TheCall Las Vegas..

Pardon my lack of blogging lately. We've been a little busy.

Wednesday, Kelsey, the boys and I flew to Vegas with part of our team for TheCall School of Intercession. I spoke Wednesday, Kelsey spoke Thursday, and in between our peeps ran like crazy to get ready for the big day at the Thomas and Mack.

Wednesday night, right before I spoke, they showed a video that ended with "TheCall Las Vegas: 3 Days Away" and I nearly choked. I remembered when it was 100 days away and I was worried about THAT!

The day of the gathering was simply phenomenal. About 7000 people attended, most of them for the entire day.

I served as stage manager (because I am, after all a technical whiz and a physically imposing figure) and actually had the time of my life. It was like all the stress was gone and we were doing what we came to do...a Joel 2 Solemn Assembly.


The technical end of the event came off without a hitch, thanks to Downtown Steve Brown, Nick Escobar, Graeme Spencer and others.

The live feed to God.tv looked really good - seven cameras and a jib makes for a good look. I was not entirely crazy about where the jumbo screens hung, but by the time I saw it there was nothing that could be done (and in reality, probably nothing that could have been done anyways...). At the end of the day, it worked.

Surprise of the day was the 20 minute choir segment led by Adam Barta. Be it known that I am not a choir person and was not sure how this was going to come off...but Adam has put the COOL back in choir! Holy smokes. They burned the place down.

I'm not sure if it was the song selection, Adam's 360 degree, arm-flailing spins, or the the guitar player ripping off blasts on the conch shell, but this was not your father's choir. I concede: I was wrong.

Non-surprise of the day was Misty Edwards playing the last hour and a half, often behind Lou as he spoke. The guitar players were pulling out some crazy weird sounds. The intensity - after 12 hours of worship and prayer - is hard to imagine.

Highlights for me:

The outstanding performance of my peeps. We may be young, naive and inexperienced, but we can out hustle the best of them! With a ton of help from volunteers, we held a 12 hour long prayer meeting for 7,000 people! I am very, very proud of their efforts. Special thanks to the peeps who saw to it that the rigging all got built by putting in a 20 hour day including flight time, as well as those who saw to it that I always had a coffee or juice next to my station on the stairs to the stage. I love you peeps.

Watching Lou be Lou. Gotta love him. At one point, as a Latino band tore into some song in Spanish, Lou wanted to participate so badly he ended up doing the pogo, yelling "Fuego! Fuego!" Lou and Therese Engle are the real deal and it's an honor to serve them.

Kelsey's Thursday afternoon session at the School of Intercession. Wowser. It was that good. Audio to follow soon.

More photos to follow - these were kiked from a Flickr set by Chad Vegas.