It’s one thing to lead someone when you have some form of power over them, such as a paycheck or other tangible benefit but what does it take to lead those that owe you nothing?  The skill in this type of leadership has everything to do with your ability to meet the need that they need fulfilled.

Honestly, there’s no real reason that a volunteer needs to come back, they only come back because it is their choice.   The primary reason the volunteer will choose to come back is because of you and the way you are leading. Sure, there are plenty of other reasons to continue a volunteer role but honestly, I have seen people give up something that they are passionate about strictly because the leader was not leading well.

That’s sad!

Know your people. They are looking to you to lead. They want you to lead. Your job is to be their biggest cheerleader, both indvidually as well as cheering on the entire team on.

Believe in your team!

Believe in your people!

They will do so much more because you believe in them.

The teams I currently lead and ones I have led in the past are pretty amazing. I am able to show up and every once in awhile, point the direction we should be going.  But, my primary role is to stand back and let the team rock it, as I serve right along side them.

For the 5 years or more that I have been writing here, I have had a real heart for volunteers in church, especially in the area of technology. It has always fascinated me how much volunteers do around a church, in so many ways. I never lost my heart for volunteers and I was very excited when we revived this site, with the sole purpose of being a site for church tech volunteers written by church tech volunteers. However I struggled to feel it. If you haven’t noticed, we have a great team of men and women here who contribute to this site, a bunch of very skilled and talented volunteers, most who serve in their local church and share their stories, their frustrations and their successes with us here at CTM.

I have apparently been leading the way, yet I told them early on that I am probably not going to write much anymore. That in itself didn’t set right with me because I will typically lead by example. If I’m leading you, I will likely be working or serving right beside you. Whether it’s at work or at church or where ever, I will either be working with you on whatever the project is or watching and asking questions and learning from you because you are better at it than I am. I rarely manage or lead at an arms distance. I will definitely give you space to own your area and do it in your own way if that’s how you roll but I still won’t be too far away. So, trying to lead this team of writers in a hands off kind of way is not a normal thing for me.

In my defense, I will say I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t walk away from this site. I tried, believe me, I tried. Once we breathed life back into it, I wanted to see this thing succeed, even if my heart wasn’t in it. Yet I have always felt a stirring inside me that this isn’t right, leading in this way wasn’t right. For me.

I hesitate to say that I’m back because I have done that before and it doesn’t stick. I will say I feel like I’m getting back in my element the more I get plugged into LifeChurch.tv #ChurchOnline. The juices are flowing in my brain and the thoughts of the great value of volunteers are rolling around in my head.

I am sure I’ll have more to say about all of this in the coming days. I am honored to be a part of what is going on at #OnlineChurch and so excited about the conversations I am having and the stories I am hearing.

If you can, stop by #ChurchOnline Thursday evening at 9:30CT, join the kickoff party for this new experience! Join us in chat and worship with us. I’m excited about my opportunity to work with a new team of volunteers.

Well, as time went by, things progressed and this site was reborn into what it is today.  I am so proud of what is being done here although, I think we have only just begun in what we can accomplish and what we need to accomplish.

2009 can really be viewed as a year of transition for Church Tech as we worked to pull a team of writers together and figure how this can all work. We still have some things to work out but I am looking forward to next year and all that it will bring.

Church Tech Matters is now a site for church tech volunteers written by church tech volunteers and those who lead them, which leads us to still equipping the church to effectively use technology to reach people for Christ.

What lies ahead for 2010? I honestly don’t know. Some thoughts:

• Expand our reach – Reach more tech volunteers and more smaller churches
• More ways to share knowledge – As I said, we have only just begun and we have some new ideas that just need to get implemented.
• Increased traffic to this site – The traffic to this site had been declining downward for the last 6 or 8 months of 2008, but it is now steadily increasing well beyond where I took it on my own. Based on current trends, I would expect traffic to continue to increase into 2010.

Coming soon we will share some new ideas about doing more to reach and connect with fellow church tech volunteers and strengthen our community.

Thank you to everyone who didn’t let me fade away into the sunset!

Thank you to all the current writers and contributors!

Thank you to all of our readers and fellow volunteers!

—

I am a volunteer Technical Director of a small to medium size church with an average attendance of 250 each Sunday morning. Our area has also been hit badly by the economic downturn.  Maybe you can identify, but needless to say, money is tight. I’m still a stickler for doing things as professionally as possible, so I am constantly on the lookout for quality ways to do things cheap.

When I assumed responsibility for our audio media ministry a CD recorder had just been purchased to make the move from recording to cassette. That process required ripping the recorded CD to the computer, editing the head and tail of the sermon track in Soundforge and then uploading via ftp to our church website. The whole process was a little more time consuming than I, as a volunteer, could keep up with at times. Not to mention the cost of CDs, labels, and cases – two per week.

We have since turned off the CD recorder and send the post fade auxiliary feed directly to the computer – the same computer we use to project from EasyWorship during the service. So far our Dell Dimension 9200 has had no problem recording and sending audio/video out. I purchased an M-audio Transit external sound card for about $80 to handle the dual I/O delivery, and it works like a charm. However this purchase is not necessary to the overall process.

Our program for recording is the free, but powerful Audacity. I used Mike Sessler’s tips on recording & processing to create a smaller file for podcasting. Usually the PC operator for the service runs the compression process then exports the Audacity file to mp3 and closes everything out. Later, I open the mp3 file in MP3DirectCut, which is also free, to clean up the head and tail of the recording.

MP3DirectCut is a simple mp3 editing tool that doesn’t have to convert to its own format. It’s convenient for us since I usually do my little bit of editing after the recording has been saved and Audacity has been closed out. Most audio editors save an editable file in its own extension which creates another file on the computer. For us we would have both the .mp3 and .aud audio files for each recording taking up space on the computer. By using MP3DirectCut we never save a .aud file. We only work with the mp3.

Next in the process is uploading files to our free account on sermon.net. Their Sermon Studio allows uploading of graphics, notes, scripture references, and audio file. You get your own sermon.net page where an archive of sermons is available for listening. Plus their sermon player is an embeddable gadget for your website with a built-in Bible for following along with the message. Sermon.net provides an RSS feed to iTunes as well.

Over the last couple of years we have developed a pretty streamlined process of recording and podcasting that now makes it possible to have our Sunday morning sermon available to the world by the time I sit down to lunch.  The only cost is a few minutes of time.

Please comment with questions or observations, or better yet, join the discussion at the CTM forum.

—

Follow Angela on Twitter: @acmul

Read Angela’s non-technical blog: Coffee House Conversations.

What is your name?

Chase Livingston, aka @chaselivingston

I realize you are a tech volunteer at your church, as many of us are, what do you do fulltime?

I’m a college student at Clemson University, studying Electrical Engineering. That basically means I study all the time, and tweet about how boring or hard my classes are.

What is the name of your church?

Mountain Creek Baptist Church

It honestly comes down to one of two things (or both):

• The leader doesn’t know how to effectively lead, encourage and motivate their volunteers
• The leader doesn’t have time to commit to lead, encourage and motivate their volunteers

Honestly, the frustration usually comes from the lack of time on the leader’s part and is not so much the result of anything the volunteer has or has not done.  It’s hard to be a leader without having a relationship and that takes time beyond the time that you are serving together.  The relationship has to be a priority and between you and me, that’s a lot of work.

However, respect grows out of the relationship, on both sides. If you are leading me and you take the time to get to know me and my passions and my strengths, that means a lot and it’s motivating.  As a leader, as I get to know you, in time, I will see your strengths  and learn the areas that you are passionate about and give you opportunities to shine.

There’s no easy button or magic formula but believe me, I have used this approach and always been appreciative of the volunteers that I have.  Build the volunteers you have up and you might be surprised by the results.

This is a high level view of leading volunteers, and just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a place to start.  If you find yourself buried and overwhelmed with tech volunteer leadership, work on making your volunteers a priority and begin to get to know them.

What is your secret for leading volunteers?

What is your biggest frustration in leading volunteers?

Join the discussion at the CTM forum!

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.

Proverbs 29:18
Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.

As I begin to develop our team @durhame I thought it was important to share the vision I had for the ministry and to let my team members help develop the vision along with me.

I prayed about the ministry as God worked in my heart; he began to reveal to me three areas of the ministry that he wanted us to focus on:

At our first tech team meeting I shared the areas of the vision with the attendees and some of the ideas that were weighing on my mind. It was amazing how God placed the exact person to fill the roles.  For example, one topic I was thinking about was the PC Workshop that Jim Walton put on and though to myself this was a great idea; countless times I’ve heard from friends, neighbors, colleagues , about the tech challenges they face at home. When I shared this idea with the group immediately Scott (one of our team members) was intrigued and wanted to know more..because that’s where hist heart was at.. what I learned was.. God does provide

Mat:37-38
Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Our team is filled with great members, and they are helping to refine God’s vision for this ministry.  As their leader I continue to seek out opportunities where their gifts can be fulfilled though the ministry.

What is your team’s vision..? Have your team members been a part of growing the vision?

I encourage you to seek your members input and allow them to help refine the vision for your team.