SW Missouri Church Tech Roundtable – Update
Posted on May 7, 2007
Bryson and I had lunch last Monday to plan the planning meeting for our local church IT group and the only dates we were both available was this past Saturday or the middle of June, so we opted for last Saturday. We both talked with various people we knew might be interested, and many expressed interest but with the short notice, it ended up being just Bryson and I.
So, we planned. We came up with a name and discussed some of our goals. We want to reach more than just Joplin churches, so we went with SW Missouri, which includes many, many churches, mostly smaller. Bryson is the IT Director for one of the largest churches around here and my church probably fits in the category of being one of the larger ones in the area, although smaller, and there are a lot more churches that fit in the small category and likely in need of technical input.
We also chose to drop ‘IT’ from the name of our group, simply because a non-technical person probably doesn’t know what IT is, yet we fully intend to be a group that offers technical help on many levels.
Also, we like the roundtable idea. We intend to avoid a formal structure, there’s not a specific leader or leaders or president or dues or anything like that. We truly want a roundtable, where we are all equals, whether someone is highly technical or just trying to learn. I suspect Bryson and I will play the role of keeping things on track, so we maintain our focus.
Our audience is not primarily church tech guys, like Bryson and I, our audience is anybody and everybody involved with their church in a technical way. For many smaller churches, the pastor is the one concerned with all things technical and that might just be his PC and turning the sound board on. We want to connect with that person, so at the very least, we can be an encouragement and even offer guidance and support. We also want to connect with highly technical people that serve in their church. There are only 2 churches in our area that we are aware of that have a full time technical person on staff, and that is Bryson’s church and another church in town. So, we would have a pretty small group if our focus was only church tech staff.
Bryson and I have similar hearts for the local church, we both want to reach out to many churches at different levels and I think that will happen, it’s just a matter of reaching these people. One thing we are doing is putting an announcement on the local Christian radio station’s community calendar. It’s a free service and they read it on the air periodically throughout the day, a great way to get the word out.
Our first official meeting is June 9 at 9:00am at Panera in Joplin, so we have about a month to get the word out. We set up a Google group here and that may serve as a way to communicate to our community.
So whether you are in Joplin or Springfield or Lamar or Carthage or even Bentonville, make plans to attend the first SW Missouri Church Tech RoundTable.
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4 Responses to “SW Missouri Church Tech Roundtable – Update”
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Great job guys! Do you have lists of other church IT people who are in your target area/
It seems like we have between 10-20 prospective people in mind, that we have contacted. Many have expressed interest, it’s just a matter of giving more than a couple days notice, like we did last week. Getting the word out on the local radio station will spread the word to those we don’t know, as well.
Great work! I posted your announcement in the Local Church IT RoundTable section of CITRT Wiki: http://itdiscuss.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/LocalCITRTmeetings
Just revisiting this earlier post — how has this been working out for you guys? I’m curious if there is anything going on in the Kansas City area and would love to hear feedback. It kind of looks like it’s stalled out in growth?