Does your Church have formal written policies for accessing computers or hiring technical equipment?

Do you enforce them by use of security appliances, hardware, software or by restricting access via group policy (or similar)?

Or are you like the Church I attend – a total free for all when it comes to computer access and whom uses them? I admit it is one of my huge bugbears and I’ve been fighting an uphill battle with the senior leadership to get them understand the issue.

It isn’t that I want to lock the Church down or be some mafia admin character. I’m trying to help them help themselves. After all, we’re quite happy to introduce police checking for our children’s workers (which is not yet a requirement in UK law for Churches) and are very strict on that. We also vet our ushers but not to the same degree – though there was talk that as they may come into contact with children that they too need to be police vetted. So it is with some surprise that I can’t get them to understand the need.

We have documents – such as those to do with the child protection policy which really shouldn’t be accessible by anyone but those “in the know”. OK, so permissions on the server are set correctly and they aren’t easy to access but then you find out the main person behind the CPP is logging other folks in with their user id … can we all say argggh! After all, if I recall correctly, some 80% plus of any network attack is an inside job in the first place.

Then there are the notes the senior pastor might write to assist with helping keep track of what he’s doing, saying, etc …. some of these (at a guess) could be damaging if the wrong person got hold of them. Naturally his P.A. has access to most of the same documents which are frequently stored on the local PC and not the supplied securer network drive. Then I find folks happily surfing the net and doing all sorts from her PC and they continue to wonder why her PC needs frequent rebuilds or cleaning sessions.

Please tell me I’m not alone in this and that my battle to make them create, use and then enforce policies is not a futile one. For sure there will always be some who want to buck the system – even in a Church.