The Apostle Paul described the Christian life as a race (2 Tim 4:7). He reminds us to keep our eyes on the finish line, so that we might win the race. It is easy to get distracted by the world, things in it, and the agendas of others. However, when we remember the finish line, it brings our attention back to what really matters.

Finish line road sign

How can we use the technology involved in ministry to keep our eyes on the finish line? Perhaps using a banner for that sermon series. The banner would then be displayed before each sermon, on the Church website, and even in printed format. This keeps the focus of everyone on the ultimate prize, and reinforces the theme for the sermons. They aren’t just disjointed messages about current events, but rather follow a theme. It’s like a road sign reminding us of where we’re going.

What sorts of graphics do you use to keep your congregation’s eyes on the finish line?

As Christians, we find hope in Christ. There is no time like Christmas when we need to realize that hope came into this world with Him. Before He came, there was only a distant hope – a glimmer like a star. Now, we experience the presence of hope every day. The world may remind us of hopelessness; it is certainly all around us. Yet, the baby in the manger a long time ago in a far away place is something that resonates within us. It bursts forth within our hearts – the hope of a new child. So we have reason to be hope-filled, even in the cold month of December. Advent brings with it a renewal of all our hopes.

May this Advent season bring you a new sense of hope for the coming year!

What’s the first impression that people in the community have of your Church? Perhaps you have a Digital Sign out front that identifies the building and provides some basic information about the Church. No doubt it lists the service times, so people will know when to come for worship.

During Advent, we announce the coming of the Babe in the Manger in new ways each year. That message appears in the Advent sermons. It shows up in the bulletins and newsletters. And it should show up on your web site. It should also be prominent for your Digital Sign out front. But how do you write that message in a format that fits the signage? Here are some examples that might work:

• Happy Birthday, Jesus!
• Celebrate Christmas Here
• Joy To The World
• Put Christ back in Christmas
• Santa never died for anyone
• Jesus came to die for you

What if we could connect a Social Media account up to the Digital Sign and let the congregation post messages. Of course, they would have to be vetted by someone, so you couldn’t do this real time. But it would be a cool way for members of the congregation to express what Christmas means to them in the community.

How much time and effort do you spend assimilating new members? Some people need a lot of help getting involved with the Church, for they have little history. Others are ready on day 1 to teach a Church School class. How do you tell the difference?

First, you need staff that are committed to helping new members find their place to worship and serve. This can be a part time responsibility for a staff person. In lots of Churches, one of the pastors serves this role – because they have direct contact through the membership process. If you are blessed with a full time staff person, then they are probably overwhelmed. People join the Church at various times throughout the year. There probably isn’t a pattern (though it never hurts to search for one.) The point is that your full time staff person will need resources and possibly others to help this process go smoothly.

Second, you need to identify what new members need. Do they just need information about areas to serve? Everyone finds out about worship through regular channels (e.g. your website.) But most Churches don’t have a ready list for areas to serve. Someone just knows about it and needs the help. The staff person needs to be a broker to help connect the new member who wants to serve with the lay volunteer looking for help. And some new members need encouragement to take the first step in this process.

Third, you need to find a way to identify new members that didn’t get involved – i.e. grew stale. From them, you want to at least identify why they didn’t get more involved; but don’t call them up and challenge them! Perhaps they never found the right opportunity. Or perhaps they are just shy. Or perhaps they got turned off from their first attempt at service. If you can gather some information in this area, then it will help you do a better job with the next new member that comes along.

Assimilation is vital to growing congregations. When everyone has found their place to worship and serve, then they feel more satisfied with their Church. They may not volunteer for everything, but they can be involved somewhere. Stick with it, and offer them the resources that they need.

In every retail store, you’ll find people eager to help you. They are usually available to answer questions, demonstrate how to use items, and help you make a purchase. More upscale stores will have people who work on salary, rather than commission, so you know that they truly just want to help you. But do we need that kind of customer service in the Church?

Some would argue “Yes” we should be setting the example! Others would say the Church is too Spiritual for such worldly matters. The Scripture advises us to be “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (MAT 10:16 NIV). So perhaps we should have an interest in how well people are treated when they walk through the doors. We all want to be a welcoming congregation, where visitors feel welcome and want to come back. And we need new members so that we can grow. Churches that aren’t growing, some have said, are Churches that are dying off slowly.

So consider how you greet visitors. Who is available to answer their questions every Sunday morning? And how do they sign up for information, be it email or paper newsletters. How hard is it for new comers (i.e. new customers) to get assimilated into your Church?

Many of the records we keep in the Church have significance in the future. Baptisms are proof of citizenship in some places. Weddings are typically recorded at a court house, but that record may be corroborated by the Church wedding service. And of course we keep copies of bulletins that have been published.

The question soon comes up, “how long should we keep these old records around?” You could conclude that we should keep them until Jesus returns. That makes sense, but God is omniscient, so He doesn’t really need our records in the future. Or you could determine that you need to keep them for as long as they are our “legal” responsibility. I have been in court houses that had records dating back over a century. But most courts today require records going back to cover the statute of limitations. So perhaps a wise answer would be to keep records for 7 seven years, and then archive and destroy them.

Fortunately, we have the means to keep archival copies of records around in electronic form. Whether we have a 100 records, or a 1,000,000, they don’t occupy any more space. We just have to organize them, so they can be retrieved easily in the future. So perhaps a better question is, how can we organize our records and make them more accessible to the congregation?

Where is technology going? And how can our Church keep up? Those are relevant questions when it comes to ministry technology. It is not enough to just add the technology to the Church. You have to plan for it to grow and develop. Many small businesses have learned the painful lesson of getting a web site, only to watch it go stale and uninviting. The Church web site can end of the same, unless you have a team involved in both the creation and the maintenance. Think of the Church web site as another communication channel for delivering information to the congregation. What’s the news this week? What is coming up soon? These are the sorts of questions that should be answered on a weekly basis, as you plan ministry in the congregation, community and around the world.

Stewardship involves more than just giving money. It really involes the whole person. But sometimes this is hard to see. The following link is for a spreadsheet that I came up with that looks at three aspects of stewardship – Time, Talent and Treasure. Take a look and see how you balance these three in your life.

Excel Format:
Time Talent Treasure Worksheet

PDF Format:
Time Talent Treasure Worksheet

Lots of Churches take “Welcome Packets” to new members after they join. Some will event take pictures and put them up on the Church bulletin board. What about having an “easter egg” for new members on the Church web site. This would be a special one time link that you would email to the new member. They could execute the link and get a brief page of links that matched their interest and talents, as documented on their new member card. If they had an interest in children, then you could include the link to the Children’s Ministry page and the email address of the Children’s minister. If they had an interest in the Church Library, then you could include a link to the Online Catalog and the email address of the head of the Library committee. All of this would be information that they could find online – if they knew where to look on the web site. The Easter Egg just puts in in one place so they can find it quicker. The special link could then expire in 2 weeks after they had gotten used to things and made contacts in their phone. It is a way to help assimilate them faster into the life of the Church.

Last Sunday, there was a medical emergency in the balcony. It happened right during the praise time, interrupting the service. Fortunately, the man turned out to be alright. And it was amazing that there were doctors and nurses in the congregation at the time, who promptly rendered assistance. I rejoice that after the paramedics arrived, the man was able to walk to the ambulance – a good sign that he was going to be alright.

On reflection, I wonder what the best way to handle a medical emergency is. Certainly, you want to ask for medical professionals to render first aid. CPR might well save a life. Or if you have an Automatic Emergency Defibrillator (AED) handy, then get it promptly. But what should you do then? Ask everyone to be in prayer? Lead a prayer for the sick person? Play quiet music while the EMTs stabilize the patient for transport to the ER? Or just go on with the service? Seems like Churches need a response to these types of situations. What does your Church do?

What does your Church offer for children on Sunday mornings? Children’s Church? A children’s sermon or message during adult worship? A separate Children’s center with lots of hands on activities? Or just nursery and/or children’s sunday school classes? Any of these is appropriate, since they free up the parents to participate in worship. The goal of the Church is for everyone to worship and praise God. And there are many ways to do that. The Church should offer as many different ways to grow and worship as there are groups in the membership.

How does technology enter into the picture where children are concerned? If the families separate when they come in the door, then they need to be reunited when they leave. Many Churches use a checkin/checkout system to reconnect parents and children after worship. A small Church can do this on sight, since everyone knows everyone. But what about visitors? Perhaps you could provide a visitor with a brochure on Children’s Ministry and just write the child’s name on it. That way, you know that they “belong” to the parent and you get an opportunity to tell them about other activities and events.

What is the first impression that visitors get when they go to your Church website? Are they finding a fountain of useful information, or more internet clutter? You want to avoid the clutter, since it will quickly turn them away. Here are some items to watch out for:

Hit Counters – back in the early days, these were impressive; not now
Autoplaying music – the organ is great, but let users choose to hear it
Dollar signs – let users choose to explore giving; there is more to ministry than that

Be sure to get some strangers to look at your site. They will be able to give you first impressions. And listen to them when they identify pages that are confusing or overloaded.

Where do you go to find training materials for ministry? There are lots of great resources available online. This site will soon be setting up a training area dedicated to ministry technology:

Training Page

Check back for new training materials in the future.

You want to be a Church that welcomes newcomers. They are your life blood as a Church. (There is always attrition, as people retire or die. So if you’re aren’t growing, then you’re dying.) However, you don’t see any newcomers coming.

Here are some ideas of things you can do to Welcome the Stranger:

• Take time to welcome any visitors during the worship service.
• Reserve parking spots for Visitors
• Make the nursery clean, safe, sanitary and well-equipped
• Limit announcements to just the highlights

What do people see during the week when the come to the Church? Do you have an information kiosks that they can inspect to see what’s going on? One approach that I’ve seen uses a closed loop TV cable system to display information. The sequence is an endless loop, showing the same series of images. Or perhaps you have a slideshow that appears.

Why not integrate the announcements from Sunday with the information kiosk? That way, people would find the same information when they came to a Church meeting that they saw on Sunday. You could dedicate a page on your web site to providing a slideshow with this information. The slideshow would automatically repeat. You would update it on the database from time to time, and it would publish new announcements automatically. Here is an example that I have programmed:

Announcement Loop

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. It is a computer device that provides online storage to a Local Area Network. Think of it as a File Server. These days, you have a NAS measured in TB (TerraBytes or 10^12 characters). They are a great way to provide your users with backups of their computer systems. Automated software can keep the local hard disk and the directory on the NAS in sync, so that the user never has to worry about losing a file. It is always backed up.

Does your Church IT group provide a NAS? Is it used effectively to preserve ministry files? If so, then how? You might share your technical configuration so that others can learn from it.

Some Churches follow the Liturgical Calendar – a 3 year cycle that takes you through the scriptures systematically. Other Churches depend on their ministry team to select scriptures appropriate to the season and current events. The Liturgical Calendar recognizes that there are patterns in worship (Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost.) It also offers some balance in that it may cover each Gospel in turn.

For Churches that use a Liturgical Calendar, how do you include that in your web site? Here is one example, taken from one Episcopal Church. It uses the appropriate colors for each Sunday.

Woodlands Church

Perhaps you have another.

Hanging the Greens and decorating the sanctuary are always fun. Christmas Lights can be a source of joy all Advent long. It adds something special to a Christmas Eve service to turn down the lights and sing “Silent Night” with just candles. It is always special to sing the Christmas Carols as hymns during worship at Christmas Tide.

However, running all of those Christmas lights can be a challenge. What if they are high in the Sanctuary, perhaps hanging off columns? Or they may require special dimming modules to control them during videos, so they don’t outshine the screens. In a Megachurch environment, you may have a lighting desk already installed. If so, then you just need to add a few more channels and do some programming. But in a Small to Large Church environment, how do you control the lights? Of course, you can delegate the task to the ushers, to make sure they turn on all of the Christmas Lights before each service. But wouldn’t it be easier to use a master switch in the sound booth? However, to do that, you need to wire the circuits in during construction. I have seen cases where there was a separate circuit with a 110VAC outlet at every window, so you could plug in lights for the windows. With a little planning, you can make this a reality in your next Church Sanctuary.

What does a great Church look like? You often think of the great cathedrals. Or perhaps the little brown Church in the woods. Either way, the variety of Church Designs is amazing. However, the Church exists to serve the people, so the design should have some utilitarian aspects. It may be impressive, and that will draw people to it, with a lofty spire and elegant stone cuttings, but it also has to serve the purpose of ministry.

Your staff will no doubt be using printers in the office. (Although there are some who have gone paperless, most Church offices still rely on some paper.) Should these printers be available on Sundays for volunteers to use? Suppose a Small Group Leader needs a few pages printed for handouts to the group. Should the Church make that available? There is a cost associated with each page that is printed. It includes:

• Cost of the printer divided by the number of pages it will print over it’s lifetime
• Cost of the ink or toner used
• Cost of the paper that is printed upon.
• Electricity cost

Since the Church Staff is charged with being good stewards of the office equipment they use, perhaps some limits should be set. For example, anyone can print up to 10 pages on Sundays; but no more. That way, the paper does last until the end of the year. And the staff aren’t surprised on Monday mornings when they find the printer out of paper.

There is a difference between Open Source software and Freeware. Open Source tends to be more thoroughly tested, and thus more reliable. Freeware is often limited, being used as a come-on to buy the commercial product. If your Church is using software to enhance its ministries, then how do you decide? I would suggest the following rules of thumb:

• If it absolutely has to work every Sunday, then perhaps you need a proprietary product. That way, you have support.
• If you are using it in a ministry setting occasionally, the Open Source is less expensive and readily available.
• If you want to turn around and give it away, then Freeware carries no strings.

There are many software products out there these days that are designed for Churches. Some are proprietary. Others are Open Source. The Church needs to make wise choices about these products. Be sure you have several staff and/or volunteers who know the software that you are proposing to get. That way, there will always be someone around who can teach it to others.

TIP: For several software needs, you will find reviews herein – e.g. Presentation Software.

Churches sometimes build new buildings. This is actually an opportunity to foresee the future technical needs of the Church’s ministry. Why not run some extra cables, so that future IT needs can be easily addressed? The cost of doing that at construction time is much, much less than a retrofit later on. However, it does require some foresight on the part of the building architect and trustees. How can you make the case for CAT 6 wiring at the time of construction?

Having Wi-Fi in the Church is a blessing. However, it can also be a resource to hackers. Should the Church provide Wi-Fi service at no charge to any and all who happen by? Some would say “Yes.” Others would be concerned about the security implications: What if the Church got hacked?

There are ways to secure the network in the Church behind a strong firewall. There should be a private network that only the staff uses that is rock solid and secure. If the staff needs access from home, then they should use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access the office. This technology is well proven in the business world. The Church can make use of it, also.

Mobile phones can be allowed access to the local Wi-Fi hotspot in the Church building. But they should be only allowed to access the Internet outside the Church building. The private, staff network would be kept private. This does present a challenge for the Church’s bandwidth. (What if half the people in worship pull out their smart phones and go get the same scripture off BibleGateway.com during the sermon?) Perhaps that should be tested to see if it would work. Perhaps it is a good idea. However, most people have the Scriptures on their phone already in their favorite translation.

Can the Gospel be communicated over Instant Messaging? Certainly! The method of the communication is not what’s important; the message is! If the instant message contains the words “Jesus is the Christ,” then it would seem to be the Gospel. However, Instant Messaging tends to be short, so it would be best used for quick followups.

How about following up with every new believer by sending them a daily text message of encouragement? That would no doubt be a tremendous help in those difficult days following a decision for Christ. Temptations ramp up. Old lifestyle choices tend to come back in full force. Consequences are encountered for past actions. An immature Christian is often times choked by the weeds in the Parable of the Sower. Perhaps some Instant Messages would come to the rescue of a brother or sister in peril. It could be as simple as an agreement to pray for them. It could be as complex as a Bible passage and interpretation. The possibilities are limitless.

If your Church branches out over the Internet, then you can say that you have an Internet Campus. The worship services in the primary sanctuary may be shared live with the Internet Campus branches. But is that really a Church? Some would say it is missing something; it isn’t real worship. Others would say that it is the best of both worlds. The small congregation at the branch gets to hear the great sermon and fantastic music at the primary sanctuary.

I have attended worship services at a wide range of Churches, including Internet branches. The technology provides a way to share the event live across many miles. It could even be used for distant lands. And the praise part of the service can be just as dynamic and glory filled. And a great sermon is just that – a great sermon – no matter where it is preached.