Introduction – Peter Schott

Posted on February 20, 2009 by paschott

Greetings,

My name is Peter Schott. I currently serve as an unpaid volunteer on the IT team for Mt. Gilead Baptist Church in Keller, TX. I have served unofficially at some of the churches I attended in the past, but am now officially a volunteer. (We don’t have any paid technical staff members, just volunteers.) I have been involved in computers since I was 10 when my dad handed me a DOS boot disk and a copy of the "DOS Instant Reference" book and turned me loose. I kept going from there, learning about networking, databases, and MS servers and operating systems.

I got started in the IT team at Mt. Gilead by being tired of seeing a website that was very outdated. I had asked about it, but wasn’t even a member at the time so had no official responsibility to do anything. I decided to work on a project using PHP and MySql on the side. I tried a handful of CMS systems before settling on the Web Empowered Church package based on TYPO3. I worked up a very basic prototype using what I could see on the current website. After showing that to our leaders, they approved pushing this out on the web – first as a test site, then as the main site. I still work on some of the administration details for the site, but the content is mostly defined by our church staff now. They can keep the site up to date without needing a developer, which is a great bonus for them.

Currently, Mt. Gilead uses ACS for our Church Management Software, running on Windows 2003 servers and Windows XP desktops. We have migrated our e-mail to Google Apps. We have plans to hold PC Workshops regularly to help people with their PCs. We plan to hold some sessions for parents to help raise their kids in this age of modern technology and are trying to more effectively use the growing social networking technology effectively.

So why am I here? Mainly, I want to share my experiences as a smaller church IT volunteer. I also hope that this will help some of you who struggle with working at smaller churches with limited time and resources. I have a passion for technology and want to share my knowledge and skills with a larger community so we can more effectively reach out to a world desperately in need of a loving God.

I look forward to what the future brings for this site and for the Church Tech Volunteer community.

For Him,
-Peter Schott

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6 Responses to “Introduction – Peter Schott”

  1. wvpv on February 20th, 2009 12:40 pm

    Thanks for the post. I thought I was reading my own autobiography.

    Yay for the small church tech volunteer guys!

    // raising fist in solidarity //

  2. paschott on February 20th, 2009 3:08 pm

    Thanks for the feedback. At times it does seem to feel like the “small church” guys are all alone. I follow a lot of the bigger church tech names, but once they start talking “new SAN” or “Server Farm”, it’s really hard to keep up. My terms tend to be “external USB” and “donated boxes”. :)

  3. wvpv on February 21st, 2009 7:31 am

    Yeah…hehe…me, too.

    I thought our team of three was doing good to get a backup domain controller up and going. Both of our servers are P4 500Mhz boxes with 512MB of RAM.

    Living large and knowing enough to be dangerous, woo-hoo.

  4. Chase on February 21st, 2009 10:48 am

    This is a very encouraging article. I’m sort of struggling with the same thing right now. I’m in a volunteer position on the tech team at our church and have been very unhappy about how our website currently looks, but I just haven’t exactly figured out how to redesign it yet. Hopefully I can find some advice here. Thanks!

  5. paschott on February 21st, 2009 1:20 pm

    Chase, I’ll have a post in the future about our experience with the WEC project mentioned in my post. It was a learning curve for us, but probably one of the easiest CMS installs I’ve seen – especially tailored for churches. I’d start there, but look at other possibilities as well. For my part, I’m more interested in handing content control over to people who really know that content. Any good CMS will let you do that.

    wvpv – I hear you on that one. I actually have to check the status of our Backup Domain Controller. I think our servers are currently P3′s, but we have a decent RAID 5 attached to it so at least have some redundancy going. :)

  6. Michael Cannon on February 21st, 2009 7:13 pm

    It’s great to hear that the TYPO3 CMS through the Web Empowered Church project has been working out for you. We use this package for our church clients and they’re pretty happy to have a feature rich system inexpensively.