#churchtech

Your church website is very important. For many people, it is the front door to your church, the first impression that they get. Likely your website is also a resource to your members, a place to keep everyone up-to-date and promote events and such.

It’s way too early to see Christmas in public, but it’s never too early for your church to start planning Christmas. That might cause some of you to break out in hives. If even thinking about starting to plan Christmas festivities for your church feels daunting, you’re not alone. But technology can help. There are a lot of ways you can make your Christmas efforts more productive—and maintain your sanity—with the judicious use of technology.

When researching technology partners for your ministry there are many different variables. What I'm going to talk about today are the five most important things you should consider when evaluating potential technology partners. If the technology partner you are considering values these five things, you can rest assured that everything else will fall into place. It's also important that the design looks nice and the user experience isn’t clunky. But if these five things are executed well, you can be confident the design and user experience will be of quality too. What I want to stress is that it's more important to understand why the company does what it does and how it does it, rather than whether or not they have a nice website with good sales.

Planting a church is hard work. In the early stages, a small group of people handles the brunt of the workload. Sunday set-up, child care, budgets, communications, you name it. Resources may be low, but solutions are still necessary. Thankfully, technology can help ease some of the burdens.

The best church sound systems in the world can suffer from one simple problem: Bad audio from the pastor’s microphone. What a travesty! If there is anything a church sound system is designed to do, it is to provide clear and accurate transmission of the spoken word.

One of the funnest articles I’ve read on the now famous pound symbol was called “Ode to the #Hashtag: A tribute to the most ubiquitous symbol of our digital times.” It was written back in 2013 by Andrew Miller on Medium, but is every bit as relevant today as it was back then. Especially this line: “People don’t know how to use you, But dump you everywhere just in case, Brands all rush to be your friend, To justify their journeys into cyberspace.” That is so true.

When Jesus said “go and make disciples of all nations” his followers listened. And, we’ve been in the business of making disciples ever since. But in recent years social media has changed the playing field. The word “go” and the phrase “all nations” are no longer restricted to physical travel and national borders.

The idea of goal setting has become almost synonymous with the dawning of a new year. While it's fresh on everyone's mind, it seems like a good time to consider your church tech goals.