Just over a week ago I attended a different church – the first one in a long, long time. No, I’m not leaving mine but was simply paying a visit to the one where my teenager now attends whilst at University.

The building is very typical Anglican in that it has a central seating area surounded by two rows of pillars and two side seating areas either side of the pillars. Whilst this is a traditional layout for the seating area it can leave a lot to be desired in terms of being able to see – unless of course you like this or want to sleep during the sermon!

However, this church had overcome this and on each pillar there was a large screen TV (old style analgoue but why not if it works?) – I guess 21″ or more along with a large screen off centre and down the front. All of these were centrally linked to the media projector for song words, presentations, notices, etc and they were also all linked to a recording device / live media streamer. It didn’t take me long to spot that they were using a dome camera (similar to these) with a 360 degree field of vision.

I’d loved to have had a chat with the operator or the person9s) responsible for the vision behind it all but I was there for family time so couldn’t justify it. However, I was impressed with the alternative use of a product that it wasn’t specifically designed for.

This got me to thinking about how I could use stuff I know about in differeing ways. Hopefully more on that anon.

What novel ways do you use equipment, software, etc?

And by media here I mean books, magazines, newspapers … in other words printed material.

I’ve long been a quiet evangelist for the green movement – not that I am an out and out recycling nutjob or constantly turning off lights, etc but I do try and remind folks where it’s blindingly obvious that we all can help to save our planet.

One of the ways I’ve been trying to drive the Church in this is by moving to what I’m terming as online publishing. Take last Sunday morning for example … I walked in and was greeted with a smile, a hug and no less than six individual bits of paper. Each had a valid reason for its existence but equally each could have been condensed down to a couple of lines and put on one piece. After the service I lost count of how many of these bundles of six were left languishing on their seats forgotten by their owners.

Is there an answer? I think so but the onus to drive it has to come from our leaders as they are the ones getting the designer(s) to generate this content.

First and foremost we need to look into exactly what is being handed out and why. Does it need to be printed out? If so, does it need to be handed out to every member or is it meant for external distribution? If for members (and I ought to clarify that I also mean attenders here as well) then do we need the huge glossy flyer for what essentially boils down to a date, time and type of service?

For regular content, such as a newsletter or magazine can we not get these (on the whole) delivered by electronic means? In our Church we are fortunate that most of the members are internet enabled and have personal email addresses. For those that don’t we can still run off the odd dozen copies or so.

I’m sure I don’t need to teach any whom read this to suck eggs but I’m raising this today to remind myself to address the issue with my church leaders and to challenge the tech community to suggest alternatives when the guaranteed “but what about’s” start coming at us.

So what do you do in your Church to reduce your carbon footprint?

I got a desperate plea today to come and sort out “a highly annoying problem” for our Mac user.

The K9 installation on his Mac required updating and no matter what he tried he couldn’t update it, nor could he get rid of the extremely intrusive and annoying popup. He tells me he even tried to trash the install of it but couldn’t – at least I’m grateful for password protected installs.

So I take time out from family time to go and see to this issue to discover that this popup is simply a black box approx 1cm x 1.5cm in the top right hand corner of his screen. It is also mostly transparent!

Arghhh!

Honestly, I don’t mind dropping everything to help out when the situation demands it, but this was taking the biscuit. I feel the need for a strongly worded email pointing out just how ridiculous the supposed urgency of this was and do they realise they dragged me away from precious family time for something that was nigh on irrelevant!

Sigh! What do you do in these situations?

Regular readers will know that my Church is creating an online presence.

The first aspect of this is our online bookshop – not some two bit addon to what we sell at the back of the coffee lunge on a Sunday morning, but a full blown professionally designed and built eCommerce site. Why? Simply because the Church has run a Christian book import / export business for over ten years now and this is the next natural stepping stone for us.

Due to my various involvements with the Church and my professional life I was put in charge of the web projects and although I’m involving the leadership every step of the way I have been given carte blanche to do “what I think best” and that “Stuart has the last say in anything web related”. Awesome responsibilities and an awesome challenge as well.

Part of the current challenge is in getting our developer to cough up the goods. Some of you will have already seen the “almost complete” eCommerce site. Unfortunately it hasn’t moved on from there as the developer has given every excuse under the sun to not do the work or to prevaricate over doing it. He has one task left – to ensure the payment gateway works, but rather than actually doing it all I appear to be getting is excuses. I’ve started praying for him / the project and have suggested the leadership do so as well.

As a part of all this frustration I’ve been thinking about the occasion when we do actually launch it. Thoughts like:

• what will be our daily / weekly / monthly tasks?
• how can I encourage the Church staff to keep this at the forefront of their thinking?
• how can we make the site look new / different without actually changing the template?
• how often should we change banners / special offers / etc?

Because I work outside of the Church in my professional life I won’t always be there to nudge, cajole and encourage and let’s be honest – eMail simply doesn’t hit the mark with everyone. So my first challenge is to get the leadership to have a monthly meeting (at least) that is solely dedicated to considering the online bookshop. Get them to discuss previous months sales – investigate any feedback – look at what stock to include / exclude – consider what promotional items to run – set challenges for the month ahead – involve the creative chap in designing the rotating banners and so on ….

Apart from these items is there anything else I should be considering?

After all, this is new to me as well.

Jim Walton of Church Tech Matters twittered yesterday “…..what is wrong with me? Why do I have little interest to continue playing church? it seems there is so much more and I want that”

This is very similar to the challenge I’ve thrown at myself in the quietness of my own head many a time and even blogged about at least once in my early days. Unfortunately I don’t know the answer and I don’t have an answer for Jim other than to hang on in there and keep seeking. (more…)