Discover how to leverage technology in your church

One of my favorite board games to play when I was a kid was a two-person game called Stratego. The goal of Stratego is to capture the flag of the opposing player while protecting one’s own. Each player starts with a large number of pieces, and each piece has a ranking. The players battle those pieces against each other until one can capture the other’s flag.

Throw out the phrase “bullet journal” in conversation, and you’ll likely get a variety of responses: everything from “Oh, I’m not ‘arsty’ enough for that,” to “This is the single greatest tool I’ve found for organizing my life,” and a lot of reactions in between. While some take a more elaborate approach to bullet journaling, others use their notebook or journal to simplify.

The COVID-19 has quickly changed almost every aspect of our lives, including our worship lives. Many churches are choosing not to hold worship services in person, but are moving online through recorded videos or livestreaming.

When I started as a church office administrator, one of my first projects was to update member records in a spreadsheet. As I sat typing, I remember thinking, “There must be a software program that can make this process easier… and keep it that way!”

We’ve all heard about those congregations that just seem to have a toxic culture. Perhaps it’s a tight-knit community that has a hard time welcoming in strangers. Maybe it’s a church whose members try to run the church behind the pastor’s back. I think one of the most common examples of toxicity in a church, however, is one in which too many people become apathetic to the church’s mission of growing disciples and feeding Jesus’ sheep.

I recently reread Kem Meyer’s book, Less Chaos. Less Noise. As I did, Meyer’s words hit me right between the eyes, as they often do. This time, however, it wasn’t about written communication. What got me was her writing on people skills.

About six weeks into my DCE internship, I was planning to leave town on my day off for the first time. There was an event taking place at the church while I would be gone, and though I had carried out my responsibilities and left the day’s tasks in more-than-capable hands, I felt anxious, almost guilty, about leaving.

Working for a church can be one of the most fulfilling career paths out there! Not only do you get paid to pursue your passion and serve God using the gifts and abilities He’s given you, but you also get to grow extremely close to the people you’re serving with, in ways that aren’t typical for non-church-work jobs. Your faith not only plays a role in your work life, but is the center of it. Many times, you become family with the people you are serving with.

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?