Worship Media Arts

Get all of our educational and training resources for one low, discounted bundle price!

With our library of educational resources expanding, we’ve decided to bundle them all together into one discounted resource. The new Midnight Oil Education Library includes all of our best theoretical and practical material for making you the best creative worship image maker you can be. Here is a list of what is available:

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Ready to experience powerful, creative, missional worship?

We’re excited to announce a new training DVD that will help you do all those things and more.

Prodigal Worship was created to equip pastors and laity with tools to design, develop and deliver high impact celebratory worship that connects God to people’s everyday lives.

The DVD (recorded April 13, 2010 at Trinity UMC in Fredrick, Maryland) features keynote addresses from Rev. Mike Slaughter, author of Change the World and Chief Dreamer of Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church, Len Wilson and Jason Moore of Midnight Oil Productions, and Rev. Olu Brown of Impact Church.

Be inspired, learn practical approaches to worship design and implementation and experience real worship as the keynote speakers share the latest thinking in powerful, moving worship.

The 2-DVD set is just $30! Order yours today.

We just finished a round of the course we teach at Northwest Nazarene University’s Graduate School of Missional Leadership (which is a fancy new term for a seminary). As adjunct professors, we’re charged with leading students through a course on Communicating Visually.

It may seem out of place to have a communications course at a seminary to some. Some of the students certainly think so, at least when they start, and have no qualms in voicing their well-honed academic opinions. This fall we had 26 students, not including the three who decided after 1 of 8 weeks that it wasn’t worth their effort. Maybe a half dozen of the group were initially not only indifferent or undecided, but flat out antagonistic to the idea that their degree required something as facile and superficial as how to run PowerPoint.

Probably the most enjoyable part of the course is to see these people come around. They become the biggest believers, invariably. Here are some of their comments from the last day of the class:

I felt that same way after I read Rob Bell’s, “Jesus Came to Save Christians.” It was a life changing book even as this class is most certainly life changing for all of us! We will never again say we see in the same way again! I think it is as much of a drastic change in sight even as the disciples had after Jesus’ resurrection.
- Todd Holden

This class has challenged me to step up and educate our congregation on the culture that we are living in today. If we want to take seriously that God has commissioned us to “go and make disciples,” then we have to be willing to communicate in the language of those we are going to. Missionaries, of course, would go about learning the actual spoken language of the culture they would be reaching out to. It is no different for us- we are sent to the culture we live in, and for some reason, there has been this wall of separation that we have created as the body of Christ. On one side, we’ve kept ourselves to the “written word,” confusing it for “The Word that was made Flesh.” We have forgotten that in our very DNA we were created by a God who took on flesh and stepped into culture, adopting and adapting to a way of life.
- Cody Stauffer

More than just engaging the sense of sight for a viewer, visual ministry is meant to relate to the experiences of those to whom it is communicating. With advancements in technologies that are largely visual in nature, the church has a great opportunity to speak to its surrounding culture with this new “language” and to relate to it in a new way. To a visual culture visual language contains much more mystery, allows for much more discovery, extends much more of an invitation to be creative, and engages in more relevant questions and answers than its printed counterpart. Now, writing is not irrelevant, but visual communication is effectively meeting the needs of a culture that is on the cusp of postmodernism, and if the church ignores the fact that this is taking place then it is stuck in a tunnel vision of its own methodological arrogance.
- Nathan Hand

We’ll share some highlights of the curriculum that led to these comments over the next few weeks.

Via Wired magazine, this nugget from science fiction writer Cory Doctorow: “thinking like a dandelion.”

Doctorow writes: “The disposition of each?Äîor even most?Äîof the seeds isn’t the important thing, from a dandelion’s point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions. The dandelion doesn’t want to nurse a single precious copy of itself in the hopes that it will leave the nest and carefully navigate its way to the optimum growing environment, there to perpetuate the line. The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!”

What does this have to do with worship, design, and art?

Creative people produce.

Not just a little, either. Creative people both tend to and need to produce a lot. This is one of the secrets to sustained creativity.

Most creative types tend to produce a lot anyway. But some anguish over their productions, constantly tweaking and never finishing. George Lucas is famous for having said he never finishes a project, he just stops working on it.

Creative types need abundance, because they need to see what grows. It’s important to keep cranking out ideas. Some will grow and take on a life of their own, and some will die. In fact, most will die. But from the abundance of ideas will emerge a few brilliant ideas.

An old art teacher of Jason’s was famous for constantly repeating his personal montra, “Quality, Not Quantity”. While his art teacher was right that quality is important, being committed to creating a good quantity of work is important for growth. The more you produce, the more you grow, and the better you get. There is a certain freedom in knowing not every work has to be a masterpiece, but that each piece contributes in some way to future masterpieces.

Let those creative seeds fly and see what grows!