FBCJacksonville Blog

On Friday night September 17,  the 400-voice Florida Worship Choir & Orchestra will lead an evening of praise and worship in the Main Auditorium at 7:00p.m.  This group of music ministers and their wives will be led by Terry Williams, Director of Music and Worship for the Florida Baptist Convention. Williams passion is to see the glory of God revealed in times of private & public worship; so much so that revival and spiritual renewal will take place throughout all 2800 of our Florida Baptist churches.

You have never heard worship like this as 400 trained musicians lift their voices and instruments as they present praise to the Saviour through the program ”God of the Ages.” This is open to the general public and everyone is welcome to join in worship with us. Admission and parking are free! (No childcare is provided.) Please click here to download the full flyer on this event.

Our newest video website is just days away and we think you will love it! Our hope is that you will help it go viral so the “word of Christ (may) richly dwell within” the lives of the people we touch.So what does that look like? Pretty cool, actually – I’m glad you asked! How about a one-stop site to Watch, Listen or Read our services and the great messages that the Lord has been giving us through Pastor Brunson. Simple to use, dependable and loaded with content! We’ll start with more than 40 messages from 6 series with easy navigation to watch the video, listen to audio or read the text of the message. Our plans are for this site to continue to grow and for all you techies out there to be able to access content like you never have before. Even if you don’t consider yourself a “techie” – try it out once it launches…I think you will be surprised at how easy it is to use.

Bottom line is, God’s great message will be more accessible to more people, on more points of planet earth…remember the every nation, tongue and tribe part? The site will have a current series section, as well as an archive of past sermons. We will have video of the full service available for those who want to enjoy the music as well. You’ll be able to listen online, or download to watch or listen on your mobile device. You may even choose to curl up with your computer and a mocha-frappa-something and read a sermon. Eventually, we hope to close-caption the sermons so our hearing impaired friends all over the world can, along with everyone else,  “receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls.” (James 1:21)

So to sum it all up – at FBC you have an enthusiastic team that is developing an awesome in-house site and not just because it’s so much fun. As much as we love our inner geek, we love the word of God even more and have all been transformed by it over the years, most of us right here from the teaching at FBC. So we are really all about participating with you in spreading abroad the wonderful message of Jesus. In our case it means translating it into all this technical stuff so it can travel…to a computer screen near you.

FBC JAX Communications Department & Media Ministry

ALIVE, our new Saturday night series, started June 12 and was an oasis from a blazing hot start to summer…physically and spiritually. More than 60 people attended, ranging from teens, to families with children, through “50-somethings”. Opening and closing with worship music from the No Limits Band, ALIVE is a 12-week series called “Quiet Chaos”; something we all experience in life. Jim Smyrl is taking a look at 12 people in the bible and showing how the love of God worked in their lives to deal with their own “Chaos”.

A new feature to the teaching time is a” text-your-questions” line, allowing everyone to text questions that arise from the teaching. This interactive feature is provided to engage people and encourages them to take part in a deeper conversation at the end of the service. The idea is to improve the connection between preacher and congregation and gives people a more comfortable and accessible forum to ask serious questions, get practical answers and clarify how biblical truth integrates into their own living and thinking. After the message and more praise and worship music, Jim returns to the stage to answer the questions submitted.
ALIVE will continue through the summer every Saturday night from 6-7:30 in the College & Career building, with light refreshments, congregational worship, great biblical insights and making much of Jesus. It’s a perfect forum for Christ followers and non-believers as well.

We recently made some significant upgrades to our streaming video workflow that mark the beginning of some exciting changes for how we share the Gospel online. We wanted to share a few key elements of these upgrades and how they enhance the ministry outreach of our website.

First, we now exclusively stream Flash video, which gives us a unified streaming platform to provide a consistent, high-quality experience for our viewers. Previously, our audience was split between two different formats, Flash and Windows Media. However, the evolution of Flash streaming video technologies in the last few years and the near ubiquitous distribution of the Flash Player plug-in made this an obvious choice for us moving forward.

Also, we now offer high-definition video online. We have been producing all our media content in HD since 2006, and this gives us another opportunity to distribute that content. This is particularly exciting because HD video is fairly new online, and we hope to provide viewers with an experience that is as comfortable and natural as watching TV. The web is inundated with quality video content, ranging from network television programs and popular movies to how-to videos, news, and more. By providing high-quality, high-definition video, we’re better able to communicate with a culture that is increasingly savvy and saturated in media content.

Lastly, we now offer live streaming and video archives on the iPhone. Mobile devices have become the fastest-growing medium for consuming multimedia content, and the iPhone is still the most popular smartphone on the market. We’ve already seen a great response to this feature, and we hope our audience will continue to grow.

Overall, these steps help us further our ministry of sharing the Gospel on the “three screens” in our society today – the television, the computer, and now mobile devices. We are continually finding new and exciting ways that technology can help us better reach people where they are, and show them how they can know God’s love and grow in a relationship with Him.

If you have questions for feedback, please contact:  Gina Ford, Executive Director of Communications ginaf@fbcjax.com Jeff Stoll, Media Pastor jeffs@fbcjax.com.

The Combined Middle School and High School Choirs and Orchestras of First Baptist Jacksonville were invited to lead worship at this year’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. The combined group is made up of almost 300 6th-12th grade students. This is a tremendous honor for our Student Music Ministry as they are one of the few non-adult groups to ever be invited to participate in a Southern Baptist Convention. The group performed selections by themselves and led worship throughout the Wednesday morning session on June 9.

To connect to Pastor Mac Brunson’s message from the Southern Baptist Convention 2010, please click on the image above.

The orchestra began the morning with an arrangement of the song “Everlasting God.” The choirs and orchestras then performed “End of the Beginning” with soloist, Bradley Stephenson, and a high school drama who acted out the words of the song. The next selection was “You are Holy” featuring Ian Love singing the solo, Emily Davis reciting Scripture, and a dance team. They concluded their first performance block with “Revelation Song” along with soloist, Katie Brantley, and Scripture Reader, Evan Brown. Later in the morning, Jonathan Welch and the group led the convention in singing “My Savior Lives” and “How Great is Our God.” Before Dr. Brunson preached the convention sermon, Charles Darus and the group led the convention in singing “Made Me Glad” and “It Is Well With My Soul.” The group’s final selection was “Psalm 24.” All 300 students then got to sit in a reserved section in front of our Pastor, with their Bibles, to listen to the sermon.

Our groups went down to Orlando on Tuesday, June 15, after a final rehearsal at the church in the Playhouse Theatre. Once they arrived in Orlando, they spent some time at the Mall at Millenia. Our Middle School Choir and Orchestra spent the night at the Central Florida Christian School which is a ministry of the First Baptist Church of Central Florida. The minister responsible for coordinating the group’s stay said he had been a frequent participant of the FBC JAX Pastors Conference. He said he wanted to do everything he could for our group of Middle Schoolers because FBC JAX had been so hospitable to him throughout his years of attending the Pastors Conference. Our High School Choir and Orchestra was hosted by the Aloma Baptist Church of Winter Park. Their pastor, Anthony George, grew up at our church. The church not only hosted the high school , but also fed all 300 students the next morning before they performed at the convention. After spending the morning at the convention, the students stopped by Downtown Disney before returning home on Wednesday night, July 16.

Our Middle School Orchestra is directed by Ryan Vickery. The Middle School Choir is directed by Associate Minister of Music Charles Darus. Jim Daniel is the director of the High School Orchestra. The High School Choir is directed by Associate Director of Music Jonathan Welch.

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Pictures courtesy of the Florida Baptist Witness.

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