hardware

External Hard Drives: A Must-Have for Church Staff External hard drives are a valuable tool for church staff members. They offer a number of benefits,...

External Hard Drives: SSD vs. HDD External hard drives are an essential part of computer storage that is either used to back up important files...

With the recent events requiring us to worship from home in many places around the world, church apps are proving themselves highly valuable. Whether you have a church app, or you're looking to get one, how do you encourage digital discipleship through the platform?

Have you thought about using a dedicated church app to share sermon audio, video, and notes, to accept event sign-ups and offer a way for people to give digitally right from their pockets? Church leaders shouldn't overpay for a church app. For that reason, we're ranking this list of church app providers by affordability.

One of the most common live-streaming questions people have when they're first getting started is "what do I need?" Often the chorus of "just use your phone" drowns out the advice from people who know the limitations of that advice. In most circumstances, a single phone in the back of the sanctuary isn't going to do as good a job as a camcorder connected to an encoder. Normally, the steps from a single phone to a multi-camera live-stream, with graphics, are like a maze. You can go a long way down a single path only to find that you've hit a dead-end and have to turn around and start over again. Not so with the SlingStudio Multi-Camera Live Streaming Platform from the folks at Dish Network. Its major strength is that it eliminates the dead ends.

Do you work away from home or the church office? If so, I'd like to offer several suggestions for a pastor's mobile office toolbox that includes hardware, software, and apps to make working away from the office easier.

Churches use many apps for presenting media, tracking membership, helping with budgets, and even updating their websites. Some churches also offer a church app primarily for people who attend their church. They contract with a church app provider to make an app that is branded for their church and focused on the needs of people in the pews.

As a mom of four school-aged kids between the ages of seven and thirteen, navigating and regulating screen time consumption at four different levels requires NASA-grade determination and persistence to say the least. Between the oldest who'd like to play 24 hours a day of XBox Live, to the youngest who'd like to watch SpongeBob from the moment she gets home from school until I pull the remote from her death grip, let's just say screen time is not my favorite thing to police. I know I'm not alone.