ChurchIT – Supporting ministry with IT

Some inspirational words from David Seah in a blog post.

what I was lacking was the great truth that the right attitude is more than just having discipline. It is also believing that doing any work at all is worth doing well, and choosing to live that way is a mighty testament to the universality of Excellence in all we do.

I think David is well worth reading. He has also developed the Pocket CEO series of printable personal planners.

He also has an excellent example of how to do a personal wiki.

There’s an amusing collection of Top Ten Church Worship Lies over at Music Academy. While trying to keep within the spirit of the post (ie not taking life too seriously) I would like to stand up for all us bassists who would dearly love to employ more effects in our playing.

I’ve got a Zoom 506, not a great pedal (auto-hiss as standard according to one friend with some justifiction) but most of the time I use it just as a tuner, sometimes adding some octaver. It’s so old that Zoom don’t even have a page for it any more! Just a mention in the History section.

How I dearly want to use the distortion/flange effect I used on a recording in my band at Uni. Perhaps I’ll slip in some wahwah here and there and see if anyone notices.

Until then, I shall work on introducing the Ukulele.

I’m in the process of redesigning our church’s web site. Having realised that spending £10 for a proper template (thanks to JoomlaShack and their online template builder) rather than trying to do it myself and wasting a lot of time, the main work has been deciding how to organise the articles and what should be on the front page.

Church Relevance has a regular chart of well designed church web sites and this provides a useful counter balance to my desire to get as much content on the front page, often at the expense of visual eye candy. Hopefully the new homepage will do this much better than the current one.

Even so it’s hard to know what sort of information should take pride of place on the web site and this goes to the root of what the web site is for. It is an advertisement for the church to the world, but it can also provide huge benefits for existing members.

I read a great article tonight on the subject at digital.leadnet.org, ‘Does your church website serve two masters?‘. For a long time the majority of our traffic has been from new visitors. Some new traffic is good but this suggests that it’s not really a community site. I’d also love to see the site used by more people but that doesn’t seem to happen. But that’s a good reminder for me that many people do not use the web and computers like I do. So I think for the moment we should concentrate on bringing people in on the main website, and maybe set up a subdomain for all the internal stuff. 

I think I shall add have added the author’s blog, healyourchurchwebsite.com to my blogroll.

Now I need is approval and sign off….

One of the dangers of computers is trying to do more than one thing at a time. I suppose that’s always been the case but working with the email and instant messenger running, not to mention the blogroll (and the forums I’m supposed to keep an eye on), it’s hard to stay focused on any one thing. And that’s not mentioning the real people I work with, who are far more interesting and worthy of my time.

I was very interested by this article that popped up the other day (via Lifehacker if memory serves) about how to concentrate.

It got me thinking that many successful people really know how to concentrate on one thing. There’s certainly enough tips online about booking meetings with yourself to avoid interuptions.

Perhaps I shall cut down on the distractions, people know my telephone number if it’s really urgent. Curiously enough I sometimes miss the old days of essays at Uni, when I could just focus on one thing for several hours and not get distracted.

Then again, I’ve got a lot of words to write on one subject tomorrow, so I may well get the chance after all!

There’s one reason why I miss the tape recorder in own sound desk. It’s the sole reason, but still important. It was really simple to use. You popped a tape in and pressed the large record button. And it was simple to check. Just look for the depressed button, the tape spindles moving and maybe some activity on the level monitor.

My MP3 player – an MSI Megastick 528 – fantastic little device with a line in socket – takes up a fraction of the space, records for longer than a briefcase of tapes (ok just a guess) and runs for hours off a single AAA battery. So it’s better surely?

Well no, not really. There’s no way to check levels without playing a track back, and there’s rarely time for that before a service. It’s also a little slow to respond to button presses; once it’s going it’s fine but sometimes getting there can be a pain.

Now, this is one thing for me, I’m reasonably comfortable at messing around with technology and can normally get it to work without raising my blood pressure too much, but there’s no way I can recommend it in a situation with people who are less happy with playing around this way. What we need is something with that familiar red button, preferably large and easy to see when active.

The trouble is, most electronic devices are just a variation on my MP3 player. We used to use an M-Audio portable recorder for podcasts and even I managed to fluff up recordings by not pressing the right combination of buttons. It’s not that the device didn’t work, just it wasn’t as simple as a tape deck.

I asked this question at the Worship conference held at Crawley Baptist last month as we had a seminar dedicated to sound and pa. They recommended the iKey Plus as offering the right balance of functionality and ease of use, and it certainly looks that way from a quick read of the manual.

Interestingly as I was mulling this post, an entry appeared from Musicians Tools for this rack mounted recording device for iPods. We’ve already got an iPod Nano for day to day background music in the church, I’m sure one more iPod won’t hurt.

My children often join me at the front or back of church if I’m playing or operating the mixer respectively. We are at the more relaxed of our two services so I don’t think it’s a problem (despite the attraction of the multicoloured buttons and sliders on the mixer – and my guitar amp come to think of it!).
Actually I’d go further than that and say it would be a problem if I sent them away. I was rather pleased to find this video of Linus Torvalds at the Linux World awards a few years ago.
You’ll have to wait a little but about a minute in his children run on stage to be with him. That’s the kind of open attitude I think we should see more of.

Stallman receiving Torvalds award at LinuxWorld conf 1999

I’m not normally given to extolling the virtues of a plain technology, what you can do with it is much more important. But I think an exception might be in order.

If you’ve not heard of XML it stands for eXtensible Markup Language, and if that sounds similar to HTML, the language of the web, you’d be right. XML is designed to be more flexible as you can define what XML is used for, so it is equally at home handling a home CD collection, or organising songs in OpenSong.

There’s my link to what you can do with it. The creators of OpenSong decided to use XML for the songs, which was a very good decision in my opinion. Someone  on the OpenSong forums asked if it is possible to convert songs to Word or PDF. Actually conversion isn’t strictly speaking necessary because Word can open the files without any extra help. Well, baring renaming the files to songname.xml because the OpenSong files don’t have a file extension. One small detail I would change.

It’s not just Word either, OpenOffice Writer opened the song too. In fact in some respects slightly better because the XML tags are represented as plain text so a simple find and replace macro will remove them.

So why the praise for XML? Well, because of the way it was created it is possible for two programs (OK three OpenSong, Word and Writer – I’m lumping the latter two together) to share information without any kind of modification. Even if they couldn’t, because XML is text based it’s human readable. In theory at least, though OpenSong files are very clear and easy to read.

So it’s a great format in my opinion, and one that I hope thrives.

I picked up a copy of Reaching the Unchurched: Some lessons from Willow Creek last night and had a quick read. It’s only 20 pages so only took as long as some updates to Windows.

What struck me was that even 16 years on it is still very relevant and challenging (yes I know how old the Bible is!).  It made me think about how seeker friendly our services are and I fear we could do better.

It’s always hard because many parts of church become habit.

A good example was at church on Sunday when we had a baptism, so lots of visitors compared to normal. The person doing the intercessions (first bit of jargon) finished off in the usual Anglican way ‘Merciful Father…’ and those of us in the know finished off with ‘accept these prayers, for the sake of your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ Amen’. Now we didn’t announce where these words could be found (I do this all the time as well) so there was no way the visitors could have known what to say. For the record, I didn’t have to look the words up.

I feel bad about it now, but it didn’t cross my mind at the time, which only makes me feel worse!

The booklet hit the nail on the head with the assertion that seeker friendly services cannot be the same as ordinary church. What I’m looking for in terms of spiritual refreshment isn’t going to happen.

If you want a read, there are copies still floating around. I found five on the Amazon Marketplace.

I’m making a start on Mission Shaped Church now. Currently half price from Church House Publishing with some sample chapters available as PDF.