Discover how to leverage technology in your church

We’ve heard the story for years now: “Every congregation needs a website”; but the simple reality is that many congregations simply don’t have the knowledge or skills to create and support a site that will be beneficial to the church and its community. I’ll write more on overall strategy in a later post, but for today, I’d like to provide a brief introduction to the various moving parts that make up a website.

At first glance, churches might seem like unlikely targets for cybercrime. After all, why target churches or nonprofit organizations when there’s more money to make by exploiting the vulnerabilities of wealthier corporations?

Fundraising is a hard topic, and I’ll admit at the outset that it’s one I struggle with. The problem is, of course, that it’s so easy to get the perspectives wrong. We can become so intent on our financial goals, particularly if we’re dealing with a large capital project like a new building, that we forget our main purpose of sharing the Gospel with the people we’re working with. Technology can be used to make fundraising more effective, but like any other tool, it has its pros and cons. It can be used in ways that are helpful in building up the Body of Christ; or it can be used in ways that, even if successful in meeting your fundraising goals, can be manipulative and destructive.

So you’ve made good use of your Church Management Software (CMS), and you have some new prospective members who are beginning to interact with your congregation, perhaps even showing up in worship for a few Sundays. What’s next? How do we begin, particularly in larger congregations, to move people from attending to belonging?

Anytime we set out to talk about ways to manage church members’ information, targeted advertising, or other efforts to use technology in outreach, we need to start from the right perspective. None of our cleverness, targeting, or planning can make the Gospel more effective—that’s the Holy Spirit’s job, not ours. What we’re seeking to do with communication, advertising, and technology is to remove barriers to people hearing the Gospel and to ensure that God’s Word is able to speak as clearly as possible to those who need to hear it. This month and for the next several months, we will be looking not at efficacy, but at clarity and removing noise from our communications.

Once upon a time, when the web was young and HTML was new, each web page was its own self-contained piece of content. All of the content and formatting that was required for that page was contained on the page itself in the HTML code, and interactive ideas such as JavaScript were mere ideas and not practice. This worked well at first, but then the day came when someone needed to redesign the look of their website. Perhaps colors needed to be changed or a new logo used. Regardless, the whole site had to change, and that meant changing every single page on the site. And no one—literally no one—wants to do that twice.

We’ve all gotten them . . . the well-meaning envelope trying to notify us about an important upcoming event or to make sure we’re aware of the can’t-miss deal of the century. And you open the envelope (maybe) and pull out the letter and begin reading the message meant uniquely for you. “Dear Sir or Madam . . .”

If you’ve purchased anything in the last twenty or so years, you’ve almost certainly experienced it: that moment when you get to the register to purchase an inconsequential item, perhaps with exact change at the ready, and your dreams of a quick in-and-out transaction are dashed on the rocks of a series of questions:

“Can I get your phone number please? Hmm . . . you’re not in our system. Let me add you. What’s your name? Address? Email address? Phone number? Mother’s cousin’s oldest stepchild’s phone number?”

With the rapid-fire pace of web applications today, it seems there’s a new must-have product about every other week. Generally, these come and go and aren’t actually all that new or innovative, so I hope I might be forgiven for largely ignoring Slack when it first launched. It was, after all, little more than a glorified chat tool, and not something our team at CTSFW really needed.

At this point, though, I think I’m willing to concede that I might have been mistaken in my first look at Slack. Over the last few years it’s actually become an indispensable part of our team’s toolkit, finding a niche alongside apps like Wunderlist, Google Docs, and Gmail in the selection of apps that do one thing, do it really well, and don’t try to do anything else.

Have you ever worked on a project for a church committee where you’ve spent weeks meeting, planning, studying, and preparing to make a decision, then a few more weeks double-checking some things, and then a handful more weeks waiting for the right people to come back from vacation, and finally after months of delays, preparation, and hard work, discovered that the opportunity had passed or the problem had solved itself?

Nobody likes to waste their time, and sometimes churches move at the speed of committees. (Which is, incidentally, only slightly slower than frozen molasses on a January morning in northern Canada . . . during an ice age.) Speed is not the only virtue, of course, and we want to make wise decisions with limited resources. But in many cases, it would be very helpful if churches were a little more agile.