Worship attendance and weekly giving are obvious metrics every church uses to evaluate health and growth.  But, there are a series of activities underlying these numbers that actually drive them.  These include: outreach, follow-up, equipping, groups, and serving.

The most effective way to help church members who aren’t yet part of a small group is through focused, personal communication designed just for them, rather than a general announcement.

The story of your weekly service(s) involves more than just attendance.  Customize our meeting reports to capture not only attendance; but sermon topic, salvations, baptisms, guests, parking spots, weather, holidays, and anything else that adds depth to your worship history.  

Last year I wrote blog posts on How to solve the problem and see the potential of worship service attendance and The best way to collect attendance from all your worship services.  These focused on how to use Check-in (we call it All Check) and Connection cards to capture individual attendance.  This can be augmented with counters reviewing the total and adding in a # for guests to accurately reflect actual attendance.

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!