How reliable are your technical systems in the Church? Before you laugh, consider the embarrassment your senior pastor would feel if everything went off during the middle of a sermon. (I’ve seen this happen, and at the early service, too!) Perhaps we need to think a bit about reliability after all.

In the commercial realm, reliability is measured by the number of Nines. That is, there will be a contract, say with a web hosting firm, that specifies the Service Level Availability in terms of percentage of guaranteed uptime. Here’s a table to help you better appreciate this:

So, if I am guaranteed that my system is up 99% of the time, that means it will be down at most 4 days over the course of a year. If I am guaranteed 99.999% of the time (5 Nines), that means that it will be down at most 5 minutes in a year. If I managed to get to 7 Nines – i.e. 99.99999% of the time – I am guaranteed that the system will at most be down 3 seconds in a year! Believe it or not, the technology is capable of that, but it gets very expensive!

Fortunately, the Church doesn’t need 7 Nines reliability, but your preacher probably expects 6 Nines, and your congregation will start getting anxious at anything less. So what do you do? Start by making an assessment of which systems are required for worship to proceed. For example, if the electricity totally fails, do you go on with no systems working, or jump to the closing prayer. If you had a UPS on everything in the tech closet, then you could continue without main power. Now think through scenarios where each of those systems goes down. What would you do? Is there an alternative that you could quickly deploy? How would you expect the staff to respond? Thinking ahead can go a long ways towards avoiding panic and dealing with the event effectively. And that ultimately will allow worship to go on. You may be wishing that the “rocks will sing out” in the closing song. Maybe they will!