Radio Free JoJo

Back in the saddle leading worship in Edinboro with a great bunch of folks at McLane Church. With most of church leadership on vacation this weekend, Pastor Andy Kerr and I were blessed by the participation and engagement by our fellow worshippers at McLane.

Tight band:

• Ryan Irwin: Acoustic Guitar/Vocals
• Andy Pamer: Electric Guitar
• David Van Matre: Bass
• Pete Natalie: Drums
• Barb Priestap: Vocals
• Joel Natalie: Worship Leader/Vocals

Set list:

• Awesome, Amazing: Joe Horness/Willow Creek
• This is How We Overcome: Hillsong
• Til I See You: Hillsong United
• Search Me, Know Me: Kathryn Scott
• What If (special): Jadon Lavik
• You Are My King (Amazing Love) (closer): Billy Foote

Andy Kerr preaches the message about really following Jesus.

This post is part of the Sunday Setlist blog carnival at FredMcKinnon.com.

Here’s the Sunday Setlist for our annual Baptism weekend here at McLane Church, as part of the weekly blog carnival at FredMcKinnon.com.

The band cooked:

• David Van Matre: Acoustic Guitar
• Andy Pamer: Electric Guitar
• Paul Grenberg: Bass
• Pete Natalie: Drums
• Brian Van Matre: Piano/Keys
• Dawn Wisniewski: Vocals
• Amy Monocello: Vocals
• Joel Natalie: Worship Leader/Vocals

Just four songs:

• All Because of Jesus – Casting Crowns
• Be Glorified – Passion
• Not to Us – Chris Tomlin
• How Can I Keep From Singing – Chris Tomlin

The sermon by Senior Pastor was Baptism: It’s Purpose and Power. The sermon concluded with a video of last year’s baptism with Travis Cottrell’s “Search Me, Know Me” as a soundtrack…very moving.

This is my first shot at participating in the Sunday Setlist blog carnival, but I was encouraged to do so by Jen Kerr and Brian Lusky, two passionate worship leaders who I much admire and appreciate.

A little background: I have been involved in contemporary worship bands since the late-1980’s, and have been a consistent worship leader most of the current decade. Although I dabble a little in piano and guitar, I don’t play them for worship yet, so I’m a vocalist worship leader. My vocational background is in radio broadcasting, so sometimes my approach to building a set is colored by the “hit rotation” strategies we use in radio. Of course, it’s important that each entire weekend worship service is covered in prayer and seeking God’s plan for it.

It was a different weekend at my home church, McLane Church in Edinboro, PA. We were significantly short on players on these particular dates so we went for a unplugged, stripped down vibe that actually worked out quite well.

Band:

• Brandt Fuller (McLane’s Dir. of Worship) – Acoustic Guitar, vocals, worship leading
• Andy Pamer – Acoustic Guitar
• Edmund Blank – Grand Piano (special guest from Mississauga, ON)
• Joel Natalie (me) – Worship Leading, vocals

Setlist:

• Everlasting God (Tomlin acoustic version) – Brenton Brown & Ken Riley
• God of My Days – Zach Neese
• We Are Hungry – Brad Kilman
• I Give You My Heart – Reuben Morgan
• Enough (closer) – Chris Tomlin & Louie Giglio

Our sermon was a video from Life Church. Week 2 of the Life. Money. Hope. series with Dave Ramsey entitled Breaking the Bondage of Debt. More information is on the McLane Church website at mclanechurch.org.

This post is part of the the “Sunday Setlists” blog carnival at FredMcKinnon.Com. Here’s this week’s post.

Just a quick note to warn you and to learn from my mistake last year. I always e-file my federal return, but mail my state and local returns. Well, because of e-filing and the general lack of Tax Day being an event, the Post Office no longer postmarks returns up until midnight. You have to get the returns in before their last pickup or else you will have to use an automated postage machine. Last year, there was a line an hour plus long at the Main facility on E. 38th because the machine transaction takes a while for each piece of postage, and if you are mailing three returns, you can be there a good five minutes. Multiply that by dozens of Erie procrastinators and you’ve got a problem.
Consider 6:00 at the main facility as T-hour, not midnight, ok?

Over at Outside Erie, the discussion is whether there is such a person who could be an ideal candidate to run for local office in Erie. I think that it would be hard to find someone who wouldn’t be simultaneously loved by one side and scorned by the other.

But beyond the politics, and after the election, what kind of leader do we need in Erie, for such a time as this? I’m pretty sure that this is a question that can’t be answered in one post, so let me get started and we’ll go from there.

I think that it’s important to begin with the position. Where does the real power lay for generic Erie, meaning the area that is recognized by those out-of-town as Erie, not just the municipal boundaries? By the way we need to make that distinction, because we may find that a Millcreek Township supervisor could have as much power and agenda-creating force as the city’s mayor, given the socioeconomic strength in that suburb.

Is the real power centered in Millcreek or Summit, or is it at City Hall, or the County Court House? 25 years ago, there would have been no contest: Erie Mayor Lou Tullio was the power broker personified. Of course, back then the county was quite new under the Home Rule Charter, and the suburban townships were full into their own business.

However in 2009 the significant decline of the city center has been accompanied by the decline in its power base. Retail has long moved its traffic to Millcreek and Summit, following the housing migration. You have a situation where thousands of people can live in generic “Erie,” work in “Erie,” and shop in “Erie,” while rarely traveling into the City of Erie.

I still think that it would be difficult for a township supervisor to lead a regional area-wide agenda. The commissioner’s chair is a slight bully pulpit. So that leaves the city’s mayor and council, and the county executive and council. As much as I’d like to see the mayor be the captain of Erie’s team, right now in my opinion it is only the county executive who holds the wherewithal (fiscal and powerbase) to lead the community’s agenda.

The county has to be the seat of good government, economic development, and facilitating networks toward the advancement of the region. The county exec should have something to say about everything that is part of life in our community, including law enforcement, education, water & sewer, and emergency response.

See how hard it is to define our leadership? It’s taken us 440 words just to figure out his or her position! Next time, we’ll start knocking down some of the traits we want to see in our community agenda-makers.

Please chime in on what you think!

An Air Force One fly-over viewing the devastation. The lack of a serious response. A shameless defense of his inept subordinate.

Sounds like the lowest point of President Bush’s tenure, when Hurricane Katrina left the Gulf and New Orleans in shambles. But it also describes President Obama’s lack of response to the true core of this economic crisis which has left the entire globe in fiscal agony, that being a solution for the banks and their bad assets.

Instead of flying to New York to do the hard work necessary to make headway on the global credit and financial meltdown, the President does a 180, flying to beautiful Downtown Burbank on the Left Coast to crack jokes with Jay Leno. While he’s there comparing his bowling talents to athletes in the Special Olympics, he does a “you’re doing a great job, Brownie” about his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

I know that I’m supposed to have a tingle down my leg just thinking about the President, and any negative comments about Mr. Obama puts me in the dog house with many of my friends and family, but I fear that he is being influenced by the most cynical of political operatives and party hacks. The troika of Emmanuel, Reid, and Pelosi are taking advantage of an American public in real pain to enact the most liberal tax and spend fantasies conjured up over the last forty years.

I don’t want to make too much of it, but to me the Leno appearance indicates a lack of maturity and seriousness; like the rock star persona has gone to his head. What was he trying to accomplish with his performance on the Tonight Show other than yuking it up with Jay? Support for the stimulus package which was rammed through Congress in 18 hours and is now law? Firing up the faithful in their class envy of tone-deaf Wall Street bankers?

It might be that it’s just more fun. Perhaps the President is finding that governing takes more than filling stadia with quivering fans. It means diving into the details and compromise and conviction. And painful in its own right. Mr. President, time to get serious.

The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. ~Proverbs 22:7 (NIV)

This global crisis was created by the overleveraging of every sector of our economy. From individuals and families, to small businesses and retailers, to large corporations, financial institutions and governments, everyone going into this crash had way too much debt on their books. I was dumbfounded when I heard that defunct Lehman Bros. had only $1 in cash for every $30 dollars they “invested,” which meant that their equity would be depleted with a loss of just 4%.

The prevalence of easy credit can be blamed for the housing bubble that when it burst brought us to a breaking point. In the markets that were greatly affected, some homeowners were taking out exotic interest-only loans, initially-low adjustable-rate mortgages, as well as taking loans that had debt-to-income ratios over 50%, meaning 1 of every 2 dollars was going to pay for the house and other debt. It got out of control.

All of this credit has made everything we buy cost more than maybe it should be. It makes me wonder what a car would cost if only a three or five-year loan was available rather than a seven-year loan. Certainly if the whole cycle of using home equity to pay down credit cards, just to rack them up again needed to stop.

So it is time for deleveraging. This is the kind of hard medicine that money advisors like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman have been prescribing for years now. The standard outcome is no debt and six to eight months of living expenses liquid in the bank, then start working on the retirement fund.

For small business that means staying off of the line of credit to make payroll, but rather stash cash away to be your own banker in hard times. Governments have to watch costs most closely and brace themselves for lower tax revenue until we turn this thing around.

As I write this, the Dow average is at a near 12-year low, and I’m hoping that we’ve seen or are at least getting close to a bottom. It seems that the doom and gloom advanced by the press is getting to be a bit overstated. I mean, when you have companies that really make things like GE getting hammered to near penny stock status, you start thinking that we may be oversold.

Hopefully, after the pain of lower activity brought on by correcting our overindulgence, we can rebuild our economy on honesty, and intelligent use of credit. I’m not saying that we follow the fiscal policy of It’s A Wonderful Life’s Mr. Potter, who would rather keep the residents of Bedford Falls in his rented slums. But prudent and responsible use of credit could put us back on a strong footing for years to come.