Well, after our big and brave start, things seemed to fizzle out a bit, and there were a few months of no movement on the development front.

After a few weeks of wanting to get myself back on the go with openworship, I figured that the best approach to getting things done was to create small, simple, but achieveable milestones, broken down in to smaller task lists and tasks. I fired up our project management tool, and started creating milestones, task lists and tasks.

I’m glad to say that we’ve already managed to achieve our first mini milestone, and hopefully the second one will be accomplished soon. Of course, as project manager, if I don’t set things in motion, nothing will really happen

Hopefully things will now move slowly but surely, and we’ll have something to show in the not-so-distant future!

God has been teaching me a lot over the past several weeks. Well, He is always teaching – I just happened to be paying attention these past few weeks. Thank God that He never gives up on me. But I digress….

I am currently working through the book “Business by the Book – The Complete Guide to Biblical Principles for Business Men and Women” (authored by Larry Burkett).

I was recently convicted by a portion of his writing. This particular section is based on Psalm 127:2:

It is vain for you to rise up early,
To retire late,
To eat the bread of painful labors;
For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.

Based on this scripture, Burkett says:

It is true that a forty-hour work week will rarely, if ever, build a successful business. But a one-hundred-hour work week reflects a gross imbalance of priorities, not dedication to being a good leader! I can state without hesitation that no one can maintain the correct balance between work, family, and God if he or she is working more than sixty hours per week. There may be occasional periods when an excess is necessary and unavoidable, but even then the relationships suffer.

… I made a commitment to never again spend endless hours pursuing success. I limited myself to a forty-eight hour work week maximum, and have maintained that schedule ever since. I find that I accomplish more and use my time better than when I worked twice as many hours. I also won’t have to look back at sixty-five or seventy years of age and say, “I wish I had done that twenty years ago.”

So, what does this have to do with me? And what does this have to do with openworship?

Well, I own a small business. Or, as I like to tell others, I am steward of an opportunity God has entrusted me with. Over the past several years, I have been the sole person in this company. If I didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. In October, I was blessed with the opportunity to grow Bezaleel by hiring its first employee. You would normally think that I would slow down, take it easy, take a breather. Nope. I trudged on forward carrying much of the burden (because that is how I always did it) and putting in the same hours. “Hmm, now I can take on even more!” – I decided.

Well, now I also have a wonderful lady in my life. Yet another blessing from our Lord. With this relationship, I have been stretched in ways I haven’t experienced before. The life of a single man becomes comfortable and familiar after 28 years.

As I continued putting in the hours, working hard, etc – I began to realize I was missing out. And because I was missing out, so were others. God has more in store for me than just to see Bezaleel become a success. He wants to see Bezaleel make a change and difference in others’ lives. But, that change has to be a part of my life first.

While reading this portion of Burkett’s book, I began to realize all the fellowship I was missing out on because Saturdays were considered my own personal work day. Because, I worked long hours each weekday and thus missed out on ministry opportunities at church during the week. My Sundays were filled with rushing to church, doing my thing, rushing home to see if I could squeeze in some more work here or there, then rushing back to church for our evening services. I was doing a whole lot of “DOING”. However, I wasn’t doing much “BEING”.

Convicted by the words of Burkett, I determined last week to end each work day at 5:00PM or as close as possible. Then, I would have something planned to do during that time off work (read a book, work out, spend time with the lady friend/ parents/ others, join a ministry, etc). There has to be something for that time to be occupied with, or else I will be too drawn to picking up the macbook and going right back to work.

I also determined that Sunday is the Lord’s day. ALL of it. The last two Sundays were great in that regard. My girlfriend and I joined a Sunday School class with our pastor and his wife. I figure this is about as high a level of accountability as I could find on such a day. I mean, you just don’t lie or duck out on a class with the preacher man. At the moment, my lady and I are the only two in this class. Thus, the opportunity for growth during this time is ginormous! A whole hour with the man of God, one-on-one to teach and equip you.

For our worship service time, after much prayer, I decided that I would no longer sit up in the A/V booth for quite a while. We have several others up there that are now competent in running that ministry. It is time for the lady and I to sit amongst the rest of the congregation and experience being a part of the service once again. It is way too easy to sit in the A/V booth week in and week out, with all the distractions that that ministry brings and loose focus of the real reason you are there – to worship the Lord.

After service, we have been going over to the home of fellow church members. During this time we have been getting our grub on with all the awesome food and fellowshipping with some amazing people.

So, again, how does this tie into openworship….

Well, Raoul and I once were chatting and he shared that he works on openlp.org and other such things on Sunday. (Raoul, if I get this wrong, just softly kick me… but it makes a great point/idea either way.) So, I am determining that at the least, I will attempt to put in time on openworship during my Sunday afternoons. Although I feel a bit limited with all that I can do in my own power with this project, I will set out to do as much as possible. Besides, with the Lord, all things are possible.

I found it kinda funny that Raoul gave me a kick start via the openworship mailing list this weekend. Isn’t it wild how God just hits you from all sorts of directions to get your attention. Just as I was dealing with these thoughts, up pops a post from a wonderful man of God on the other side of the world (or close). God is amazing!

Well, I hope in some way this post has ministered to you all. At the very least, this post has allowed me to convey thoughts from inside my head to text.

Dave Ramsey, a Christian financial guy (the modern day Larry Burkett), has often asked, “What could the children of God do for the Kingdom of God if they were debt free?”

The thoughts generated by Burkett’s book lead me to ponder, “What could the children of God do for the Kingdom of God if they could free themselves from the bondage of poor time management and things that are a waste of time?”

Well, if the Lord is willing, I hope to find out. Will you join me?

Thanks for hearing me out.

Glad the tomb is empty,
Kevin L.

I wanted to take a moment and wish everyone in the openworship world a merry Christmas!

May this glorious day find you all cherishing your time together with family and friends. Most importantly, may you all cherish the Saviour of the world on this day that we celebrate His birth.

Glory and praise be to our God and His Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ!

Thank You, God, for the blessing You have bestowed upon mankind, even in spite of our sinful nature and our lack of deserving such a great Gift. May the people of this world find their eyes opened over the course of this holiday and the beginnings of a new year.

May we who have accepted Your lordship in our lives be busy about the work You have made ours to carry out. Let us glorify You in all that we do and share the truth of Your birth and sacrifice with those who know You not.

Amen.

We love You, Jesus. Happy birthday!

As Raoul recently shared, “The land of openworship has been quiet recently, but don’t let that fool you, there’s been work going on…” Well, he is right….

We are proud to present you all with a new openworship website design and revamped content. Over the last day, I have been switching out our CMS software to deal with a few bugs we encountered with RSS feeds from the openworship blog and a few other areas. While we were at it, we tried to tie in the current design with the design of the openworship application (which can be sneak peeked at here). You will notice the new openworship logo at the top of the page.

The new CMS also makes it a bit easier for those working with content. Our previous CMS made creative writing unpleasant for some users. *You know who you are.*

We have also enabled much nicer URL’s within the CMS for search engine optimization and the like.

You will also now find a link to the live IRC web-based chat client on the Support page.

We hope you enjoy the site and find it useful. Any suggestions that would enhance your experience with the openworship site are most welcome!

The land of openworship has been quiet recently, but don’t let that fool you, there’s been work going on…

Kevin and I have completed all the major templates, and have created rudimentary Mako templates (Mako is the templating system we’re using). I’ve created the main controllers for the site.

Joshua and Michael have also been busy, taking Kevin’s notes on the database and converting them into code. I took a look at the code, and arranged a meeting between myself, Joshua and Kevin, and we’ve finalised the last few database design bits. Joshua and I will be meeting in a few hours time to go over the database tables and the models, and so that I can show him how to join the models to the tables, and the models to each other.

Once the models are done, we can start getting stuck in to the meatier coding. In the mean time, we also want to upgrade openworship to run on the latest version of Pylons, which should be released fairly soon. I’ll most probably be taking on that task since I’m the most Pylons-experienced person at the moment.

All in all, we have been busy, and we’re all excited to be working on this together. From my side I can say that I’m working with a really great bunch of guys, and I couldn’t wish for a better set of team mates!

So some folks might be thinking and asking “Why Python? I thought you were going to use PHP?” so I have decided to lay down our reasons for choosing Python over PHP.

Firstly, we reckon that most churches will want to install openworship on their internal network (which will most certainly happen in countries where the cost of Internet is high, e.g. most African countries). Since they will be running their own servers, getting Python, Pylons and openworship working will not be a problem.

For those folks who don’t want to run their own server, and those who are happy having their system on the Internet, we are investigating a hosted solution. This would mean that a church can pay a small monthly fee to have openworship hosted for them, reducing the need for them to know how to run the server and to watch out for software updates and the like.

Secondly, by using Python and Pylons, we’re going to be developing things a lot faster.

Python really speeds up development time. It’s a powerful and concise programming language, and I’ve been really impressed with it recently. Python is also a very “readable” programming language. This means that it’s easy for new folks to quickly get up to speed, and it’s easy to find bugs.

Pylons is an application framework, which means we have less groundwork to do and can get on to developing the important stuff. Coupled with Pylons are a variety of open source Python libraries that make working with databases, templates, and other things much easier and faster.

So at the end of the day, choosing to use Python means it’s easier for us to develop, and it’s not difficult for others to get openworship up and running.

Hello everyone! We now have an IRC channel setup on irc.freenode.com. The channel name is…. you guessed it, #openworship. I am still learning the in’s and out’s of managing a channel. If it doesn’t appear in the irc.freenode.com channel list, just try connecting to the channel manually, it should be there.

God bless,
Kevin L.

Over the past two weeks, Raoul and I have been working back and forth on the design of the openworship web app. The overall skeleton for the site has been pretty much completed. After the overall layout was completed, our next focus was the main page of the “Songs” portion of openworship.

You can view the overall layout by visiting http://open-worship.org/design/.

The “Songs” main page is located at http://open-worship.org/design/songs.html.

Our next page of interest will be the main “Scriptures” page. Once we have the main navigation pages completed, we will begin to focus on the sub pages, such as the “Add/Edit Song” page, etc.

We are really excited about the work the Lord has been creating through us. It is an amazing experience to see a work for the Lord materialize before you. We are certainly looking forward to see the work continue to grow before us and emerge into a software that is God honoring and that better equips God’s people to perform His work.

In Him,
Kevin L.

Hello everyone! Welcome to the first blog post at open-worship.org!

There are some exciting things going on in the world of openworship. We want to help you keep abreast of it all! In an effort to keep everyone up to date on the happenings around openworship, we have started this blog in addition to the publicly available developers’ mailing list. If you haven’t checked out the mailing list and subscribed… well, what are you waiting for! Do it already. You can access the developers’ mailing list by using the link on the left of your screen.

Feel free to subscribe to this Blog’s RSS feed. The link to the RSS feed is located at the bottom of this page! As new blog entries are posted, you will be notified via the RSS feed.

Well, that is it for now. Look forward to a post about the design element of openworship that we have recently started. That and more to come, just keep your eyes open!

Til then, God bless!

Glad the tomb is empty,
Kevin L.