What’s important to you?
What gets your attention?
What interests you?
Those are the kinds of questions I’m pondering lately. I want to do more, there’s more I can do, there’s more I need to do and there’s more that we can do together. There is no reason that you should be a lonely tech guy/girl at your church, we can all do more by coming together and sharing ideas and even challenging some thoughts and ideas.
I’m up for it, are you? I’m not here as a Mr. know-it-all, I’m here as the guy that knows I don’t know it all and I’m using this blog to expand my knowledge base. Lately, I feel like I have been everything but focused on the things that are important and now it’s time to do just that.
What are you facing in your church? What are your tech issues? Do you have any recent victories? Tell us. You know I’ll share mine. Leave a comment. You can subscribe to comments here, did you know that? Then you won’t miss a thing.
If you’re too shy to comment, send me an e-mail or call me on my cell phone, all that info is here. Whatever you want to do, but I really wanna know what’s important to you?
This is a rather rambling response, so please forgive me for not thinking it through first. I’ll *say* that my spiritual walk is the highest priority, but my calendar certainly doesn’t reflect that. Trying to be more intentional about Bible time, prayer, interacting with other Christians, and especially with non-Christians, each consume time, and it’s time worth being consumed!
I think my job involves making IT easier (how about invisible?) to our non-IT staff, and ideally, makes it easier on our IT staff as well. One of Fellowship Technologies tag lines is “Minimize Administration to Maximize Ministry.” I’d like to apply that to Church IT — I want our staff to *expect* that everything will work when they come in, and that information is easy to get to, and ad-hoc queries are natural and friendly and don’t consume a lot of time.
I’m [overly] consumed right now in the war on spam. I hate it when even one spam message gets through to our staff, but I’m also realistic enough to know that it will happen. I hate it even more when a good message is blocked. There are days I want to go to work for an anti-spam vendor and not be satisfied until I’ve personally looked at every mis-handled piece of email. (I guess I have a lot of OCD in me)
I want to find the right resources for churches of all sizes to manage their IT needs. Where is the definitive source of church IT solutions? Where are the published best practices? What’s the organziation of Church IT people that anyone can join (as with NACBA for administrators)?
Is that the kind of thing you’re looking for?
Important – yeah, this hit me pretty hard, too. What do I say is important versus what do I actually put into practice. I’d say that my walk is important, but I’m also realistic enough to know that I don’t place enough time in my spiritual disciplines. I’ve definitely been convicted and feel that I’m progressing, just at a snail’s pace sometimes.
I think that worship is important and regularly read up on things related to that. How can I help people when they attend a meeting of the local body to give their all to God and leave the service changed? Am I worshiping or merely letting words flow through me? Am I giving my all? How can people be freed from distractions during the corporate worship time? Can technology enhance that? (Can I get too focused on technology?)
Attention/Interests – I’m quite into tech, especially databases. Something new/shiny also catches my eye. I like games of most sorts, books, music. I’m definitely interested in kids now that I have one of my own and their antics generally catch my attention now (in a good way).
As for areas we’re facing now – biggest is healing at the moment. The body was hurt pretty badly about 1.5 years ago by the pastor at the time and is just now really recovering.
Technologically, we still have issues with sound and I’m pretty sure that we have a lot of trouble getting people involved in that first step. Some of that stems from the healing process, but I think there are definitely ways to improve that.
I like the way Fellowship Church has their visitor booth right in the center where you can get information about all sorts of things, including a volunteer form to drop in the plate indicating you’re ready to serve. Their staff were really friendly when I visited and very helpful trying to get someone plugged in. One of the blogs I read regularly (God::Media or similar name) discussed something called “Serv-Fest” that sounded promising for volunteer involvement as well.
Tony, check out Postini.com for Spam. We used that service at my prior company and were very pleased with the cost and results. They maintained the spam filters and the users could very easily see what, if anything, was caught and decide if they needed to release certain messages. My e-mail address was a spam magnet and I got daily reports of 50-200 caught messages, but most users got an e-mail maybe once a week and much less frequently they had to deal with something that needed to get through.
I’d love to have a definitive source for church IT as well. There are a lot of different sites out there now, but no central point. I’ve seen some posts about http://www.3cords.org, but it isn’t live yet.