The last question to our panel (context) which is the title of this blog post was open-ended in nature.  I took it as an opportunity to share two major concerns I have for technology in discipleship.  The first one relates to parenting and the use of technology.  The second one concerns church data and the use of technology.

I was a family pastor for many years and have always been interested in parenting through different seasons of technology development.  Our kids graduated from high school in 2008 and 2010, so their first phones were flip phones.  They used them a lot to text their friends, so we had to put boundaries on their access to their phones at night.  They were also not allowed to look at them at school.

In less than six weeks, on June 17th, AT&T will Say Goodbye to email-to-text and text-to-email.  In other words, your church-goers who use AT&T will no longer be able to receive texts you send through our free texting option.

When we first developed texting in Churchteams, it was done exclusively by leveraging this service which was offered by all major US telecommunication companies.  This allowed us to offer free texting for many years.  However, in 2020 and 2021, all the major telecoms launched their 10DLC (10-Digit Long Code) services, the first step in a shift away from free texting.

The third question given to our panel (back story) had to do with finding the balance between the use of technology and the importance of face-to-face relationships in discipleship.  

I think I understand the concern behind this question, but to be honest my definition of discipleship leaves very little room for technology interference.  Here's what I mean.

Christian discipleship is about becoming more and more like Jesus.  At its core this is something that happens within the heart of a person.  This means transforming a person's mind, emotion, and will so that they align with that of Jesus.

Holy week can be a blur of admin details for pastors and church staff.  They are spending extra time this week preparing for a Seder meal, or maybe a Good Friday service, and very likely extra services over the weekend.   And, hopefully, a plan to follow-up new guests.

I just got off the phone with a part time, children's minister who put together an Easter egg hunt this past weekend.  She got a stack of cards with information from the families that attended.

She just finished manually entering that data into a spreadsheet.  One at a time she is copying and pasting addresses to send emails.  She is also typing phone numbers into her phone one at a time to send follow up texts.

What tools do you offer churches to effectively foster deeper spiritual growth?

Last week I attended the Disciple Leaders Network annual meeting in Oklahoma City.  On Monday night they asked a group of us who work in the technology in ministry space to talk about discipleship and technology. 

I thought the questions we discussed were particularly interesting and that you might be interested in them. 

There were four questions overall.  Here's the first one along with my expanded response.

These recent releases showcase the incredible responsiveness and creativity of our support and development teams. We've rolled out fantastic upgrades that make your experience smoother and more efficient.

Now, you can easily maintain a history of contributions while keeping your database clean. We've developed a faster, more up-front way to prevent duplicates when manually entering a new person.  And now, making a registration payment is even more convenient—with just a click from an email or text, users can securely pay using a saved card.

These are just a few of the ongoing improvements we’ve recently released. Check them out!

Almost six months ago I started a blog series on the top ways to use registrations for events and forms in Churchteams.  Our support and onboarding teams deal with these applications of the software all the time.  In addition, our Knowledge Base is full of related articles that need to be optimized. 

The goal of this series was to draw attention to specific ways to use the feature and then point to articles and video resources to help build out these applications.  I did some research on how some of our top churches were using the feature on their websites and used those findings to outline this series.

A growing number of churches use Prepare your visit forms to make the first visit experience as hospitable as possible.  I had written on that as part of a series on workflows a few years ago.  In addition to that use of the registration feature, here is a summary of this series with a link to each topic for quick access.

If you have kids or grandkids, you may know that many preschools and private schools start registering for the following school year in February and March.  My kids were talking about it for our grandkids just the other day.

If your church or organization offers a preschool, elementary school, or any other program that requires paying tuition or installments over time; you know managing that entire process can be a challenge.  We've navigated these waters with many churches through the years and now have an incredible solution that addresses pretty much every concern you are likely to have.  Here are some examples:

Almost all churches track worship attendance to give leadership an idea of the effectiveness of their large, celebration gatherings.   Generally, a single number represents the attendance each week or in some cases for each service, each week.  These are then plotted over a period of time to track engagement and see trends.  We all know this.

Sometimes individual attendance is tracked in worship in order to reach out to people who miss multiple times.  This works fine for really small churches, but larger churches empower their small groups to shoulder the burden of care.

Do your small groups feel like they might be old news in your church?  Maybe people know they are expected to be a part of a small group, but they are not excited to actually participate.  It's like the life has gone out of the small groups ministry.

There are hundreds of references in the New Testament to the church being a family.  Think about all the times the authors refer to church members as brothers, sisters, mothers, sons, daughters, children, family of God, etc..  It was this way from the start of the church.

How do you register parents and kids for Camp and VBS currently?  Is it all by paper?  Do you use a third party tool or your website provider form to capture the information electronically and then have to export it to Excel or manually enter it into your database?  What about accepting and tracking payments?  

In Meet The Software every week, I talk about how we empower leaders by integrating their multiple data sources (including sticky notes and Excel) into a single database.  Instead of their information being scattered, leadership is empowered when their information lives and works together!  Join me in that Zoom webinar for additional insights into why and how technology evolved to create this frustration and how we resolve it.