Cause to Pause

A few weeks ago I was talking to someone about their business, or a friend’s business or something. I forget exactly what, but the subject was streaming. Getting information to a lot of people in different places and have them all feel like part of the same group within the company. They were just kind of musing about how it would be great if they could do that. I said it is already being done. Their incredulous reaction was all the invitation I needed. “There are a number of businesses that have perfected this on very tight budgets”
“Really, who?”
“Churches” It was not the response he was looking for. He knew the technology was out there, but assumed it was only for the very large HP, Humana, Kaiser kind of operations. This got me thinking “What if…..”

When the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD was hot, I read a column report out of Comdex. The writer said “The winner of this format war will likely be decided by the **** industry. (I used asterisks to cheat the filters. I think we all know what “industry” I am referring to.) Sad. Our day to day technology is driven by victimization.

Imagine if churches, banded together, networked in mind, spirit and ip addresses became not just “users” of technology, not just organizations “hoping to redeem the culture through the medium of MySpace”, but were of such critical mass that the next time there was a format war, the message out of Comdex was “The new media delivery format will likely be decided by whoever provides the greatest serviceability to churches.” The next big innovation is always just around the corner. Just imagine if the marketing guys main focus was “ok, this has to be scalable to the mega church seating 20,000 on Sunday plus another 20,000 online as well as affordable for every neighborhood church with 50 people on Sunday and 10 who are shut in. The total mass of the church market is too large to be ignored.”

There is some amazing stuff going on in churches, not only from a “gee whiz look at the pretty video animation” way, but in “how do we analyze “x” for productivity to ensure it brings value”. Imagine how the world would view the church if it was common knowledge that WE were the drivers of technology. Mass printing started out with the Bible.

Makes me think of a future post…”What if we made FEMA obsolete?”

Thanks to Dean Lisenby for posting this on his blog. As I was doing my study tonight, I needed a diversion so hit my top six blogs to see if there was anything new. Appears I am a day behind. I am glad they made the announcement. Here’s why these things make me nervous:

A little about me- for the last four years I have been the Bus . Admin. for a traditional, denominational church. I.E. – committees fearful of change. Like most denominational churches, we have seen a steady decline in the last 30 years or so as we have failed to match the changing demographics of the area. Where we have failed is in expecting the world to come to us just because our doors were unlocked at 8:00, 9:30 and 11:00. Right now our Session is in the midst of a Vision planning and reorganization strategy as part of a larger Transformation process.
When I took over my current position, we had about 800(half of which show up) members, no elementary school, a preschool with about 40-50 students and an annual budget of $1.2 mil. We now have still about 800 members (still about half attend), 80 children in the preschool, 130 in K-8 and a total budget of almost $2.5 mil. And we have 40% LESS admin staff to do it with. So a lot of stuff gets prioritized away. Frustratingly so.

We have made some progress. Last year, we put screens in the Sanctuary. Horrors!
Implementing online giving was a big step for us. That led to online tuition payments. As time progressed, the challenge always becomes “How can we buy staff time back?” Our vendor for online giving and tuitions did not provide decent reporting. When I found out ACS was going to have a direct gift import through AccessACS, I was all over it. Spend $30 a month and free up 4-6 hours of staff time? Sold. Especially in light of the fact that usage will increase dramatically in the coming years. Everything else you can do with it? Gravy. Solid reports with batch totals was what I wanted. I have committee chairs who maintain their own groups and print their own mailing labels,have “one button email” access to everyone on their committee, plus the ability to email every other committee with easy pulldown filters. You are on Hospitality and need to get a message to Budget and Finance? No problem.

Then we took a look at Extend. Our website was controlled by one very well meaning volunteer who was way too busy and was a programmer by nature. Not a visual guy. To say there was outdated information on it was an understatement. But it is just not fair to expect one volunteer to be responsible for that. Hiring someone to do that exclusively was not possible and, it seems, unwise – thanks to my friend Jason Reynolds. In Extend we found the ability to
a. remove all the outdated, irrelevant material
b. introduce some basic features
c. look at it from an outreach standpoint instead of an “electronic flyer”
d. have the ability to dream
A small core group took some initiative and made a decision, with the blessing of leadership, that it was better to have minimal information, but what you had was accurate, than to have gobs of erroneous information. Strip down and build up from there. This has also been an important learning excercise in what ministries are actually functioning well.

Through the ACS desktop applications, Extend, and AccessACS, I now know that we, as a smaller church in the midst of a vision change have the tools to do ministry just as well as those with much larger budgets. This does not count the other offerings from ACS like Outlook API’s tied to the database, an awesome calendaring program running on a thin client, Silverlight applications that pull calendar events and announcements in real time into a digital display (still in beta). Ability to search your database straight from a Windows Smartphone or iphone. And some other really useful things on the horizon (can you say A/C controls linked to your ministry calendar? Sure you can. Just a LONG way off).

We don’t have an annual payroll of multiple full time IT people. Well, we do, it’s just that they all live in South Carolina. If we have done anything well, odds are 1-800-669-2509 was a part of the process. If we didn’t have tech support that was leading edge and concerned not for us as a customer, but us as a Ministry Partner doing God’s work, we would be in serious trouble. Have you ever had a vendor call you and say, “Need any help? How about if we change ‘x’ to ‘y’? Would that look good?” I have. More than once.

That is why change is so crucial to me. That is why change in my number one ministry partner is important. Having watched the trajectory of ACS over the last few years, seen first hand the potential, and then hearing the future possibilities, anything that could upset that trajectory is cause for concern. As long as God has me here, I am counting on them to help this church be the influence in the community we once were and can be again. A small church can have all the ministry and communications resources they want and need-without the fulltime IT staff to support it. Which is exactly why I am relieved to see in the press release a committment to “more of the same”. In this case, it’s a good thing…..

Sitting in the Palm Beach County courthouse awaiting my civic duty. Generally, when you mention “Jury Duty” the conversation immediately turns to how to get out of it. I don’t mind so much. This is my second time. Last time I made it to the second round of the selection interviews.  Not sure why I got DQ’d but I would imagine it had something to do with the line of questioning about “Whose testimony would you give greater creedence to. A police officer or someone with a prior arrest record.” duh.

In today’s tech world and thanks to free wifi, I can do most of what I need to do workwise while sitting around. I will have to scope out an outlet before the day is over though. So, if I can do my job PLUS a civic duty, why wouldn’t I? I would hate to get wrapped up in a two month grand jury murder trial though.

Jury duty-a lot like “working” at Starbucks…only the coffee isn’t as good.