Web-based Ministry

Yesterday I met with my new friend, Boyd, from ChurchTeams.com (a great resource for your church - I encourage you to check them out).  We were talking about the future of the Church, technology and ministry and we talked about the reality that in the not too distant future, churches may not need internal servers. 

I was sharing my thoughts on the Church IT world and how quickly it's changing. How most IT departments are not keeping up with the rapidly changing world around them and how I believe that we're just on the edge of all the change coming to our Church tech and IT worlds. 

I talked about how North Point doesn't use Microsoft Exchange - they're all Google. Many churches are following in their footsteps. Think about it: North Point is a huge church with a large staff - if they can do it, you can, too.

I talked about how churches are using resources like Unifyer, 360Hubs, Arena, Fellowship One, Planning Center Online, ChurchTeams.com, etc., etc. - all web-based resources. 

Today I had lunch with the Emerging Media professor at the University of Texas Dallas. He started talking about this very reality without knowing I had already written most of this post. He talked about the new reality of sharing information via the cloud. I already collaborate with many people and writing partners via Google docs. 

Some of you may think I'm crazy and disagree with me strongly, but I've always been an early adopter and I believe you'll look back on this post 3 years from now and think differently. In your own church world, how many programs that you use are web-based? How big of a stretch would it be to think of doing away with servers in your situation?

Greg Atkinson - www.GregAtkinson.com

Comments

[Kyle Smith]

Greg, I totally agree with you, and not only Churches but businesses and personal use as well. The only requirement should be a solid connection and a good machine to access it. Let's use the resources of Google and other companies to get the job done.

[Anhony Burns]

Greg. We have been using Google's App for Non-Profits for a couple of years now and it works great. I think internal servers for churches is a thing of the past. Why waste God's money on things that others will give you for free.

[Greg Atkinson]

Thanks guys. It's good to see that some "see the light" and know the wonderful resources that are available to us right now and in the future.

I think the big question is for our traditional IT friends that could literally work themselves out of a job: If you could set up your church in a better/healthier situation that was more economical (even free) and didn't require your constant attention and maintenance - if you could set them up to go without internal servers and thus lose your job, would you? That's the question.

[Gabe Hoffman]

it's true, we been using google apps for about 2 years, it's way cheaper and better than exchange (for about 80 staff, btw). planningcenter is a must for every large event and every service. we actually use all the 37signals stuff, including highrise for our member database. add in time machine usb drives for everyone, and we have totally ditched most of our servers. now if I just could buy a really fat fat pipe to the internet I could forget about any sort of mega local storage, but that is a last big need for servers. the lowest quality uncompressed hd video is about a gig a minute, that's a lot of data storage.
I don't think it's working yourself out of a job, if you are at all good at your job anyway. Your job is to make sure that technology doesn't get in the way of people who are doing ministry, and there are going to be more and more ways to do that and empower people. Server maintenance sucks, that's not a career, that's a technical janitor, and yes if that's your idea of IT, you're in trouble.

[Greg Atkinson]

Great thoughts and perspective. I agree. Unfortunately I think server maintenance (the technical janitor) is a lot of churches situation.

I do love the 37 signals stuff and know several churches that are making good use of their resources.

If only more IT folks thought of their job as empowering people like you do. That's an awesome attitude.

[Mike Sessler]

Great thoughts, Greg. We switched to Google Aps for non-profits a year ago and haven't looked back. We run our e-mail and staff calendar there, and use Docs for all sorts of things.

Even though I did set up a small Leopard Server this winter, we use it only for centralized backup of our Macs (with Time Machine) and shared file storage.

We're moving to Church Community Builder for church management, and I hope to get funding for Planning Center Online approved next budget year.

With our distributed "cloud" architecture, our staff has better access to files, email and calendars than we ever did running Exchange. And it's a lot less to manage. I spend literally less than 2 hours a week managing our IT now. It's wonderful!

[Greg Atkinson]

"I spend literally less than 2 hours a week managing our IT now." - Mike, that is wonderful. I work with too many churches, including my own experience at Bent Tree, where IT people have headache after headache, downtime after downtime, errors after errors and cost their church a lot in time and money. Glad to hear of your progress.

[Boyd Pelley]

Thanks for the mention Greg. I enjoyed our time yesterday as well. It is a blast to help build the apps of the future - presently. Our new membership and contributions features perfectly complement our small groups stuff to serve the server free church of the future.

[Mark Burleson]

heh.

you should hang out with Church IT Roundtable more =]

[David Drinnon]

Decentralization of services/software eventually leads to decentralization of information....making it very challenging to integrate information for strategic planning and ministry. For smaller churches that find most of their needs met by a single software (such as a ChMS), this isn't as big of an issue. But in time, as churches push the boundaries of thier solutions, they are often forced to take the best of breed of multiple solutions - one solution for membership, another for accounting, another for event and facilities management, outsourced ecommerce (churches probably won't take on the costs of PCI compliance), and the list goes on. Now churches have issues such as integration, single sign on, disparate and redundant data, etc. This leaves little choice but to bring solutions on-site (off the cloud). How many Fortune 500 corporations do you know are living on the cloud? If a church is going to grow, then it will eventually have to wean at least some or most of its core data off the cloud.

[Greg Atkinson]

Hah! I know Mark - I should hang out with CIRT more. You guys are good people.

David, you seem to not be in touch with reality. How can you compare the Church to Fortune 500 corporations? Most churches are 200 people or less. Most of those are 100 people or less.

You said, "For smaller churches that find most of their needs met by a single software (such as a ChMS), this isn't as big of an issue." - The majority of churches ARE smaller churches and that's why I think these questions must be addressed and wrestled with.

[David Drinnon]

I think you missed the point of my post. I was not arguing against the viability of the cloud for smaller churches. I was only pointing out that as churches grow your proposition doesn't necessarily scale with them.

As a further comment to my initial post, I made a general assumption that smaller churches have simpler processes which are often accommodated by single software solutions. Though this is probably true most of the time, the viability of a solution is often driven by the complexity of the "ministry processes" it facitliates, not just the size of its membership or attendance. On that same note, the same could be said of larger churches, but I have not come across any large churches with simple processes.

[Matt Harrell]

It certainly can be a poor use of God's money. Just to get shared calendars, contacts and email using Microsoft Exchange is SO expensive. Church leaders should really be evaluating how much they spend on these things and the staff and services needed to maintain them all.

I also agree with David's post about having to use different tools sometimes. This is what "web 2.0" (dare I use that term) is all about. Integrating tools and letting each one do it's job.

The timing of all these tools with churches is great and the tools are getting better. We're learning a lot at MemberHub.com and hope to help churches create online community and do the business of being a member all online! For a whole lot cheaper than the solutions churches are trying to use.

Good stuff. Thanks Greg!