Growing Healthy Churches (May and June)

With guest speaker Dr Paul Borden. Dr Borden “is in demand internationally as a church consultant. Paul has been working with Bishop Ivan Lee and the Mission Area Leaders, and recently conducted two parish consultations.” There are 4 events – 2 for lay leaders, and 2 for pastors.

Download the PDF information sheet, or register here.

Exchange Conference (1 June)

Held at St Anne’s Ryde, “Exchange is more than just a conference, it is a forum for people who want to reach people and share the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

It includes IDEX:

“…an EXchange of IDeas that others have had in reaching people with the message of Jesus. We will have 12 of the best ideas we can find and give them 2 minutes to let you know what they have done.”

Find out more.

Shine Conference (15 June)

Hosted by St Paul’s Castle Hill, Shine is ”a conference for creatives & church leaders to unite, equip & inspire.” I’ll be speaking at a workshop on social media, and church communication.

Find out more.

PTC Training Day (3 August)

Hosted by the Presbyterian Theological Centre, the theme of this day is ’The Hard Things of Life and the Riches of God’s Word’. The guest speaker Ed Welch from the Christian Counselling and Education Foundation.

Download the flyer, or register here.

Preaching that Connects (20 June)

Hosted by Corn Hill Sydney, this event will feature Phil Campbell (Mitchelton Presbyterian, Brisbane), Gary Millar (Principal Queensland Theolgical College) and R.W. Glenn (Redeemer Bible Church, Minneapolis, USA).

There will be a round-table discussion chaired by Simon Manchester, input on preaching well from the Old Testament, and also practical advice on how to avoid putting our people to sleep while we preach.

The conference will also launch Gary and Phil’s new book, ‘Saving Eutychus‘.

• Where: St Thomas’ Anglican Church, Cnr Church & McLaren Streets,, North Sydney, NSW
• Rego: $30 (including morning tea). Please pay on the day.
• RSVP: via Facebook or to gavin@cornhillsydney.com.au

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

It’s also possible in a growing ministry environment to be overwhelmed by emails and tasks.

I’ve started to think about how we could use technology as a tool to assist our team communication and collaboration. I’ve mapped out our requirements – these are requirements that are important in our context, but would be true of many churches.

What are the essential requirements?

These are the non-negotiables. If the tool doesn’t meet these requirements, it’s not up for consideration.

1. It needs to be free. There’s an amazing number of great tools for managing tasks and projects (Flow, Basecamp, Producteev, Blimp, Wunderlist Pro, Strikebase, etc), but even at around $5+ per month/user, it’s a stretch for most churches, including mine. Besides, there are some really good free tools available (for example, Do, Asana).
2. It needs to be easy to use. If it’s not, no one will use it, and that defeats the purpose.
3. It needs to be accesible on the go. We can’t be limited to taking notes when we’re at our desk, or taking notes in one place when we’re out, then transferring them when we return.
4. It needs to serve both individuals and the team. Some tools are great to use as an individual, but can’t be used as a team (e.g. Omnifocus). Others tools work great for teams, but are clunky to use as an individual. We need a tool that serves both.
5. It needs to sync with Google Calendar. This is what we use (as part of Google Apps), and being able to see upcoming/due tasks in the calendar will make staying on top of tasks much easier.

What are the ‘nice to haves’?

1. Integration with Google Apps. Ideally, we will be able to log-in using our Google Apps account, without the need for another username and password. More importantly, to be able to access and link to files from within Google Drive would be really handy. I’m still toying with this being an essential requirement, given the usefulness of Google Drive as a repository for our documents.
2. Integration with Evernote. This is less of a priority, but as I’m still exploring the possibilities of using Evernote Business as a repository of important information, I don’t want to rule it out.

How do I envisage us using this tool?

The desire is for the tool to improve communication and collaboration, not add a burden to our already busy days. Here’s how this might look:

• Collectively adding to a list of tasks (e.g. things that we think of to be fixed at the next working bee).
• Working on major events and projects that require the contributions of many (e.g. website redevelopment, Easter,  carols, Christmas, Central). This includes detailing who is going to do what, and when – including both staff and members.
• Setting up recurring tasks for regular and important activities (e.g. marking attendance, inviting people to courses, praying, updating the calendar, etc).

What are your experiences with using technology to assist church teams? What tools and workflows have you found to be beneficial?

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

Find out more.

Two Ways to Live (iOS)

Find out more.

Gospel Message (iOS and Android)

Find out more.

New World (iOS and Android)

Find out more.

Gospel in 7 (Android)

Find out more.

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

Find out more on the Barley website.

I also think Squarespace has a lot of potential.

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

“I met with a young man in our church recently. I love his heart. I baptized him a few months ago and have taken a personal interest in him. I see such kindness in him, that I asked him to serve in our children’s ministry. He was delighted.

After we talked about the opportunity, he said he filled out a card asking to serve in our preschool ministry a year ago and never heard anything. He assumed we weren’t interested in him. I was devastated. Hopefully, he simply fell through the cracks of our system, but this type of thing frustrates me more than just about anything.”

It frustrates me, too.

As the frequent victim of unresponsiveness (more often outside the church, than inside it), it’s difficult to conclude anything other than “I guess they just don’t care”. Just yesterday, I was chasing an organisation who I have contacted 5 times without response.

Addressing unresponsiveness

Let’s be clear – in churches, a lack of response is very rarely intentional. Ultimately, poor processes (or a lack of processes) are most often the culprit.

How should this be addressed? Ron makes 5 suggestions for what to do:

1. Make responsiveness an extremely high value in the organization.
2. Leaders should lead by example.
3. Answer all emails and return calls promptly, even if you don’t have an answer yet.
4. Have a system is in place to respond to all queries.
5. Never ignore a request.

These are excellent suggestions. With number 4 in mind, I’ve started to map out processes for a couple of key areas of our church life, and integrating these processes with our member database. These include:

• A process for responding to people who sign-up for our Belonging course.
• A process for responding to people who sign-up for our Christianity Explored course.
• A process for adding new people to our member database, and welcoming them to church.
• A process for following up on questions submitted via our Next Steps cards.

This is just a start – there’s lots of other opportunities to be more intentional in these processes. For example:

• A process when someone leaves church (it’s too easy for people to leave, and their absence to go unnoticed for too long).
• A process when someone offers to serve (it’s too easy for people to have their offer ignored, and then never offer again).
• A process when someone contacts the church about getting married/having a funeral/getting their child baptised.

5 benefits of implementing processes

Identifying and removing these cracks takes effort and thought. I’m also conscious that it’s possible to go over the top and map out every possible scenario – this isn’t necessary.

However, I believe having thinking through these processes achieves a number of important things:

1. It promotes the gospel. Serving people well, shows people what our God is like, and how much He is worth.
2. It communicates that you care about people. Your query matters. Your interest matters. Your gifts matter. Your absence matters. You matter.
3. It enables efficiency. Time is no longer wasted wondering who needs to be followed up, or doing damage control with people who have been the victims of unresponsiveness.
4. It provides clarity. People (staff and volunteers) know what they are responsible for and don’t need to constantly second-guess who is doing what, when.
5. It provides accountability. When there’s a problem, you can work out where the issue originated, and who needs to address it.

What are the areas of ministry in your church that would benefit from some clearer processes?

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

Elvanto have scheduled an introductory webinar for anyone interested in an overview:

“This webinar is designed specifically for those who want to learn what features elvanto has and how to use them.

Our very own Jess Murphy will walk you through the basics of what you need to know to get set-up within Elvanto.”

If you’re interested, sign-up for the webinar here.

If you’re already using Elvanto, you might like to join me and sign-up for the webinar to learn more about using people flows.

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

Evernote has recently released a new resource for Businesses, and I think it’s a compelling resource for churches:

“Knowledge sharing and discovery are critical for business success. Evernote Business makes the ideas, research and expertise of your team easily discoverable, creating an open, productive and smarter workplace.”

It’s easy for knowledge to live in the head (or on the computer) of one person. If that person isn’t around, or leaves the organisation, this information is unavailable. This is no less true for churches.

Incomplete or non-existent systems for sharing corporate knowledge don’t only make life inconvenient – I believe they also present issues of stewardship.

This is why Evernote Business is worth looking into. It’s a way of storting knowledge and making it available to whoever needs it, at whatever time. It’s a way of saving time, and stewarding resources.

I’m currently considering it for my church, as I map out the best way for us to steward our corporate knowledge.

Here’s the full list of features, or you can watch this short video overview:

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

I take my iPad with me everywhere now, and it’s a great tool for note-taking. So I decided to develop a ‘meetings workflow’ – a consistent process that I use to prepare for a meeting, take notes, and then follow through on the actions after the meeting.

This isn’t the only workflow and I’m sure it’s not even the best workflow – the important thing I’ve discovered is to have a consistent approach – a process that’s used for every meeting. Personally, I’ve found this workflow very helpful and it’s gone a long way in eliminating the challenges of note-taking, storage and actioning.

To make the most of this workflow, you’ll need to buy 2 apps:

• TextExpander
• Drafts

Step 1. First of all, I created a snippet in TextExpander, so that when I type ‘.mtg’, the following text appears:

Step 2. I open up the very useful ‘Drafts’ app on my iPad.

Step 3. I type in my meeting snippet (see above), and Drafts is populated with my meeting template.

Step 4. I edit the template, adding details of the meeting type, and the time. If there are other details worth adding in (e.g. background to the meeting, or things I want to remember to discuss) I add these too.

Step 5. After the meeting, I send the meeting notes straight from Drafts into my Evernote account. Drafts provides lots of options for what to do with your notes, but Evernote is my preference. Whatever your workflow, you want to send your meeting notes to the same destination each time.

Step 6. I open up the meeting notes in Evernote, and add any actions or reminders into Omnifocus.

Step 7. I file the meeting notes in Evernote.

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

It’s a database that is really assisting the ministries of my church, and I would highly recommend it to others. After many conversations with pastors at numerous churches, I thought I’d share with you the reasons why we made the switch to Elvanto and haven’t looked back.

Interested in an info night or users group?

If you’re in Sydney, and interested in coming along to an info night to learn more about Elvanto, or to join a group that discusses how best to use Elvanto, let me know (steve@communicatejesus.com).

10 reasons why I use and recommend Elvanto

I should point out that the reasons below are based on the features we’re making use of, but there’s a lot more to Elvanto than the 10 features listed below.

There’s a collection of features we haven’t scratched the surface of yet - events, child check-in, community and volunteer log-in, financial management, and more! Check out all the features of Elvanto.

1. Easy to use

I know this sounds obvious, but there are many church member databases out there, and not all are easy to use.

But they need to be, if anyone is going to use them – which is the point of having one! This might sound crazy, but I’ve spoken to too many people who are paying for church management systems that are too difficult to use and are nothing more than a glorified Excel spreadsheet.

2. Prompt, expert support

I can’t speak highly enough of the support provided by the team at Elvanto. Similar to the customer service I’ve always received from Wufoo, I’ve never waited more than a couple of hours to receive a reply to a question or issue.

Support matters – you can’t afford to compromise on this. With any church management software, you will have questions and there will be issues, and it’s essential to be well supported to make the most of your system.

3. Efficient group management tools

People can easily be added to groups, and groups can be used to collect people in different ways – congregations, small groups, serving teams, leaders, etc. For example, these are the groups I am a member of:

Within groups in Elvanto, you can easily contact people and mark attendance (e.g. at church or small group), create group events and more.

Related to groups and a commonly requested feature from many of the churches I’ve spoken with is the ability to create a member directory. It’s now very easy to generate a member directory from Elvanto, to view online, or print/email as a PDF.

4. Detailed custom reporting

Most church database solutions include reporting tools. However, these can be complex, and not necessarily customisable. With Elvanto, you can easily create detailed reports on just about any piece of data you’ve stored.

For example, you can report on:

• Who has been attending/not attending church.
• How many adults/kids/teens/men/women attend your church.
• How many people have completed Christianity Explored.
• Who has joined the church in the last X days.
• The members who aren’t in a Connect Group.
• And much more.

There’s a bunch of standard reports, or you can create your own. For example, I’ve created a report to tell me which people are serving in kids ministry whose Safe Ministry qualifications are due to expire in the next 6 months.

The reports can be easily shared, or exported to another format (e.g. CSV).

5. Access on the go

You can easily view all data in Elvanto on your phone or tablet. You don’t need to pinch and move the screen to find a phone number  - Elvanto knows when you’re using a phone or tablet, and adjusts accordingly. This makes it easy to look up a number, check the roster, or mark the roll.

6. Flexible people categories

Not only can create your own ways of categorising people (e.g. Core, Crowd, Community), you can completely customise what information is stored for each people category.

You can create fields to store details on how people are involved in church life, what courses they’ve participated in, spiritual gifts, how they would like to be communicated with – the list goes on. The profiles are as flexible as your church needs them to be.

For example, I set up these fields in our database to record the details of a first visit to our church:

In the future, I’ll share how we’re using our database to maintain our Safe Ministry records.

7. Powerful communication tools

The features that enable you to communicate with people from Elvanto is another area where Elvanto stands out from most of the other database solutions.

Templates

You can create template emails and letters, that save you from typing out the same messages, over and over again. For example, reminder emails, welcome emails, etc.

You can then select an individual, group or congregation and send an email (or letter) using that template.

It is super-easy to do, and this functionality is so handy. I can’t stress this enough – I believe this alone makes Elvanto a worthwhile solution for most churches, even if it didn’t have any other features!

SMS

You can set-up SMS messaging (where members agree to receive them). You need to select a provider, but I think this can be really useful – we’re currently exploring sending text messages to parents in church, letting them know if their children need attention in Kids Church.

Email marketing integration

We use MailChimp at Church by the Bridge to send our weekly email newsletter. Elvanto integrates with this seamlessly, allowing us to easily add people to receive E-News from within the database.

8. Form integration

With Elvanto you can create online forms and collect any sort of data you like (feedback, event registrations, first impressions etc). There’s lots of providers that you can use to create forms, but where Elvanto comes into its own is its ability to integrate this data.

For example, we’ve created a simple sign-up form for people who’d like to participate in the Christianity Explored course:

The information provided on this form can be used to create a new person on the database, or update the details of an existing person. This saves a lot of time, and the challenges of having data in multiple places.

Once the form is submitted, you can set up processes for what should happen next – e.g. send an email, update their details, add to a group, etc.

9. Service planning and rostering

We are about to make the switch from Planning Center Online to use Elvanto for our service planning and rostering. I’ve been impressed with the extent of the features offered by Elvanto that replicate those of Planning Center Online – so much so that we’re ready to move across.

By using the service planning and rostering tools in Elvanto, not only will we save $100 a month, we’ll also make use of having all of our information in one place.

Previously, when someone left church, or their details changed, we’d have to update their details on our database and in Planning Center Online. Now, one change is all we need.

10. People flows

This functionality we haven’t really got into yet, but it will be really useful once set-up. People flows allow you to create processes to love people and reduce the number of ‘cracks’ (good thoughts on cracks from Ron Edmonson).

With a people flow, you map out the steps for caring for people – e.g. from sending a welcome email, to following up to see how a newcomer is going a month after their first visit. Here’s a template people flow provided with Elvanto:

Free trial

If you’re convinced, you might like to sign-up for a free trial. If you have any questions about Elvanto, I’d be happy to help out, or you can contact them directly.

Please note: I am writing about Elvanto because I use it and highly recommend it. In the interests of full disclosure, I want to let you know that if you sign-up to Elvanto using the links in this article, I’ll receive a referral fee. You can learn more about my affiliate relationships here.

Advertise here with Beacon Ads

While I’ve used the accountability tools for years, the filtering has only been available for Windows. Until now.

Filters aren’t perfect and they aren’t an excuse for parents to relax, but they are an added layer of protection (especially for children) that I believe is worthwhile.

Watch this video, or read more here.

Announcement: Covenant Eyes Mac Filter is Here from Covenant Eyes on Vimeo.

You can get the first month of Covenant Eyes free using this link.

Advertise here with Beacon Ads