Nov. 5-7, HoustonI hadn't heard of the Worship Facilities Conference and Expo until a couple of weeks ago, but it looks like a pretty big deal--they're planning for 5,000 attendees and 400 exhibitors at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. Here's a description from the promotional materials:

We work to create a unique learning experience for church teams through our program. WFX is designed to educate church executive, facilities and tech teams to learn together through a unique conference program that focuses on four tracks, a day-long executive seminar for pastors (pastorsxforum.com), the largest expo floor for the church market filled with thousands of products and services, and a special events program that will offer something for every team member. For four years WFX has been educating church teams with the knowledge and cutting-edge information they need to reach their growth goals.

Would your tech team, worship team, or facilities planning team would benefit from being at this event? Might be worth a look.

I was listening the other day to one of my favorite podcasts, Geeks and God, and heard about a new site that worship leaders need to know about: Muddy River Media. This is a ministry that provides quality video, motion backgrounds, loops, countdowns, still images and more, absolutely free to churches. Yes, you read it right--FREE. Donations are accepted, of course, but Muddy River Media views itself as a missions organization, with the purpose of providing quality media resources for worship and ministry, particularly for smaller churches that don't have the budget to go buy media, or don't have the resources and talent in-house to produce their own.

If you're a worship leader or a pastor of worship arts, particularly at a smaller church with limited resources, do yourself a big favor today and check this site out.

You can find an article about the site at the Geeks and God website--the Geeks and God guys actually helped develop the site using Drupal (the same CMS we use for our church Web site and for this blog site), and they've done a great job with it.

I've mentioned this site before on this blog, but if you haven't checked out Chris Tomlin's worship leader site, WorshipFrequency.com, go take a look. You'll find an interesting site with articles for worship leaders, charts and tabs for many Tomlin songs, and other resources of interest to worship leaders. The last time I looked at it, the site was just being launched and hadn't been fleshed out yet, but in the last few months, the site has grown and flourished, and it seems to be getting a lot of traffic.

There's a Video section that contains brief instructional videos from members of the band--that's pretty cool. In the Charts section you'll find several charts (with chords) that you can download or print.

The "Song Studies" section contains articles that amount to Bible studies related to certain songs. The "Frequent Thoughts" section is a collection of articles by worship leaders about worship and leading worship. Some authors you've heard of are included here, like Paul Baloche and Matt Redman, plus some you may not have heard of like David Nasser.

The site is attractive and cool to look at, but I did notice some links that didn't always work, so clearly they've got some work to do in the area of usability, but I'm sure they'll get it all worked out.

There is a message board area, as well, and this may be the hidden gem on this site--thousands of postings from worship leaders engaged in discussions of the art and craft of leading worship.

If you register (it's free), you'll also have access to information about upcoming concerts and pre-concert worship leader events.

Chris Tomlin has had a lot of success as a worship leader, and this site seems to be a wonderful way for him to "give back" to the worship leader community. You'll want to check this one out. A quick usability note--if you have pop-ups disabled (as I typically do with Firefox) you'll want to enable them for this site. That's a mild annoyance for me (because I generally hate pop-ups), but at several places on the site, you'll need to be willing to deal with this.