I’m Tim Golden aka Golden ~Eye~ around the net..

I am the Technology Director at RMC Research in Portsmouth, NH.

I am also the Tech Team leader at Durham Evangelical Church (dec) where God has given me the chance to work with some great people and serve my community, church, and God with the gifts he’s given me.. Let me share with you personally via the video below…or you can read part of my bio on the contributors page

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVO87gOt_04&w=345&h=284]

I was excited to learn that God was working in Jim’s heart to restore Church Tech Matters because as the name states.. church tech REALLY DOES matter.. Then when he invited me to be a contributor I was even more excited though a bit apprehensive too. Although writing does not come naturally to me I do enjoy to talk and being a part of the CTM Team is a great opportunity for me to ‘talk’ about where God has been leading me, building the team and growing all of us within his kingdom.

I’ve been working on growing the dec tech team over the last six months. As I prayed for God’s guidance and wisdom he began to reveal to me his vision for the dec tech team. So I’ve started by sharing that team vision with the dec tech team members and wrote my first CTM post about Growing church tech teams. We have many great committed members that love the lord, and want to use their gifts to help further His Kingdom.

I look forward to sharing our experiences at dec with the rest of the CTM community as well as growing and learning for the rest of the CTM members.

Blessings,
Tim Golden
http://twitter.com/goldeneye
www.timgolden.com

I’m a Geek that loves everything technology. I’ve been working with church tech since before I was a teenager. I have worked with many of different presentation software solutions for video presentation and have 15 years experience in sound and video systems. I have recently been learning intelligent light programming for our new system and have enjoyed that quite a bit. As a side note of the things that I believe helps me run sound and services effectively is my experience as a member of the worship team and as I’ve had the opportunity to play the part of a pastor. I am both a musician and a singer and that allows me to think like those on stage would be thinking. I pride myself at being able to learn anything I need to and as long as I can see it and have enough time to play with it, I can make it(whatever it might be) work.

By trade I’m a PC/Network tech with an extensive ministry background. After getting in some college hours I went to a Master Commission internship in Mission, Texas where I was the everything technical for 1 1/2 years. I was primary for running sound and making sure that the presentation system(song show plus while I was there) was working 100% and that all services went smooth. For a church that started to grow very quickly that proved to be very educational and more difficult than it might seem. Enlarging the sanctuary 2x’s in a year and a half was interesting to say the least. After my internship I served as youth pastor and techy for a church in Harlingen, TX a neighboring city on the Mexico border. This was a very small church where my main tech goal was get the absolute max out of what was available as there was no upgrade budget.

I moved back to Kansas City and after taking a brief hiatus ended up as the volunteer lead for the media presentation team at Crown Pointe Church. I’ve been back with Crown Pointe for 4 years at this point(I think) and enjoy the work I get to do with the lights, video and camera setup we currently run.

I love getting to help others with thier technical needs. Especially churches. I’ve said it many times that someday I want to be a part of a group or organization that would help teach churches how to use technology as effectively as possible for evangelism and help spur churches as an evangelist to seek and save the lost. To whom much is given, much is required and I believe that I have been given many gifts that are to be used for God’s glory.

In non-church related life I am co-host for the video podcast Life in the Tubes at Http://www.lifeinthetubes.com and work as an overnight support tech for a local cable company.

Below are some links to some of the videos I took this week of Worship at Crown Pointe Church.

[youtube bZgsu8m8eWg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZgsu8m8eWg]

[youtube AnX5_dMBYfc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnX5_dMBYfc]

[youtube o5uO0H1w41g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5uO0H1w41g]

My work history began in business technology (cash registers, stock control, pokie machines, EFTPOS units, photocopiers and computers), into IT (Server admin, network and workstation admin), into radio engineering as a broadcast engineer (national radio network, working in the IT department then the Group Engineering department of 92 radio stations across oz) and I now find myself gently wedged in between my church where I head up all of the media, video, internet, IT and audio/visual departments/ministries (wow … that sounds busy), also trying to build my own business and finally hosting the Saturday and Sunday afternoon show radio show on 107.3 fm local Gold Coast radio.

A good example of jack of all trades, master of none, yet somewhat successful in a few of the following things: Audio broadcasting, social media (facebook/twitter etc), making audio/video be where it needs to be at the right time (how do you classify that any better?) and I’m quickly learning a lot about internet streaming and how God might want to use the internet in his current Operation: Sheep campaign.

Finally, I’m a purveyor of low quality jokes, but high quality advice. 27 years old, single Australian male who ministers in Australia’s home of surfing, but doesn’t surf (a complete disappointment to everyone who read the first line I’m sure). My church is an Australian Christian Church, called SURFCiTY Christian Church, if you must look at the webpage I’m ashamed to say I’m responsible for www.surfcity.org.au is the place to go. Once you’ve completed a week of everything else at church you never actually find the time to update the website do you?

I’m looking forward to having much to say about everything and hopefully as a result, you or your ministry might be blessed.

Anyway, that’s me at the top – Stuart (I don’t do photographs) Dyckhoff. If you want the history of the surname then please just ask otherwise call me Stuart or some variation thereof.

I’m 45 and have been in IT for 25yrs. For the last 22yrs I have been the sole tech volunteer with regards to IT, Media and Drama in the Church I attend, and I dabble in sound, lights and everything else. The Church has grown from 35 to 150 adult members over the years I’ve been there but for some reason we haven’t attracted many IT Techs, but have had plenty of volunteers for music, sound and lights!

I’m a hardware guy through and through and most of what I know has been learnt at the coal face. My current job sees me as a “Telecomms Analyst” (aka a Network Engineer) specialising in support of WAN / LAN and Security. Previous roles have seen me as field repair specialist / onsite engineer at a local Sony plant / network administrator to a distributed 10,000 node LAN/WAN and Corporate Support in my local council.

Having been involved in other roles within the Church that are many and varied I trust that I can bring some of that knowledge and experience to bear. These include head usher; co-founder/leader of our drama group; desktop publishing; media presentations and more. The Church is at an interesting position currently in that they want to do more with technology and I am first point of call for most things – this brings both good and bad but I am looking forward to the challenges this brings and hope to share some of these exciting times with you.

Personally I am father to three fabulous children and have been married for 23yrs and live in beautiful South Wales (UK). My own blog is ChurchTechy and please allow me to point you at a recent post for some eclectic info about me that might give you a better understanding of who I am and where I’ve come from.

Should you need to contact me then please visit my blog and use my contact form or  even just eMail me as: stuart.dyckhoffATchurchtechmatters.com – I am looking forward to joining in and sharing where and what I can. I can also be found on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – do tap me up if you want.

My first exposure to “running sound” was in the late 70′s.  I began helping set up, tear down and watch the “sound guys” as they did the audio mix for a music ensemble that my mom was a part of.  I loved it.  I was a geeky kid then and I’m a geeky kid now.  Early on, I watched, listened and learned as much as I possibly could.

Here I am, over 20 years later, still working as a volunteer in church media/tech, but now leading the team.  Over the years, I continued to do the same things I did as a kid – watching, listening and learning.  Now, with the wonderful resources available via the web, I read, google, read some more, exchange ideas and then go and do a lot of trial and error.   I have worked with many great paid staff and volunteers at several different churches.  In each case, the opportunity to expand my skill sets always presented itself and I made the choice to learn something new.  From new audio mixing techniques to programming lighting programs; from working with broadcast video/audio to creating and expanding web content, there have always been opportunities to use new tools to share the message of Christ.

Currently, I serve as the Volunteer Technical Arts Ministry leader at Rawlinson Road Baptist Church.  We have a small team of dedicated volunteers trying to do the best we can with a limited budget and resource set.   In addition to regular live house mix for band, vocalists and sermon, our team also provides projection support for music and sermons.  In the last two years we’ve added podcasting, live video streaming and archived video.   I am still recruiting new volunteers as we seek to build a deeper team.  Each year, we continue to expand what we do for our church and our community, so the need for new volunteers is always there.

As an extension of our ministry, I volunteered (or was volunteered) to update and maintain our church website.  This has truly been an education by trial and error since I have no experience or training with web design or programming.   Our current CMS is Lifewaylink which, while limited in features, has a very short learning curve to begin making updates.  I look forward to learning from the other contributors here at CTM so I can improve our church’s web presence.

Outside of my church, I also have a passion for helping smaller churches implement media and other technology tools to support their ministry efforts.  I have taught media ministry related classes for the South Carolina Baptist Convention and I am currently working with the Worship and Music department on media ministry related podcasts.    These classes have also opened doors for me to work directly with some of these smaller churches as they have added new media tools to their ministries.

While church media/tech is my passion, I still have to pay the bills.  I have worked in various roles in the telecommunications industry since 1996.  Most importantly, I have been married to Michelle for over 15 years and we have two wonderful children.  Follow me on my blog, on twitter if you wish. I look forward to exchanging ideas and learning as much from you as you will learn from us.

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

Follow me on Twitter.

We are glad you’ve visited our site and that you have interest in being a part of a community that supports each other in church technology needs.

I can speak for myself that as a writer I’ll need some inspiration from you the reader as to what you would like to read.  Whether sound, lights, video, software, networking, or any of the many dozens of subjects possible, what questions do you have?  What equipment would you like to see us review and give you our opinions?

We are here contributing to this blog so that You, the reader, will know that you aren’t alone in the church tech world.  I know from experience that feeling and have had to make the tough calls that later I found out, really were the wrong calls but others that were the right call. 

So how do we get to hear from you.  the commenting system on the blog will work but really we have some better ways.  First you can post a twitter message to @church_tech.  I will be watching that account and will be happy to pass your question along to the contributor team for their answers.  Secondly so that you the readers can answer each other’s questions as well we have a forum available for you to post your questions in. 

I have felt for years as I’ve worked in churches volunteering to get the job done, that I wanted a place to discuss the things I get the chance to do for the kingdom.  Now there is one.

Thanks Jim for setting this up and getting all of us together to form this community.  I’m already starting to feel the affects it is having and that’s cool.

-Chris Duckett