her aerobics class might look up to find a man turning on the shower next to hers. A little girl using a movie theater restroom will now have to worry that a strange man might walk in.

Michelle Turner, who leads a citizens group opposing the law, says, "Any biological male who is willing to wear a dress and who is feeling transgendered at that particular moment can enter the ladies room or locker room."

And what is to stop non-transgendered men from entering the ladies' room? Nothing. A child molester or rapist could put on a dress and go right in. So could pornographists. It is an appalling, shocking law. And get this: There is no exemption for religious schools, book stores, churches, and daycares. As Turner notes, "The act will use the force of law to make these organizations accept transgenders, transvestites, and cross-dressers as employees."

The American Psychiatric Association classifies gender identity disorder as a mental disorder. Supporters of the Montgomery County law refuse to accept this, and they have decided that you and I are not going to be allowed to accept it, either. Dana Beyer, a "transgendered" person employed by the Montgomery County Council, says that if you believe that XY chromosomes and male genitalia make someone male, you are a bigot.

In effect, transgendered persons are demanding that Montgomery County erase the distinctions between males and females. Make no mistake: This is not about the need for co-ed bathrooms. This law is simply being used to normalize gender identity disorder—much in the same way the gay lobby uses laws to normalize homosexuality.

Montgomery County officials passed this law despite the fact that citizens opposed it by an eight-to-one margin. The good news is that concerned citizens have gathered enough signatures to put the issue on the November ballot.

But Montgomery County is not the only jurisdiction passing laws like these. Check out what your own local leaders are doing to protect your privacy rights. And parents, make sure your kids know the difference between the Christian view of sexuality and that being propagated by those who think they ought to be allowed to choose their gender and their bathroom."

Chuck Colson on Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams

Check out this brilliant critique of Rowan Williams' recent comments on Sharia Law in the UK by Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship in the USA.

"

There are an estimated 1.6 million Muslims in Great Britain. By some estimates, more people attend mosque than go to Anglican churches every week. Judging by recent comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is easy to see why.

As most of you by now know, Archbishop Rowan William said in a recent interview that the “UK has to ‘face up to the fact’ that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.” He left no doubt who those “citizens” are: British Muslims.

So according to Williams, British Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” Instead, in the tradition of having your cake and eating it too, he proposes finding “a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law”—in other words, sharia.

British Muslims could choose to have “marital” or “financial” disputes resolved in sharia courts. Sharia courts in Britain? At first I thought the Archbishop misspoke.

But it turns out, no. He calls this “supplementary jurisdiction” unavoidable. He compared it to accommodating Christians in areas like abortion or gay adoption.

With all due respect to the Archbishop, there is no such parallel. The only thing that is unavoidable here is his failure to see sharia as it is practiced in the real world, as opposed to in seminars. As the Asia Times columnist “Spengler” put it, Williams is conceding “a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England.”

In real-world Muslim communities throughout Europe, coercion is so commonplace “that duly-constituted governments there” no longer wield justice among its citizens. The imams do. And where would the Archbishop draw the line? At husbands beating their wives for wearing Western clothes or maybe stoning a woman accused of adultery?

Nor will, as Williams hopes, permitting sharia on British soil aid social cohesion. On the contrary, Williams’s fellow bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali, recently spoke about what he calls “no-go zones” in Muslim communities where Christians dare not enter. As a result of death threats, bishop Nazir-Ali and his family require police protection.

Nazir-Ali, whose father had to leave Pakistan after converting to Christianity, told the UK Telegraph that sharia is “in tension” with “fundamental aspects” of Anglo-American law. That is because our “legal tradition” is “rooted in the quite different moral and spiritual vision deriving from the Bible.” This crucial difference seems to have escaped the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The West’s greatest contribution to civilization has been the rule of law, the bulwark of freedom, captured in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Now a ranking religious official proposes compromising that with a theocratic church rule? Please.

Williams’s comments are a tragic sign of the Church’s weakness. We fawningly respond to Islamic overtures for dialogue, even as we see Christians being persecuted in Muslim nations—and sharia law being imposed on others right in our own backyards.

This weakness is the stuff that empty churches are made of."

Booming Beyond Measure!

So the latest concert to hit Medford was last night, the Boomin' Beyond Measure tour featuring Matthew West, Jeremy Camp & TobyMac.

The crowd was a sell-out and got straight to their feet as Matthew West took the stage to open things up, armed with only an acoustic guitar. He was really surprised and delighted when I gave him a tub of his favorite mint-chocolate-chip ice cream before the show.
The audience warmed to him at once as he played 4 or 5 songs with a mixture of humor, challenge, worship and thought provoking points.

Jeremy Camp had to miss the pre-show meet-and-greet as he was suffering from the flu, but he really pulled it together in a powerful and inspiring worship set which was a really pleasant surprise to me. Starting with the awesome "Give You Glory" he was carried along by the encouragement of the crowd and the presence of God in the building, and really seemed to be enjoying himself, despite his illness.

TobyMac took to the stage with a ten piece band which included his DJ buddy Dj Maj, dancers and backup singers. It was high octane all the way with God squarely in the center. Non stop oral and aural treat with plenty of stuff from Portable Sounds along with (for me) the highlight of the night, the old-school 70s medley which included snippets of Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music", Sugarhill Gang's "Rappers Delight", Chic's "Good Times" and "La Freak" and KC & The Sunshine Band's "That's The Way I Like It", and ending with Sister Sledge's "We Are Family".

The show closed with a blistering "Jesus Freak" and they were gone, leaving a breathless and danced-out crowd.

Happy Valentine's....

My 5 Life-changing moments - Part 3

So we left it with my having downed a bottle of aspirin and going to bed. Things weren't looking good. Except God had other ideas. Something within me made me get up again, go down the hall and call a friend, who took me the 2 miles to the nearest hospital, where the next morning, after a stomach pump and a thorough psychiatric assessment, I was discharged with a whole new outlook on life.

I was glad to be alive, and so thankful to God that after some months of leaving him out and doing my own thing, he still cared enough to rescue me. I vowed in return to dedicate my life to him in any way I could, and within 7 years I had embarked on the pathway that led me to where I am now, and that leads me onto my final life-changing moment.

On April 25th 2007 I left England to come and work here in Medford, OR for The Dove. I had been over for 2 months the previous September just to see if life in the US was going to work out. It did and it has.

There's no doubting that leaving your home country and moving to a foreign land is a huge upheaval in many ways, but the process has been made so much easier by my wonderful talented and fun-loving work colleagues, the listeners and locals I've got to know along the way, and most of all, at church, by the worship ministry people, the pastors, the Mighty Men, and my new US family, the Life Group, without which I'd be a mess. I love you guys.

So there you are. My 5 life-changing moments. Sorry it was a bit long, but it all needed saying, some of it perhaps for the first time.

I wonder which moments have shaped your life...?

My 5 Life-changing moments - Part 2

We're up to the third in my 5 life-changing moments, and this one was in 1985, during an event that Steve Chalke (see 2) had enlisted me in, the annual Spring Harvest conference, held in April in various holiday camp sites around the UK.

As part of Steve's fringe media team I was also hawking tapes by the band I'd joined (my first), the script-rock (sic.) band The S.T.A.T.E.S. (stands for Sharper Than Any Two Edged Sword - Hebrews 4:12) to some of the well-known British worship leaders who were there. I had already given a tape to Graham Kendrick (who is a big deal in the annals of UK worship) when the weather took a turn for the worse, and the 5,000 seater big top tent, which is a signature part of Spring Harvest and the place where all the main adult meetings are held, was blown down. This left Spring Harvest looking for extra venues, and extra musicians to play in these venues for the worship meetings.

Graham must have remembered the tape, becuause I got a call from HIS bass player Les Moir, who is now a friend and still involved in the UK Christian music scene, asking if I played worship, and would I like to try out?

The rest, as they say is history. I played for a pickup worship band, got asked to tour with the leader, Ian Traynar, at other events, would up joining Youth For Christ's itinerant schools' band "TVB" for 2 years in 1993-5, was a founder member of the Saltmine Trust's band "Audacity" from 1996-98, and have toured all over the world, led worship in all manner of places and settings, appeared on a number of live worship albums, written countless songs, and worked with worship leaders and evangelists like Dave Pope, Graham Kendrick, Sue Rinaldi, Noel Richards, Chris Eaton, Luis Palau, Don Moen, Robin Mark and Calvin Hollingworth.

All because it got a bit windy back on an April day in Minehead!

Now onto 4, and for this we switch to my college years at Kingston Polytechnic (as it was known before it became a University) in 1985 - again!

I was there to study teaching, and in my first year I met a girl called Laura, who was not a Christian, but at that stage I wasn't going to let that get in the way of some fun. Plus she was absolutely gorgeous!

After 6 months together, we drifted apart, but I didn't take it well. One night after spending my time in the Union bar downing vodka and blackcurrant juice, I went up to my room and emptied a bottle of aspirin down my throat and went to bed, imagining I would not wake up the next morning.

For what happened next, stay tuned....