If you haven’t heard yet, one of our gospel.com community members, Sports Spectrum, is blogging about the Olympics over at More Than Gold News. They’ve been doing short audio updates on the US team and providing rundowns of the medal results as well as upcoming events.

Head over to this post to hear an audio update from August 14th.

They also have a newsreel widget you can add to your website. Click on the play buttons next to the posts to listen to their broadcasts.

Have you ever wondered what kind of thought and planning goes into choosing the songs you sing (and sometimes play) in a worship service? If you’re a worship leader, do you have a solid, Biblical system for thinking through and choosing music pieces that fit each church service?

The process of selecting worship music will be different for each individual congregation and worship style, of course. But to help you think through your music choices, FarsiPraise has collected some thoughts on the matter from a variety of church and worship leaders (both are in PDF):

• An essay by Paul Oakley (of the Church of Christ the King in Brighton, England) that walks through seven steps for considering and choosing worship music.
• A second collection of short mini-essays by seven other church leaders explaining how they choose music for their churches.

If you’re a church leader struggling to pick the right music, these thoughts from other leaders might help. And if you’re a congregation member who’s always wondered who chose the music and why, they might give you some insight into an important part of weekly worship planning!

I first ran a across Gary Wheeler’s name when I was asked to review the film Final Solution for Hollywood Jesus in 2003. Wheeler produced that film for Messenger Films, but I did not speak with him then—instead interviewing Gerrit Wolfaardt (on whose life the film was based), South African actor Jan Ellis (who played Wolfaardt in the film), and Executive Producer A. C. Green. I later ran into Cris Krusen, the film’s director, at the 2004 CBA convention, and became part of the prayer circle for his teenaged son Daniel, who at the time was institutionalized for schizophrenia. Last fall, the record of that prayer circle was published in Krusen’s memoir Let Me Have My Son.

So I’d heard plenty about Wheeler for a good long time, and followed his work in my editorial capacity at Hollywood Jesus. I was intrigued when Wheeler’s first theatrical film, The List, went into limited release—but it did not screen in Seattle, so I didn’t get a chance to see it.

The film was recently released on DVD, however; and when a press release came out announcing that the film had won three Crown Awards—Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Drama—at the International Christian Visual Media convention in Orlando last month, I jumped at the opportunity to speak with Wheeler about his experiences.