Cause to Pause

Tuesday was “Pre-convention Day” for ACS technologies annual conference. This year titled Reach09.
I spent the first half in the IT Roundtable discussion loosely moderated by Dean Lisenby. In this case, “loosely moderated” was the goal. In a half a day we covered two topics- Social Networking and Volunteer Recruitment. I am sure the afternoon session covered more ground.
The Volunteer portion focused on volunteers WITHIN the IT department. Do you have them? Do you let them have access to more than compressed air?
It was a very interesting discussion-especially in light of the mix of people and ministry styles. There were those that shuddered at the thought and others who confessed that their volunteers were really the network administrators. It was the volunteers who would be up in the middle of the night if exchange went down. A vast spectrum to say the least.
Social Networking hit on- what else-twitter. However there were questions I hadn’t REALLY delved deeply into. Including monitoring and potentially limiting staff usage to twitter. “How much of the youth director’s time should be spent on twitter?” “Are we, as IT people now supposed to act as the police for that?”
With great power comes great responsibility.
The second half of the day was spent listening to Jason Lee and Linda Cleveland from Northwoods Church talk about their experience launching Checkpoint.
There was a considerable amount of information to be had. Especially in terms of setting expectations and defining goals with ALL ministry members that will be impacted by a specific change. Never underestimate the need for having everyone who will be a “stakeholder” to have complete “buy-in” to any ministry project.
From start to finish their project took over a year. This included investigating other check-in solutions to find which one would ultimately serve their needs the best. Once that initial part was done , which took several there was the process of defining the outcome in terms of data but also in terms of the experience for the end user or “guest”.
If you have any questions related to Checkpoint, rolling out a new system of any kind or how to encourage your vendor, in the direction you need to go, Jason is the guy to talk to. I am sure he would welcome the dialog.
Keep an eye out on his blog as he is going to post some very useful documentation there shortly.

There is a steady stream of tweets coming out. Just follow the hashtag #reach09.

Ever get a volunteer, give ‘em some direction, then when an “oops” happens the volunteer blames themself for messing up and you blame yourself for not training them right?
Yeah. Me neither.
But the real question comes in “What was the goal?”
Ok, for just a minute, get down off the “Ten Leadership Principles of Successful Team Development Through Personal Excellence” train and remember that the most important word is “personal”. The only thing that really matters is people. We are all just dealing with people. Shoot, some of even are people!
If you have read this blog for any length of time (and I thank the both of you), you know I have a slant toward expectations. Giving and getting. But sometimes, maybe, just sometimes it isn’t about fulfilling expectations. Maybe sometimes it is just about “being”.

For the last six weeks my small group and I have been wading through the book of Galatians. The whole book is about grace verses law. Living a life led by the Spirit verses living one of fulfilling expectations that are beyond reach. This letter is unlike any of Paul’s other ones. This isn’t Paul the “hang in there guys, I believe in you, me and my buddies all say ‘Hi’, let’s have lunch, buh-bye”.
This Paul the Angry Blogger.
What is he so honked off about? Somebody has been trying to get the Galatians to start worrying about fulfilling expectations that they have no business even thinking about. And once they got on the “expectation fulfillment train”, there was no stopping it. Their focus shifted from one of gratitude and “glad that is over” to one of…well…..OUCH!

I don’t have any great axiom to close this post out and tie those two points up with a bow. It all seems incongruous on the surface.
But I will say that you know how you really didn’t care about that little “oops” I mentioned? Your volunteer probably didn’t care about being undertrained either. Probably never entered their mind.
But if either one of you lets the other start down the “should have done…” road, you are both in trouble. You are BOTH putting yourself under a burden that really doesn’t exist. That’s a line of thinking that certainly won’t end at ” love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control”.

I saw this post from Christopher Dawsonover at ZDNET:

“Just a brief rant here, folks…I talked a while ago about my superintendent and how he used AOL extensively for calendaring and communication. Basically, I came to the conclusion that if we don’t provide users with a range of tools to satisfy their needs, they’ll bring crappy ones on-site that we’ll need to support (like AOL).”

Now there is a little bit of wisdom! One of the challenges we face in church data is “silos of information”. People maintaining their Excel sheets, Outlook contact lists, etc outside of the main database. This became a topic of discussion at the FL.CITRT during the session on IT Strategy.

One of the axioms I picked up over 10 years ago from Calvary Chapel, Ft. Lauderdale was that their entire method of ministry had been boiled down to:
“Find a need and fill it.”

The same applies to internal tools: listen to needs, prove the tools, maintain ongoing dialog, be willing to set aside pride and the “I am right, you WILL do it MY way” type of thinking.

It is either that or fractured ministry, silos of information, frustrated staff on both sides and burned out volunteers.