Hanging out with church geeks
Posted on March 7, 2007
The past couple of days I had the privilege of hanging out with the IT guys at Church of the Resurrection. I do contract work for Resurrection and most of my work is done remotely, from home, late at night. I make the 2 1/2 hour drive to go onsite about once every 3-4 months, I always intend to do it a little more often, but it doesn’t happen that frequently.
I am working on building a set of management reports based on Shelby data and yesterday Clif, the IT director, shared his vision for the needed reports and we defined our approach. We established several months ago that we will use SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, which provides a robust reporting tool and should provide us with the end result we need. The cool thing is the reports will be viewable through Internet Explorer on the intranet and the data can be exported to Excel or pdf or pretty much any format you could ever need.
So, I did do some work on Monday, but the I had a lot of fun Sunday evening too, which is when I met up with Clif so we could do a couple of important things.
Our first stop was his own church, where his wife is the pastor, Living Water Christian Church. Clif is the master of all things sound and multimedia and he has done amazing work in his church. 
This is a young, small church but it is definitely high-tech. Living Water has a coffeehouse called Oasis on Friday nights, where local bands come in to play and people can come in and hang out. Clif cranked up a recording of one of the bands who played there recently, it was crisp and clear and loud, so loud the floor was shaking.
The church is in Parkville, which is north KC, so if you are anywhere near there, check out Living Water. Pastor Laura has a heart for leading the church and God is definitely moving. Check out the most recent podcast here.
We left Living Water and headed to Zona Rosa, a fairly new shopping district near the airport and had dinner at Bravo! Cucina Italiana and it was good stuff. I got the lasagna and it was huge! Very good meal.
Clif and I sat in the restaurant and talked about church tech stuff for quite awhile, including the various potential ChMS product(s) in Resurrection’s future, among other things. There’s some exciting stuff going on and some things on the horizon that will be exciting, as well.
I try to schedule my days onsite at Resurrection on Mondays because that’s typically when the entire IT staff goes to lunch. Sunday night, Clif said he always buys lunch on the first Monday of the month which is this week. Bonus!
Clif has pulled together a great team and I always enjoy hanging around with these guys. They’re not only geeky, they’re smart too and they do a ton of work supporting this church.
Thanks for letting me take part in the work that all of you are doing at Resurrection, see ya next first Monday! (Clif already burst my bubble by reminding me that the gas for me to get there costs more than the free lunch) Oh well, see ya next time I get back!
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