It's becoming quite clear now that praise & worship music is BIG business. It's not just found in christian bookshops and heared on niche radio stations like UCB. Just like in the USA, it's becoming more prominant in the mainstream media channels.  Tom Jones's weekend appearance in the Help for Heros concert highlighted this with the inclusion of a gospel song from his new album Praise & Blame.

Also interesting to see how in recent years, big churches like Rick Warren's Saddleback church enter into endorsement deals with companies like Yamaha. Yamaha aren't a charity - they exist to make money and must believe that there's money to be made in marketing to churches.  An endorsement from Saddleback will carry a lot of weight. When searching for acoustic guitar ...

It's been a little while since the last update.  I've been concentrating my time and effort over the last year with a church planting team in Paris.

Whilst this means I have had to put the study books to one side, it has allowed me to put some of the theory into practice in the area of worship and instrument research.

Looking forward to rentree in September and a new season of study!

Have a great summer :-)

I'm pleased to say that I'm still following the course.  I wasn't really sure whether I'd have the determination to keep going but I'm about 1/3rd of the way through the first module.

It's not been easy (at times) with full-time job, 3 children & various church responsibilities but I'm still managing to make good use of my commuting time. There are some days when my brain just hurts too much after work to spend time on the study.  So I just take it easy and remind myself that it's not a race.

I do pretty much all the studying using my Palm TX pda.  It's much easier that using a laptop on the train and it has a bible and web-browser.  I save the web-pages on the PDA for each unit so I can work off-line.  The journal is done using a Pocket Word application which I syncronise with my PC each night (in case I lose my PDA). 

Till next month.....

All is going well so far.  I'm learning a lot and enjoying the challenge.

The website is working well and the material is split up into small chunks which make it easy for me to complete some sections on my daily train journey.

I just completed the registration process which was fairly easy.  

I had some irritations with PayPal.  It seems that PayPal detects that I'm living in Holland and presents me with the Dutch language PayPal site and Dutch payment options which differ from the UK.   I figured out how to get the PayPal site into English and then was able to register a credit card.  This registration process took a week to complete because in order to register a cred card with paypal you need to make a £1 payment and wait for the transaction to appear on your credit card statement.  You then need to enter a code which appears next to the transaction description to complete registration of the credit card. 

I really happy with the online study notes and the website.