Originally Posted by deacon blues

Before the worship began, I forgot that they had this video called "North American Youth Congress Praise Exercises" very funny and a good crowdbreaker. The video began with a woman's voice (with British accent) and a sound graph line that would move as she spoke (as if she were a computer voice). She began to instruct the kids on various praise "exercises" that they would be encouraged to use during the Congress.

Praise Exercise #1: Rythmn Clapping: a brief explanation, a READY, GO! and then a silouetted young man (think iPod commercials) clapping his hands with very hard driving dance mix music. Everyone joined in.

Praise Exerice #2: Pentecostal Head Bob (with the explanation, READY, GO!, music and participation)

Praise Exercise #28: Leaping with Pumped Fist

Praise Exercise #156: Noise

Then they went back through each one altogether---it created a lot of energy as the praise and worship began.

After "I Am Free" by the Praise Band, Todd Gaddy greeted the young people and talked about how much it was appreciated that everyone made the effort to get here and what a life changing event this was going to be.

He said a video would be following with the names of states and countries that everyone came from and to cheer when you saw where you were from. Everyone was screaming and cheering.

The CLC Ensemble followed with a a Black Gospel song I would guess was entitled "Right Now", since they said "right now" about 1300 times in the chorus. It was the first low point IMO. Not that they did anything wrong, the musicianship was great, the harmonizing was good, its just the song did not elicit worship. The energy in the room kind of died down.

Following CLC was a funny video talking about how kids are addicted to coffee and coffee shops and made a connection to Bible Quizzing and quizzers addiction to studying and memorizing scripture. I think that was the gist of the video b/c I was helping my wife wrestle with our 2 year old throughout the service. Wayne Francis introduced the BQ champions from Moss Bluff, LA for the experienced division and Houston, TX (Life Tabernacle) in the intermediate division.

Wayne Francis then went on a long diatribe of announcements (a real waste of WF abilities---he's not speaking once here, very disappointed). I was reinforced in my doing away with announcements at our church. I don't think too many people listened to what was said, at least not around where we were sitting. He even went through the whole days schedule for today, which is printed in the books our kids got for being here.

Simeon Young Jr received the offering but in a very funny and creative way. He had superimposed each Youth Official's face on a copy of currency: Wayne Francis on the five dollar bill, Shay Mann on the ten, and Gaddy on the twenty, which looked very funny (he kept the president's beards and hair, only superimposing the face). He then encouraged the youth to give five for WF, youth leaders and chaperones to give ten for SM, and pastors and elected officials twenty for TG. It was a quick and seamless offering.

CLC Ensemble sang again for the offering. At this point the service had kind of gone in to a lull with all the announcements, offering and such. CLC again did a fine job musically, but the song was another black gospel song that just didn't draw you to worship. I am guessing the song was called "God's Already Worked It Out", again b/c that was the line that was repeated an innumerable amount of times.

Shay Mann recognized special people: Host District of NC David Elms, Sr, the NAYC Praise Band under the direction of J. Dean, and Joel Urshan from Cincy, OH who would be preching later in the service.

They showed another video about running the race and then JD and the praise band were back at it. It was about time, b/c 30 minutes had passed since a sense of worship and praise had been present.

They started with "He Is Jesus". A new song for me, but very worshipful and refreshing. I could not understand where lyrics on the screen were. I thought maybe they just were trying something different, but when a song came along I didn't know or our kids didn't know it was hard to sing along. They must of had a technical glich b/c words finally showed up in this segment, but they looked kind of faded and hard to see. It got better as the worship proceeded.