I came across a band called The Music Room this week.  Their music is amazing and their vision is inspirational.  They are getting ready to head out on a 52-city tour so there's a chance that they'll be in your neck of the woods within the next few months.  You've got to check out their music, their story, and their schedule at www.entertheroom.com.  Here's some of what they have to say about their music and their mission:

The Music Room is a band that wants to serve. We don’t want to glorify ourselves. Our songs are not geared towards self-glorification, but perhaps instead they ask the listener to self-examine. We want to write songs that force people to look truthfully and soberly at the life they are living. We don’t want to shame people, or discourage people; we want to see people be set free. If our music can lead people to know and recognize a God that sets people free from shame and slavery then we’ve succeeded. You see we’ve gone from not expecting much of ourselves to expecting that God will do much with us if we make ourselves available to His plans.

One of the really cool things that The Music Room is doing is partnering with an organization called Courage to be You.  This is a non-profit that works to raise awareness about human-trafficking (sex slavery of young girls) in Northern CA.  Courage to be You has produced a compilation album to sell at benefit concerts for the purpose of raising financial support to build a safe house for girls rescued from the hopeless life of sex trafficking. The Music Room was able to contribute one of their songs - “Cost of Believing” - to this compilation.  Check out www.couragetobeyou.org for more info.

We sometimes hear questions that go something like this: "Since SnapShot Web uses templates, how can I ensure that my site doesn't look just like everyone else's site?"  The underlying assumption is that a template is a static entity - something you simply drop onto your Church Website and can never change or customize.  This is simply not the case.

We always tell people that the templates are really just a place to start.  FInd the template that is the closes to what you are looking for and then start tweaking the colors and images and backgrounds so that it will fit your particular culture.  Three months down the road, if you are looking for something different, change it.  We'll make this super easy for you. 

All of our templates are included with any of the SnapShot Plans.  You can change as often as you'd like and even use different templates for different pages or sections of your site.  You can see live examples of all of the templates at www.snapshottemplates.com.

To get a sense of just how customizable the templates are, you've got to take a look at www.graceyouth.net.  Click through that site and see all of the things they have going on.  See if you can tell what template this is.

Give up?  Here is the template that they started with.