Technology does make life easier at Church.
From paper songbooks to overhead slides, physical Bibles to YouVersion, podcasting to videocasting, physical notes to springpad, desktop to cloud, the list can go on and on depending on your Church’s needs and willingness to adopt tools like these.
On the flip side, there are such things like over-dependence and incorrect usage that can mutate worship services into sound & light concerts, distract people away from a sermon, alienate sections of people etc.
So I’m kinda curious to know…
- Out of all the tech tools in use in your Church or ministry, which do you think has been most beneficial? In terms of helping to serve the congregation better or reducing cost/time/effort.
- Which tech tool gave your Church/ministry maximum grief?
- How do you keep technology on a leash?
Would be grateful if you could post your answers in the comments.
Gangai Victor
A worship leader / musician / trainer / songwriter and technology enthusiast from India. Author of The Worship Kenbook. Blogs at Worship Blog
Does “tech tool” refer to the old deaf guy sitting behind the sound board? If so then that is my nomination for the most grief award!!
Mean! 😉
You must be a baptist lol j/k…. but seriously… Lol
1 Maybe the bible app from you version and the churches website
2 Mediashout for sure!
3 A small budget 😛
(1) I love YV too!
(2) MS? Really? I found it a monster to get used to!
(3) Awww, tell me about it!
#2 you said maximum greif it gives us a lot of trouble crashes and a poor ui etc.
Sorry, I was actually agreeing with you, should have typed:
“MS! Really! I found it a monster to get used to too!”
You can learn to program faster than you can get used to the unbelievably complicated UI.
Ended up ditching it actually!
My personal favorite technologies that I think are awesome for church are:
1) Open DNS – free way to install a web filter on your network
2) WordPress – the best website building tool out there period. Of course, this is just my opinion, all my Drupal buddies wanna kill me for saying that 🙂
3) VM Ware – virtualization maybe the way to go for the church to cut down costs
Awesome!
Though my blog is running on blogspot, I dig the utility of wordpress.
Thanks for sharing.
1. The most beneficial tech tool hands down has been Church Community Builder. It is an online database system that allows us to communicate via email/text, track attendance, keep up with calendars, check-in system, custom reports, and help accountability for following up with people (assimilation)
2. The maximum grief comes from old computers and bad wiring/ip phones. Computers are slow as a turtle. We purchased the campus we are at and everything was already installed sound/lights/network/phones and nothing makes sence lol.
3. I love technology but I have to really think through solutions before implementing them. For the online directory we use, I actually travelled with another staff member 2 hours away to another church to see how they are using the system and to see how they like it! We brought all our questions and got as much info as we could. Technology isn’t cheap and should be thought through before jumping in. After all, most of the time you are spending the churches/God’s money and not your own. Get as much information as you can, cout the costs and see if it helps achieve your mission.
Great to see cloud computing taking a place!
I learnt a lot from ur response on (3). Some thoughtful stewardship principles that everyone should look at embracing.