By Jeff Hook

We all know the technological revolution has made a significant impact on our lives, bringing both corporate and public-sector businesses a tremendous amount of productivity and usability benefits. Unfortunately — except in a few very large congregations — the postmodern Church hasn’t been able to truly take advantage of many of these innovations to make operations efficient and effective.

As the Internet-savvy seeker comes of age, a website presence might become as important as the senior pastor’s speaking style and the overall worship experience; however, this requires significant resources to maintain, and it often takes more back-end manual work to administer. Sometimes pastors feel the operational nightmares and expenses are almost not worth the convenience the congregation enjoys as a result. And all too often, the activities and transactions being conducted on the website have no integration with what’s going on in the church’s back-end systems, resulting in duplication of work and extraneous manual efforts.

In a church business environment, staff and volunteers typically push paper from here to there to get their work done, usually in a not-so-timely fashion. The same document is touched many times in various sorting and processing steps, and a tremendous amount of time and energy is wasted. As in the business world, churches have “islands” of automation and information that aren’t tied integrated, which creates the following problems:

• A person calls the church to report an address change, which is then noted in the central database. However, that same address is kept in six other places on spreadsheets on various people’s computers, so continuing contact is disjointed.
• A person registers for a Bible study on the Web. An officer administrator must print out the e-mail sent from the registration service and physically add that person to the registration rolls.
• Someone asks if he can volunteer in one of the ministries for which a background check is required. That same person volunteers in another ministry, and a second background check is conducted because the first is stuck in someone’s file cabinet.
• On paper, a member requests information regarding several different ministries. The message, as it’s routed throughout the staff, is lost or misplaced.

The list of operational inefficiencies goes on and on. And because this work is being performed by volunteers, many churches don’t see this manual effort as really costing them anything. In this day and age, however, any time that’s expended without reason — volunteer or not — is wasted time.

With the technological improvements introduced in recent years — from the Internet to browser Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to SQL databases — it’s past time for the postmodern Church to begin using the power.

An Enterprise Church Management System (eCMS) must address many needs:

Security of children. An eCMS must provide real-time security for children with parental or guardian check-in that involves a form of receipt that can later be used to pick up their kids. Also, it must be able to ensure that volunteers who are caring for the children have undergone appropriate background checks.

Growth. The great commission calls us to reach out and spread the good news. A church that’s not growing — not seeking others or keeping its youth involved — eventually will die. An eCMS should offer all sorts of capabilities to help a church grow, including:

• An integrated contact-management system that doesn’t allow parishioner requests for information, prayers, etc. to slip through the cracks.
• Convenience, so members can avoid activity check-in lines.
• Near-time attendance reporting. A church leader must be aware when normal attendees stop coming to worship so he or she can quickly find out if something is wrong at home or in the church.
• Activity registration. Allowing members to sign up and pay for church activities via the website eliminates a lot of extraneous work.
• Volunteer and staff efficiency. Most churches have a finite amount of financial and people resources. If they aren’t being used for right things, wasted time will eventually suck the life out of your staff.

Technology. The technology you use should be the same as you use in your everyday life. First, it should be Web-based so you can access information from anywhere. It should also be easy to use, just like Amazon.com or your favorite website. Lastly, it should integrate with other forms of new technology so the “islands of automation” can become an integrated continent, all based on the same information.

God created everything relating to technology many years ago, and we’re just now discovering it. Just like other things God created, it can be used for good or evil — but that doesn’t make technology something we should avoid.

Jeff Hook is the president and CEO of Fellowship Technologies. Recently, his company unveiled a groundbreaking software solution called Fellowship One — an ASP-based service that’s totally scalable to meet the needs of any size church, whether it has 200 members or more than 20,000. This fully integrated solution offers management of people, volunteers, contributions, ministries and activities, and also features event registration with real-time attendance tracking. All pertinent information is seamlessly integrated with the church’s public website. For details, log on to www.fellowshiptech.com.