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At this point in time all of us  (at least in this area of the world) are aware of the technological wonders that can make ministry a bit more ‘user-friendly’.  One of the main ways this has worked in my own favor has been my usage of the resources at BibleGateway.com.  The sources are good and easy to use.  I can cut-and-paste verses or quotes from various commentaries, compare versions and access it even from my phone if need be.

As for other tech, I have preached from printed notes most of the time, but on several occasions I have resorted to using my tablet or and iPad in the pulpit.  However, technology can and DOES have drawbacks.  I came across an interesting article for those of you who might be thinking of going this route.

Check out Brandon Hilgemann’s cautionary tale here, at MinistryTech.com.

Do you have any good cautionary tales of your own?  We’d love to hear them!

 

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You arrive at your church office on a typical night after work, and go to your desk.  Flipping on the monitor for the computer, then hitting the power button on the desktop, you sit back and wait for the system to come up.  It grinds away for a few minutes and then the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH displays!  If you are a techie you start trying to diagnosis it.  If not, then you call the techie who set it up for you.  In either case you get the bad news eventually.  Your hard drive failed.  Crashed and burned is more like it.  And with it goes your financial records for the church, the documents you have so carefully written, your sermons, your hymns and choruses for the presentation software.  Even your church directory.  Those  pictures you took at the church retreat last year, the profile pictures for the church directory?  Gone.  If you had a church techie the first question out of their mouth after telling you the hard drive is toast will be, “Do you have a backup?”  You hang your head and your face turns red as you say, “No.  I didn’t think I needed one.”  Well, Sunshine, you did.

Another scenario…you have turned your resignation in to the Church Board.  You are heading to another, larger church but you have to leave some basic info for the pastor who will be following you into this church.  How do you do this?  Paper files?  My father-in-law, with 40 years in ministry, would always leave a detailed letter with key documents for the next pastor.  A CD-ROM?  The password to the computer and a wish for good luck in locating anything?

When I came to my current church we did not even have a list of the members.  We had a number given at the previous District Assembly, but no names.  We never did identify who all of the people were who were supposedly on a list somewhere.  The previous pastor was not available to call, either.

I’d like to offer a couple suggestions.  First, backup your computer.  The best choice is a backup offsite somewhere.  If you do this and the building burns down then your backup is safe even if the hard drive is literally melted down.  If you do not have an internet connection at your office then the second best choice is to buy two portable hard drives (~$60 each at the time of this writing).  Schedule a nightly backup  of all your user documents with one, then take it home or to another safe place and then use the second the next week to back up the same files.  One of your backups will be safe regardless of what happens to the second one.    You will lose no more than a week’s worth of data.  DO NOT backup the applications.  Those can be replaced and will take up a huge amount of space.  Your user documents cannot be replaced.

Second, consider using a secure cloud server off site to store generic documents that you will want to pass along to the next pastor.  I recommend using the Google app ‘Drive’.  Create a user account for the church and store the documents you really need to pass along here.  Categorize them so someone looking through them can find information easily.  So you might want a folder for Board Meeting Minutes, broken down to subfolders by year.  Another folder might contain documents related to membership records.  A third might be policy documents.  Make sure the Board knows about this account and the account login information is available to trusted individuals.  I have known more than one pastor who has died and someone else has been left to pick up the pieces. When the time comes to resign or you otherwise leave this pastorate most of the documents needed will be available simply by giving the new pastor the login info.  You can even do this by loading completed documents to a thumb drive at the church, in the case you don’t have internet access there, and upload them to the cloud server from another location.  The beauty if this is that the cloud server is (or should be) well protected and encrypted, and is accessible anywhere there is a web connection.

We never like to consider these things, but if you take the two basic steps outlined above you will save yourself, your church and another pastor a great deal of work.

 

“…making the most of your time, because the days are evil.”
Ephesians 5:16

 

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As we approach the end of the year pastors are dealing with the elephant in the room.  What do we do next year?  Whether you are trying to make the next year better than the last, come up with sermon series or to simply round out a schedule of basic events, the task is much the same.  In the old days we used to have a wall calendar with a bunch of various colored Post-Its.  Nowadays most of us have a computer.  So,  shall we get down to it?

I’d like to describe here one solution that I have found that works for me.  I first described this last year just after Thanksgiving, and got enough good comments that am outlining it again here.  There are other ways to accomplish this task, but this one works.

First, I signed up for a Google account, giving me access to a number of tools.  One of those features is called ‘Google Calendar’.  Once signed up with Google, I created three different calendars.  One for the church, one for me personally and one for my secular work.

Second, I put dates as appropriate in each calendar. So far, so good!

Thirdly, I use the code generated by Google to embed my church calendar into the HTML of the church calendar webpage.  Any events put into the church calendar are now visible to our congregation, and dynamically update as the calendar is changed.

Fourth, I downloaded the Google Calendar app onto my smartphone.  I have set up a home screen on my smartphone that displays only this app so I can get to my calendar by only flipping between home screens.  In setting the app up, I specify that it displays all three of my calendars.  This merges the dates on the calendars so that I can easily see what I have, and when, coordinating all three areas of my life.

Fifth…and this is where the magic comes in…when I update the church calendar from my phone the church calendar on the church website is automatically updated as well!

If this solution works for you, then I am glad to have helped.  If it doesn’t work for you there are other solutions that can work just as well or better.  But in any case it is imperative that you get a handle on the issue or sooner or later you are going to find yourself scheduling a Board meeting when you were supposed to be at your child’s school event.

I pray you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are looking forward to a well-scheduled and conflict-free calendar of Christmas events…all filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit!

 

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attendanceSome time ago my wife and I were trying to figure out the best way for us to take attendance at our worship meetings with the least hassle.  Our denominational District asks that we submit end-of-month averages for certain activities.  We had been using old-fashioned paper printouts for each individual month which had a checklist of names.  Check the box and you are done.  The problem is that the names would vary over the course of a year and even worse, the sheets would disappear at least once or twice a year.  Maybe someone got overly enthusiastic when cleaning up, or we took them to calculate the month-end statistics submission, but they were gone.  Each time something like this happened we would have to modify and reprint the sheets.

My wife tried using an Excel spreadsheet on her smartphone, but the software was pricey to get the full version and the free version was clunky.  Then I found a website that promised to solve all of my issues.  It was called “My Attendance Tracker” at http://www.myattendancetracker.com.  for the last two months I have been using this cloud-based software to track our attendance as an trial of sorts.

Here are my thoughts.  First, the software is a labor of love by a man whose wife is a teacher needing a quick and easy solution for her attendance tracking needs.  Signup is free, and you get access to the full version of the software.  If you like it, he asks you donate to ‘the cause’ whatever you feel the software is worth to you.  No nags, no spam.

Second, the software is cloud-based, so you have access on your phone, tablet, desktop PC or laptop, anywhere, anytime.

Third, the software is customizable.  You start out with ‘classes’ and ‘pupils’, but can easily change the categories to ‘meetings’ and ‘people’ or whatever you want.  It is easy to add people and assign them to meetings.  For instance, in my church we have everyone assigned by default to ‘Sunday Worship’, and we have a subset of those assigned to ‘Prayer Meeting’ and ‘Caravan’.

Fourth, taking attendance is a breeze.  You sign in to your account, select a meeting and date (calendar is displayed) and the display will list all the people assigned to that meeting.  They will default to whatever you want in regards to present, absent or tardy.  For my purposes I removed the ‘tardy’ and have all people assigned to ‘absent’.  Once your attendance screen loads you press a button beside each name for indicate their status.  I simply look around and press ‘present’ if I see them!this is done so quickly and easily that I can do it on my smartphone while a hymn is being sung during the service.

Fifth, there are a number of predefined reports available that cover much of what you would expect.  If you don’t find what you need the program has the ability to easily define new reports.  At the end of the month I simply go to reports, select the one I want and set some options, then display the report.  I still have to calculate some averages but that is a minor inconvenience.  Either the report module lacks this or I have simply not found it yet.

I highly recommend you check out this site and software and see if it can help you.  In the end whatever best serves your needs and preferences is what you will use, but I think you will not be disappointed with what you find in “My Attendance Tracker”.

 

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”  Psalms 90:12 (NIV)

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tabletOne of those interesting mental exercises we perform every so often involves the question, “If you were stranded on a desert island and could take only one <blank> with you…” .  Sometimes it is “book”, sometimes a person, sometimes a tool.  So to expand on this, if you could have only one tech tool with you to help in your bivocational ministry, what would it be?  For the purposes of a bivocational pastor they should be portable, discreet and sufficiently broad in application as to make their use anywhere a possibility.  Here are a couple ideas to get you started.

A Smart Phone.  The smart phone, regardless of operating system, has to be the top contender for the title of most useful single tool for the bivocational pastor.  It is a veritable Swiss Army knife of  ministry tools.  I use my LG G3 phone (Android) to take notes during meetings, use it as a personal and church calendar, update the church website and post news and pictures to our Facebook site.  I also use it for email, take attendance using MyAttendanceTracker.com, read my daily devotions through Biblegateway.com, study for my sermon using online resources and listen to worship music in preparation for Sunday Worship.  I have been known to hook it up to our sound system to play prelude music for our Sunday service, and once I used it to play sound effects for a skit we were using during the morning service.  I have used it to locate addresses and get directions when doing visitation. Oh, yes, and I use it to send texts and make phone calls to our people!  The uses for a good smart phone are almost limitless in bivocational ministry.  It allows you to perform many ministry tasks almost without regard to time or location.

A tablet.  Many of the same functions that can performed on a phone can be done better on a tablet.  Reading is more comfortable on a tablet and with a good word processing package it is possible to use the tablet as a substitute for a laptop or a desktop PC.  Moreover, you can use your tablet to remote into a PC and have the full power of a Desktop PC available to you anywhere you can access a WiFi connection.  The one thing most tablets cannot do is be used like a phone to call and text people (caveat…some tablets CAN do these functions, but most do not).  For ease of use I recommend selecting a tablet of at least 10 inches, for portability you might want to select a 7 or 8 inch tablet.  I use both depending on circumstances.  For typing convenience equip it with a Bluetooth keyboard and cover with a stand.

These are my top two picks for tech tools.  Do you have others?  If so, please share your experience and choices!

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calendarAround this time of year the typical pastor is getting eyeball deep into calendars.  First there is the personal calendar to take into account.  Second there is the work calendar.  Then there are the range of church calendars. Keeping them all in sync and with no conflicts can be a major hassle.  Add to that the fact that the public calendars need to be placed where people can get to them, such as on a website, and it is very easy to get overwhelmed.

I’d like to describe here one solution that I have found that works for me.  There are other ways to accomplish this task, but this one works.

First, I signed up for a Google account, giving me access to a number of tools.  One of those features is called ‘Google Calendar’.  Once signed up with Google, I created three different calendars.  One for the church, one for me personally and one for my secular work.

Second, I put dates as appropriate in each calendar. So far, so good!

Thirdly, I use the code generated by Google to embed my church calendar into the HTML of the church calendar webpage.  Any events put into the church calendar are now visible to our congregation, and dynamically update as the calendar is changed.

Fourth, I downloaded the Google Calendar app onto my smartphone.  I have set up a home screen on my smartphone that displays only this app so I can get to my calendar by only flipping between home screens.  In setting the app up, I specify that it displays all three of my calendars.  This merges the dates on the calendars so that I can easily see what I have, and when, coordinating all three areas of my life.

Fifth…and this is where the magic comes in…when I update the church calendar from my phone the church calendar on the church website is automatically updated as well!

If this solution works for you, then I am glad to have helped.  If it doesn’t work for you there are other solutions that can work just as well or better.  But in any case it is imperative that you get a handle on the issue or sooner or later you are going to find yourself scheduling a Board meeting when you were supposed to be at your child’s school event.

I pray you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are looking forward to a well-scheduled and conflict-free calendar of Christmas events…all filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit!

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(source: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_GsLjECEPOHU/S13788TkgkI/AAAAAAAAAgA/sOcuchFBYEA/s400/readme.JPG"Finding and managing time is a top priority for bivocational ministers. Finding time to study the Bible is an activity we recognize as extremely important but which can be swallowed up by the ‘urgent’ matters of life and ministry. The fact remains, if your ministry is to be vital and fresh you MUST have a devotional and study life separate from simply reading to prepare your sermons. This is where technology can come to the rescue. I have listed here some of the best free resources out there for Bible reading. Most are usable anywhere you have a connection to the internet, be it a wi-fi connection or a cell phone data link. The great thing about these resources is that you can read any time and any where you get a few minutes break. In the doctors office. In the car. At lunch while at work. In church if you get bored (just kidding…)!

BibleGateway.com offers 18 different reading plans with options available for each one. These include such standby’s as the New Testament 24-week plan, plans linked to the Book of Common Prayer readings, and Chronologically arranged plans. My wife and I use the BibleGateway chronological one-year plan, in the NIV version. My wife uses her Samsung tablet, while I prefer to read using my cell phone. If we are offline there is a nearly identical plan available through Blueletterbible.org in PD format which we can reference.

Blueletterbible.org, mentioned above, has some excellent reading plans. The caveat here is that those plans are mostly downloadable PDF’s, not linked readings through an online Bible. Still, it is an excellent source of material and includes several devotionals such as ‘Morning and Evening” and Day by Day by Grace”.

Biblestudytools.com offers 17 different plans, including a one year thematic option whose stated goal is “to make as many associations as possible between the different parts of Scripture while still reading individual books of the Bible from start to finish”.

Oneyearbibleonline.com has several versions of their reading plan, allowing you to select your own starting date and Bible version. You can also download a reading plan or customize a one year or chronological plan to suit your own needs.

About.esvbible.org  has a set of 12 reading plans available, is several different formats. Most are available as RSS, iCal, Mobile, print and email formats, although this particular site is limited to the ESV version of the Bible. IT is a good choice to check out if you prefer the ESV.

YouVersion.com offers Apps for Apple, Android, Windows and Blackberry devices. Technically this is an ‘offline’ resource.  The good thing about this is that you can have your Bible and reading plan available even when you don’t have a wi-fi or mobile connection. One of the most widely used Bible reading apps, they currently claim to have 1,092 versions available in 780 languages.

Backtothebible.org offers a few unique plans including the 21-day, the 90-day and the 6-month ‘challenges’. There are 5 separate one-year reading plans.

Bible.com offers some reading plans, many of which are drawn from Youversion.com. However, they also offer some unique devotional studies such as the 15-day “Bill Graham’s ‘The Reason For My Hope'”, as well as devotional studies from Kari Jobe, Dara Maclean and the Newsboys.

Take a look through the resources here and see if there is something that can help jump-start your Bible reading. These are obviously not the only services out there, but it they are a good place to start. May the Lord bless you through His word as you faithfully cultivate your own spiritual life!

“Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.”  Psalm 119:105

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(Source: "https://www.flickr.com/photos/epublicist/9733284483/")There is a lot of talk about how to use social media these days, but not much on how NOT use social media.  Sometimes it can be just as important to know what not to do as well as what you should be doing.  I happened across an interesting blog post by Peter Mead over at http://biblicalpreaching.net/, and want to pass it along to you.  The purpose of this is not to just get you to nod in agreement or shake your head in disagreement; the purpose is to get you to actively think about what you are doing and how people perceive it.  Remember, it is not our intention that matters so much as how people perceive what we do. And what we as pastors do reflects on the Body of Christ.  Click the link below to read the article, and enjoy!

3 Weird Things To Avoid Doing on Social Media

 

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Cell_PhoneOne of the recent trends in communication has been the adoption of cell phones by the general public.  Many of those people who have been the most adamant adopters have been in the younger generation.  Most young adults up to the age of 30 have never known a world without cell phones and cannot imagine being disconnected.  Even when these you people move out of their parents homes or leave college to get their own place they do not opt to have a land line.  The thought seems to be, “I already have a phone, why would I want a land line phone?”  In an economic sense this seems to be very logical…for us older people (older than 30…)  the thought of totally doing away with a land line seems equally unthinkable.

[cryout-pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”33%”]“Non-attenders end up calling the church phone and leaving a message.  This is not an ideal situation.” [/cryout-pullquote]  As for me, right now the Church has a land line with an answering machine which gets checked twice a week.  Members of the church know that if  they want to get in touch with me they should do so by calling my home phone, or in an emergency my cell phone.  Unfortunately this can also lead to abuse of your phone numbers.  On one recent day I received three non-emergency calls on my personal cell phone while at work.  On the other hand, non-attenders end up calling the church phone and leaving a message.  This is not an ideal situation.

Despite the feeling of jumping off a cliff by getting rid of their land line,  bivocational pastors may want to follow the lead of their young adults.

  • Cell phones have built-in capabilities bivos need.  Voice-mail and texting are two very desirable capabilities that a land line may or may not offer.  Answering machines are a poor alternative.
  • Long distance service is included at no additional charge on many plans.
  • Cell phones increase your availability.  Because you can carry a cell phone with you, if a call comes in you really need to answer…it is right there in your hand, not on an answering machine two days from now.
  • Cell phones can be had fairly cheaply and reduce your monthly phone bill.  Pre-paid phones can be as low as $10 with a $20 card for minutes.  Our phone bill for one month is in the $30 to $40 range per month, with no long distance included.  A full smartphone is not needed.  A simple flip phone is sufficient for most uses.
  • By being available via the church cell phone you can STOP giving out your home phone and personal cell phone numbers to people who might abuse them.
  • Cell phones allow you to filter your calls and set appropriate office hours.  If you make it known  you will allow the phone to go to voicemail after a set time, for instance, phone number abuse can be kept to a minimum.  Caller ID can help you avoid sales calls.

The main disadvantage I can think of when getting rid of a land line is that your listing in the yellow pages will disappear.  However, this may not be the problem we think it is.  Yellow page usage is going down all the time, and people are searching on the web for phone numbers of churches.  A solution to this might be to try it for a month or two with a prepaid cell phone while keeping your land line.  See how it works before you make the leap!

In short, for the bivocational pastor a cell phone may allow you to be not only more efficient in your ministry but may cut costs for your church as well.

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If there was a way for you to cut down on your workload by a third to a half, reduce your stress by half and increase your effectiveness twice over, would you do it?  I think most of us would jump a the chance, especially those of us who are bivocational.  Sounds like a bad internet ad, though, doesn’t it?  Well, it is not.  There IS a simple way to do all of these things and more.  In a single sentence it is this:  Put your schedule for the next six months to a year down on paper.  Seeing that is it the beginning of a new year, this is the perfect time to start off on the right foot.  But if you are reading this article at another point during the year, don’t despair!  Start where you are and you will see the benefits anyway.

How does this help you?  First, you will know what you are preaching a long time in advance.  You can gather scripture, notes, illustrations and music ideas well in advance.  Many of us (even fully-funded pastors!) have those times when it is Saturday and we still don’t know what our sermon outline looks like.  That will be a thing of the past…and the stress that goes along with it.  Second, the person who does your music will have more opportunity to select and practice music.  Music specials will be easier to schedule.  Key dates will be incorporated into your schedule rather than being added at the last second.  Now, instead Excelof simply planning a single Mother’s Day sermon and a Father’s Day sermon, you can schedule a sermon series around family life that takes both of those days into account!

One of the most influential books I have read in the recent past was on how to do this scheduling efficiently.  This is Nelson Searcy’s book, “Engage: A Guide To Creating Life-Transforming Worship Services”.   It is available as an eBook as well as in hard copy.  I highly recommend that you add this book to your reading list.
My personal practice is to use an Excel spreadsheet that is color coded to create a schedule (see illustration at left). All Sundays and known ministry days are added first (Tuesday prayer meeting, etc.).  These are followed by holidays and special days during the year.  Advent, Lent and Thanksgiving are chief among these.  Sermon series and special events are scheduled around these dates.  This is only one way of doing these tasks; you will find a method that is meaningful to you.  Give it a try, and I guarantee you will see benefits to your ministry quickly!

Happy New Year!