The FBI pays us a visit

The Annex is going away. It's worth less than it would cost to move, so what to do? I know! Blow it up, real good! Our Facilities folks invited the local FBI SWAT team to use it for practicing a hostage situation. Andrew took a bit of video showing the guys in full battle gear assaulting the Annex. And here are some pictures of the damage they left in their wake.

Annex main entrance with shattered glass everywhere:

Glass from the back door lays shattered on the floor:

A spent shotgun shell (they used shotguns to shoot open locked doors):

Smashed door hinge:

This door latch was blown off by a shotgun blast. It threw the door knob into the sheetrock wall, making a nice hole:

The black spot on the floor is from a "flashbang" - a non-lethal grenade that makes a big flash and a loud bang to stun anyone in the vicinity. You can see damage on the adjacent partition. The white powder on the floor is fire extinguisher residue:

Somehow they knocked a hole in the outside wall. Yes, that's daylight you can see through there!

Lesson: don't be in the way when your friendly, local FBI SWAT team storms the building!

The Leawood Police are coming in tomorrow for more training exercises. There's nothing left to smash. ;-)

Seth's "Memo to the very small"

Those of you who subscribe to Seth Godin's blog have already seen his post a week ago titled "Memo to the very small." Interesting that he mentioned churches in the opening paragraph as possible users of his method for small organizations to use the web.

People from small or technically-unsophisticated churches frequently ask us for advice about how to build or rebuild their church web site. Seth describes these people perfectly when he says:

These are businesses that have trouble dealing with the Yellow Pages. Too much trouble, too much time, way too expensive. So, should local micro-businesses just ignore the web? Or should they become experts in the art of building and maintaining a website?

His suggestion is to use Typepad with a standard template, a Squidoo lens, and a set of pictures on Flickr. Those of you who work with small churches as a volunteer or consultant, does this sound like a good recommendation?

Neat Patch?

We don't need no stinking Neat Patch. (Sorry, Jason, couldn't resist.)

This is one of the racks for our new office at Southcreek. It has two 48-port HP switches and fewer than 10 ports are free since we completed our moves yesterday.

On the shelf below the patch panel is our SonicWall firewall and DSL modem. These provide a backup (a VERY slow backup) for our wireless LAN bridge.

Moving Day 2

Yesterday was the last big moving day in a sequence of moves we've been doing for more than a week.

Below is the humble Annex, a temporary building obtained for our rapidly-expanding Children's Ministry back in the mid 1990s. For the last several years it has been the central church office, housing our receptionists, mail room, main copy/work room, most of our executive management, and numerous other staff. It's hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and frequently smells of animals that have crawled underneath to die! Next week it will be used by local law enforcement for training exercises before it is finally dismantled and hauled off.

Front door to the Annex with the East Bldg reflected in the glass. The sign directs visitors to the new reception desk in the East Bldg.

"We are moving! Please pardon our mess while we pack"

Load 'em up!

And move 'em out!

Spring Church IT Roundtable

I neglected to mention in my first post that today we are being hosted by Sugar Creek Baptist Church, http://www.sugarcreek.net/, at the LYF youth center. Our hosts were very gracious, and I want to thank them for opening up their facility and catering to us. (Image to right is an X-Box array for youth.)

Today we heard from many Vendors and consultants ranging from VMWare, ScriptLogic, DataCore, Service-U and Web Empowered Church.

I was familiar with VMWare and Service-U, and obviously Web Empowered Church, but the other two I'd never heard of before. DataCore is a mind expanding virtualization software that virtualizes your SAN or slack disk space across multiple servers, and synchronizing between virtual storage. I'd have to think about that more, but one thing that is potentially big for churches is synchronizing virtual storage between geographically distributed locations. What we were told was that you can synchronize between 8 different locations. So if multiple churches are using DataCore and have unused disk space, they can use each other as back up locations. Potentially pretty cool.

ScriptLogic produces a toolset of automation and management applications that makes nearly everything in Windows system administration easier. Active Directory users, GPOs auditing and alerting, patching, spyware, file permissions and ACLs, USB port security, MSI packaging, system imaging and software distribution, and file system level auditing. I'm excited about the potential of using ScriptLogic apps in our environment because it is easily powerful enough to make up for a half time network admin guy or more, and our network guy would salivate all over his shirt to have these tools at his disposal. The tools are not only cool, but can replace other tools like Symantec Ghost and MS SMS, saving you some money nad giving you one software manufacturer to yell at when things go wrong. :)

All in all, a very cool pre-roundtable day and I enjoyed meeting the vendors, including Tim Whitehorn, CEO and original creator of Service-U. Resurrection is a long time user of Service-U, and I have always suggested it to churches looking for a resource management and calendaring solution.

Looking forward to tomorrow, but first - a good nights sleep. Aaaaah.

And Here We Go!

I'm here at the church IT event organized by Tony Dye and friends. Our first day is vendor presentations - but first we started off with a short worship service. It was amazingly high energy for a ~30 minute service. In short, they rocked, we worshiped, and when they finished everyone simply stood in awe and silence for many seconds until someone started that quiet "is it ok yet?" clapping.

Thus far I've been thrilled to meet some of the guys I know only by blogs and e-mail addresses. I expect shock and awe over the next few days. Geekfest. :)

Moving Day 1

We're working closely with our Facilities Department to move 50 staff people, starting yesterday through the end of next week. Yesterday was Move Day 1 when we moved 21 people from Central Campus to the leased office at Southcreek. Next Wednesday and Thursday we'll be moving 11 people from one place to another within campus (including Andrew). And then Friday we'll move another 18 people from campus to Southcreek. Whew!

Philip (foreground), Jeremy, and Brian working among the cubicles:

Movers from Fry-Wagner:

Dick Cooper, our Director of Facilities, holding forth:

Jeremy prepping phone cords:

Ian, concentrating on settting up phone extensions, amid the chaos:

Kelly Williams (center) and some of her staff from the Finance Department surprised us with lunch (what a blessing!). Uber voluteer Doug Blackwood, retired from management of the help desk at HP, is on the far right.

Outfitting the new office space

Here's some of the work we've been doing over the last three weeks to prepare for 40 staff moving into the 9000 sq. ft. of office space we leased to replace our 13 year-old temporary building.

In the process of installing data and phone cables:
Ian and Jeremy begin installing equipment in the phone/network room:


Jerry and Kevin from WKT (our phone vendor) installing the phone system:

Ian installing a repurposed Dell 2650 for use as a file/print server (it does DFS replication with a server in our data center on Central Campus):

Should we say "no"?

Another answer to Tony's question comes from Joel Dehlin:

I.T. should not be saying no. You should give the customer(s) information about what resources you have available, and they should (collectively) make decisions about what to do with the resource. You can cajole, influence, or merely suggest, but the customers should be making these calls.

Rain fade update

I posted previously about the wireless LAN bridge we installed from our Central Campus to our new leased office space, and I mentioned the problems we've had with rain fade.

Since my last post I learned that the radios nominally use the 80 GHz band, but since it's a full-duplex link, there are two diffferent frequencies in use: around 80 GHz in one direction and around 72 GHz in the other direction. Consequently, the signal strength in one direction isn't the same as the signal strength in the other direction. The graph I posted previously was for the stronger of the two.

Since my last post our vendor has repositioned the radios again and wrung out another 3 dB, which is great. Unfortunately, the link is dropping at -66 dBm, whereas the spec says it won't drop until somewhere in the -69 to -72 range. And according to Bridgewave, our radios tested to -69 in the factory before they were shipped. So we still have a problem.

Here is the signal strength graph from yesterday when in rained starting around noon and continued at varying intensities for the next 24 hours:

In all of that we had only one drop lasting around 30 seconds at 3:39 pm. You can't see the excursion below -65 because the monitoring system is on the other end of the link. (The monitor needs the link to be up to grab the signal strength from the other end.)

Now, one 30 second drop doesn't sound to bad considering it's been raining for 24 hours. But the problem is, if we had staff working here yesterday, every phone call in progress at 3:39 pm would have been dropped. Most likely every Shelby session would also have been dropped. That doesn't seem good enough to me. What do you think?

Three values

In reponse to Tony's post about how much to serve users ...

This is good stuff, Tony, but twelve values is probably too many. I try to simplify things down to three if at all possible.

1. Our default answer is "yes". We always hope to find a way to meet the user's need, even if it isn't in quite the way the user expressed the need or quite the solution the user proposed. See: http://appianway.blogspot.com/2006/01/our-default-answer-is-yes.html

2. Our mission is our user's mission. That is, when we're working with Children's Ministry, our mission is to teach kids about Jesus; when we're working with Congregational Care, our mission is to visit people in the hospital; etc. Rather than focusing on our own mission, we're focused on the mission of those we serve.

3. The one mission that is uniquely our own is information security. If we don't look after information security, no one will. We define information security as providing or denying information access as appropriate and ensuring that critical information can't be lost. If #1 or #2 above conflict with security, then we make a tradeoff.

We don't always achieve our internal IT Department goals (roll out the software update by Feb. 1, upgrade environmental monitoring in the data center by the end of the month, etc.), but we always get high marks from our user community. As far as I'm concerned that's the correct priority. And of course, we have to work very hard behind the scenes to make sure we don't work exclusively on short-term or user-visible things. Sometimes the best thing we can do for our user community is to work on something that takes a lot of resources and users never know about. But that's nothing fancy, it's just good, disciplined execution.

Fall Roundtable update

From the number of comments on my Fall IT Roundtable Invitation, it seems like we'll have a great group here in Kansas City for the Fall Roundtable. For now I just wanted to acknowledge all the responses. There will be a lot more information and discussion about the Fall event during the Spring Roundtable in Houston. We want to get feedback from the Spring Roundtable before we start posting more specifics.

Have a blessed Good Friday and Easter.

Rain fade

I posted earlier about the wireless LAN bridge we installed from our campus to our new leased office a couple of miles away.

These radios operate at such a high frequency (80 GHz) that nearly everything -- a tree, a dense flock of birds, an errant golf ball (okay, I just made that one up) -- is opaque to the signal. Consequently, they suffer from signal attenuation due to rain. This is a well-known phenomenon called "rain fade" that the RF engineers have to take into account in their designs.

We're having some trouble getting sufficient path clearance (getting the base signal high enough) to avoid a link drop during periods of intense rain. Right now the base level is approx. -44 dBm. We were expecting rain fade of approx. 16 dBm, which should make it bottom out around -63 dBm. According to Bridgewave, these radios are supposed to be able to maintain the 100 Mb/s link down to -72 dBm. Therefore, we should have approximately 9 dBm of safety margin.

But we have two problems. First, we're seeing rain fade of 22 dBm. Second, we're seeing the link drop when the signal goes below -65 dBm. With 6 dBm more rain fade than expected and the link dropping 7 dBm before it should, our 9 dBm of safety margin is shattered.

Here is a graph showing two times when we had brief periods of intense rain. Each time the link dropped for a few minutes and then came back up after the intense rain passed:

After the the second drop you can see other periods of rain fade that weren't intense enough to cause a drop. (The graph shows signal level in 100ths of a dBm. i.e. -4400 is -44 dBm.)

I gave a requirement of four 9s of availability (99.99% up time). Clearly, with the current base signal level, the amount of fade we're experiencing, and the link drop level, we're not going to be close to four 9s. Thankfully, we're installing this well ahead of staff moving into the office so we have time to improve the situation. Also, I'm grateful that we're installing in the Spring when we have rain every couple of days. Each time we make a change, we don't have to wait too long before a real-world test presents itself.

We're out there on the bleeding edge with this one! Please pray with us that this wireless LAN bridge story has a happy ending.

GodTube mocked in Wired

Did anyone else notice this Wired blog post mocking GodTube?

There are many things swirling in my mind about this:

1. Does it make sense to have "Christian" versions of popular, secular web sites, or does it make more sense to proclaim the good news on the secular sites themselves? John Brownlee, the writer of the post, gets at question when he says, "What is disturbing about GodTube is that it is an observable microcosm of the way that fundamentalist Christians have shut themselves off from any outside perspective." Where is the line between being "in" the world but not "of" it?

2. John does us a favor by saying what many others also must be thinking. Doesn't this help us gain insight into the mindset of secular humanists and atheists? We can't possibly present the good news persuasively without knowing the views of our hearers.

3. Also facinating are the comments at the end of the post. Clearly John struck a nerve because many people wanted to react to what he said -- both echoes of John's ideas as well as thoughtful Christian responses.

Network and server monitoring

We are in the process of taking our network management up to the next level. Our server and network infrastructure has gotten sufficiently large and complex that we need to keep a much closer eye on what is happening. We need to be able to monitor resources, applications, and errors. We need a way to alarm, for example, when a server, switch, or application is down or when a resource gets to a critical range.

We're currently evaluating What's Up Gold. I also recently heard about Splunk. Do any of you have any thoughts on either of these or something else we should evalutate?

Wireless LAN bridge

We are preparing to move 40 staff to an office building a couple of miles from the church. For the last several years those staff have worked out of a temporary building for which the temporary use permit is now expiring. So how do you connect 40 remote staff to your LAN? If you have a clear line-of-sight, a great option is to use a wireless LAN bridge.

Here are pictures taken yesterday as our vendor performed alignment of the integrated radio/antenna units. These are 80 GHz (millimeter wave) radios that are capable of 1 Gb/s full-duplex, but we got the version that is rate-limted to 100 Mb/s.

Radio on roof of office building, pointed towards the church. The steel wall in front is a "penthouse" that hides roof-top air handlers an other equipment. The mast is mounted to steel girders supporting the penthouse.

Close up of back of radio with volt meter showing signal strength.

Looking over the top of the radio toward the church building, 1.7 miles away.

Close up taken from the office building with black arrow showing the location of the radio on the roof of the church building.

Radio on roof of church building. The mast is held by a 4-point mount and weighed down by concrete blocks so roof penetration isn't required. This location was chosen for maximum wind protection (air handling unit to the right; roof parapet to the left). It also happens to be right next to a roof access hatch.

Ian (our network admin) with his shiny new radio!

Jay, the lead installer for our vendor, tweaks the alignment by turning nuts on the mount while looking at his volt meter.

Jay relays meter readings to his co-worker on the roof of the other building.

On this end the radio is connected by fiber.

Close up taken from the church building with white arrow showing the location of the radio on the roof of the office building.

Is redundant more reliable?

Pete Whiting, in a guest post on Joel Dehlin's blog, has some insights into the perils of complexity. This is good food for thought as we plan our server virtualization project at Resurrection, which we have scheduled for implementation in May. I particularly agree with Pete's point about isolating/avoiding tight coupling between services. For example, it's much better if an application is dependent only on one server, than if it requires two (or more) servers to be able to operate. With virtualization, we are making it a priority to gather everything a particular application needs onto a single virtual server, which will be able to run on either of two redundant physical servers. This architecture provides the benefits of redundancy without introducing unnecessary interdependence.

A Long Overdue Thank-You

Thanks Tony for your outstanding hospitality during my visit to Perimeter Church back in December with Mark Stephenson. Please offer my long overdue thanks to the rest of your team as well. Our tour of Perimeter Church's facilities was amazing. God has blessed the church with an innovative spirit that is never satisfied with past accomplishments. The oldest part of the building is only 15 years old, but already many parts have been purposed and repurposed, designed and redesigned, modeled and remodeled numerous times as the church’s needs have grown and changed. That kind of passionate pursuit of ministry warms my heart and re-energizes me.

Speaking of open source

Scoble posted today about the Viacom-Google lawsuit. He says Viacom loses by winning. YouTube, which is owned by Google, wins by losing. It will be a few years before we know, but I hope he's right.

Open Source Kingdom

Mark Batterson posted recently about the kingdom impact of freely sharing creative ideas. Here's hoping Mark's vision spreads to decision-makers in other congregations. The Church should be the greatest open source community in the world.

The DST Saga Continues (with a happy ending, we think?)

Tony has been blogging about various Daylight Savings Time issues at Perimeter Church here, here, and here. We, too, have had some serious headaches with this. I commented on one of Tony's posts saying that we couldn't get the Exchange Calendar Update tool to work. Tony generously put the question out to IT Discuss and we got a response from Jason Hand of Walk Through the Bible. Thanks Jason, but unfortunately it didn't help.

So ... Yesterday, when everything was going horribly wrong ;-) Ian, our network administrator, found someone at Microsoft who could help us. He posted a full explanation of what happend here. Turns out even the developer at Microsoft who wrote the tool couldn't get it to work in our case. In the end he threw up his hands and had Ian do a manual workaround to the front-end of the process that allowed the rest of it to run successfully.

Things have finally settled down here. We have only a few, minor issues being reported today. DST - was it fun for you?

Fall IT Roundtable Invitation

I was part of a group of IT leaders from very large churches that met a couple of times a year for three years or so. The group (which never had a name other than “megachurch IT group”) included Mike Gold of Willow Creek, Terry Chapman of Fellowship Church, Vic Mollett of Southland Christian Church, Eric Busby of Saddleback Church, and others. When last we met in May of 2005 I told the group I would host the next meeting here at Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area in 2006. Unfortunately, I got slammed last year with workload and staff turnover issues so I wasn't able to make it happen. I recently exchanged e-mail with Mike Gold about renewing my invitation to host the group here and suggested merging the group with the Church IT Roundtable. He was very supportive and hoped to be able to attend and invite the old gang to join the Roundtable.

Accordingly, we would like to invite you to come to Kansas City for the Fall Roundtable October 3-4, which is right before Leadership Institute, our biggest conference of the year. After the Roundtable you could stay for Leadership Institute if you’re so inclined. I spoke with Tony Dye about getting this on the agenda for discussion at the Spring Roundtable to determine the level of interest. To get the conversation started, please leave a comment here and let me know if this sounds good.

National Church IT Association?

If you read Jason Powell’s blog, you already know about his hope to create some sort of national church IT association. (Tony has arranged for Phill Martin of NACBA to come to the Spring Roundtable to speak about this.) Now as for me, I strongly prefer the roundtable format for meeting with and learning from other church IT leaders. I worry that formalizing and scaling up what we’re doing into a national association would result in losing the powerful, peer-to-peer sharing of the roundtable format. I also worry that we’ll discover even the 25-30 people expected to attend the Spring Roundtable will be too many for everyone to fully participate. So what to do?

Fall Roundtable Format

Now here’s where it gets really exciting (we think?!) or maybe even crazy. For the last couple of years I have been meeting informally with church IT leaders here in the Kansas City area such as Mike Mayfield of Pleasant Valley Baptist Church. I suspect many of you have had similar meetings with other church IT leaders in your own cities. Perhaps some of you have already held roundtables in your cities. This makes me wonder if the best way for us to scale up would be to have roundtables in cities across the country and then link them technologically.

What if we made a first effort at this idea for the Fall Roundtable? What if we limit attendance here in Kansas City to 15-20 people and find some great way to link in roundtable groups from other cities? This idea is partially inspired by the Willow Creek Leadership Summit that brings together church leaders from around the world. We’re imagining some kind of “un-conference” that retains the strengths of peer-to-peer sharing but is scalable to involve many more people than you can fit around one table. We would like for everyone to be able to see/hear each other and use their own laptops to annotate/live blog the discussion and have side conversations. We’re not even close to figuring out how to do this from either a facilitation or technical standpoint, but one idea is to use Adobe Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze). Whatever the mechanism is, we would need to fully test both the technology and the method of facilitation prior to the meeting. And, no doubt, we’d learn a great deal from doing this once. At that point we would know either a) this works; b) this works but needs to be tweaked/improved; or c) it doesn’t/can’t work.

Please comment and let me know your thoughts or post on your own blog and link back to this post.

Don't you be doing that church hop

Perry Noble points us to Steven Furtick blasting church hoppers/church shoppers like I've never seen it done before. I was fired up by his comments. On the other hand, I have good friends who have struggled with finding the right place where God is calling them to worship, grow, and serve. There's a line between a genuine spiritual struggle and a crassly consumerist attitude toward church.

The best approach for churches is to reach out and welcome everyone with all of their experiences, sins, mistakes, bad hair, doubts, fears, body odor, struggles, biases, broken relationships, addictions, questions, emotions, mental illness, inappropriate behavior ... and yes, even warped attitudes towards church. We start with people wherever they are. And then, pay close attention here, we must rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to work through our teaching, worship, service, and deep Christian community to transform them. No doubt some of those people have been church goers for years, yet they haven't learned even the basics of Christian discipleship. Instead of giving up and calling them out, let's call them up to a richer, fuller, deeper understanding of what Jesus asks of them. To be clear, I'm talking about starting with people where they are, but not being complacent about letting them stay there.

Web Software Developer position open

We're seeking a highly-skilled web software developer for a challenging and fulfilling position at The Church of the Resurrection (Kansas City area). Work in a high-energy, innovative environment with other talented technologists. BS in computer science or related field or equivalent experience required. Minimum of 2 years professional experience with the LAMP platform and 2 years professional experience with the .NET platform. Reports to the Director of Information Technology. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to serve Christ with your software development skills. To apply, please e-mail Cork Kurlbaum (our uber-volunteer/professional IT recruiter) for immediate consideration.

Five hot technologies for 2007

Yesterday Computerworld published an interesting article predicting five technologies will be hot over the next 12 months:

1. Ruby on Rails - web application development framework

2. NAND Flash drives - solid state mass storage with big enough capacity to substitute for small hard drives and 100x the performance

3. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) - short range wireless at 200x the speed of Bluetooth

4. Grid Computing - rent a data center by the gigabyte such as Amazon's S3 service

5. Advanced CPU architectures on higher-density chips

Y2K7

I just spent all day yesterday, along with a co-worker, tracking down one of the more heinous time calculation bugs I've ever seen. If you're a programmer, you probably already know about the Daylight Savings Time change that is occurring in this year of 2007. This is sending a shock wave of problems through the IT industry on a scale of which we probably haven't seen since Y2k. Everyone is having to update code that calculates when DST begins and ends.

In short, Microsoft is either in a very tight spot, or they screwed up big time. With the new calculation of DST, any year previous to 2007 now has the potential to show the wrong time! Here is a quick example.

This page is using JavaScript within the viewers browser to calculate dates. You will notice that if you are viewing this page from Vista, or a Linux based OS, that all the dates are displayed as expected. If you're on a Windows XP or earlier OS, the middle two dates will show as being in DST when they should not be:

Wed Mar 15 00:00:00 CDT 2006 <- Um, not quite yet actually. CDT doesn't start until April 02, 2006 02:00.

This is because MS OS' previous to Vista can only store one set of DST rules. So when you installed that cool new patch that fixes 2007 and future dates, you break every year previous to it. Nice. Granted this only crops up in past dates between the previous DST starting time, and the new one. I.e. between 2007 and 2006, this is between March 11 and April 2. See another conversation on this.

This is going to cause problems until it is fixed. Hopefully MS can get us something quickly, but depending on how deeply the OS is affected by this - they could have a serious issue on their hands.

Kathy Sierra on user happiness

Kathy has an excellent post today on what happens when the "policies and procedures tail" wags the "user happiness dog." I continually remind my IT team here at Resurrection that our job is to serve users, not the other way around. My team has a lot of ideas about how to increase our efficiency, which I think is great so long as it doesn't make things more diffcult for those we serve. Do you advocate for users in your organization?

Skypecast - Cooler than I Thought

I came across the Skypecasts beta directory on Sunday, I don't even remember how. I have been aware of Skypecast for quite a while now through Jason Powell's blog, and had always thought of it as an alternative to hold on-line meetings. I was blown away to find a directory of open discussions taking place about all sort of subjects!

I clicked on a "Join this Skypecast" link for one of the entries, and found myself listening in on a Arabic speaking discussion as though I was standing in a public square in Saudi Arabia and just walked up to a group of people, listening to the conversation. This is wild!

I began thinking, the potential of this is huge. This is not just free conference calling, this is a globally accessible public forum. If you want to hold a discussion on any subject all you need is to download Skype, advertise the discussion in whatever manner you chose, and host and moderate it. The barrier to holding a discussion is broadband Internet access, a computer, a headset with microphone, and the knowledge to get Skype installed and a Skypecast created. This is exactly the flat world that Thomas L. Friedman discusses in The World is Flat. I found people hosting their own sociological and political discussions, some of them with very controversial subjects, with people from all over the world participating.

Think about that for a moment. If you were to mash the technical ability of Skypecasts up with the right social networking service, you could bring a great deal of the worlds population closer together than ever before. Say you're a student and you are writing a paper on antibiotic resistance. You've got a few questions that you're not able to answer through the Internet resources, so you set up a Skypecast for next Wednesday evening and publish this event through a social network service, asking for help from any experts on the subject. On Wednesday you get to talk with a couple other people writing similar papers and you all share resources, and in the middle of that you get a leading expert join in that has seen your advertisement for the discussion and now multiple people benefit.

The potential uses for churches and small groups really excites me. Imagine a globally diverse small group that anyone can be a part of, or just listen in on. A pastor can host a discussion on applying the scripture to your life, and interact with real people with real questions in a moderated format. I think these sorts of technologies will ultimately re-define the roles of evangelism and caring in the physical church to include the global community. The phrase, 'your neighbor,' will not mean what it used to mean.

I haven't posted here much, so to reiterate why this interests me so much, I am very driven to get churches on-line. By that, I mean encouraging churches to utilize web ministry and enabling them to use technology for ministry and evangelism. Why? Because I strongly believe that on-line evangelism will be highly important in reaching future Christians, and that God has many great things in store for technologies such as Skypecast and social network services.

United Methodists Reaching Postmodernists

A disappointing thought crossed my mind as I drove home early Saturday morning from a late night out. (The late night BTW was much less harmless than it sounds. My wife and I attended a high school musical in support of a friend, and we stayed up late conversing about different subjects.)

What if, on the whole, the United Methodist church can not reach postmodernists? I mean simply can not do it. What if the things that make a worship United Methodist are exactly those things the postmodernist revolts from?

I began thinking about the church reaching the postmodernist, and recalled conversations that I've either witnessed or been a part of. They all go something like this:

UM Pastor: "You say that the service doesn't speak to you, but give me an example of how would you change it?"

Postmodernist: "There needs to be more music. It needs to be cool, not boring. Hip! It needs to be more emotional and less institutional."

UM Pastor: "But those are not specific examples of what you would change about the service today. I understand what you said, but I don't understand how you want us to do that."

The conversation usually goes down hill from there, with the postmodernist trying desperately to explain what hip and cool means and how they could be so very moved if it were done better. Both parties walk away having no idea what the other meant.

I've heard at least one pastor explain this as, "They aren't able to explain what they want." That baffles me, as I'm pretty sure I just saw human beings who speak the same language converse about what they want. This ends up sounding like the modernist saying they are open and willing to improve the worship experience, as long as they don't have to change anything about it at all. Why can't you just be happy with the way it is now?

To me it comes down to this: The answer that modernists are looking for is which portions of the service today need be changed to reach postmodernists, without changing or losing the structure of the worship? What the postmodernist is trying to answer politely - everything. That being said, I'm sure there is a middle ground. I believe that churches that are successful in reaching postmodernists are those finding ways to say yes rather than no, and still hold in their hearts the significance of denominational traditions. Those that tie the significance of a worship service too tightly to the rigid procedural tradition may have a really tough time reaching postmodernists.

Where does your church apply the significance of worship? The process, or the expression? Are they doing church, or being the church?

Mac vs. PC

"As a Mac user, I wish Microsoft would run an Apple-like ad about the process by which Mac users get service for broken hardware. It would be really hard for Apple to respond, because their system for dealing with broken hardware is itself horribly broken. They need serious incentives to fix this." - Dave Winer

Just last week my team at Resurrection and I were joking about exactly this idea. (We support both PCs and Macs.) The Apple commercials are terribly funny, no doubt. But Apple would have you believe that their stuff never breaks. In our parody commercial, Mac would be broken and a poor, hapless user would be striken by the question, "How do I fix this thing?" PC would answer, "I don't know." Then the user would ask, "Who DOES know?" Followed by nothing but dead silence.

When PC is broken, we call our friendly Dell service person, who comes out a day or two later and fixes it. It's painless and nearly effortless. When Mac is broken, we are faced with a small number of bad options, all of which will cost us a lot more time and brain damage than calling Dell. Surely Dave Winer and us aren't the only ones who have faced this issue. Does Apple care?

Visual communication

I've posted before about the importance of visual communication in our world. Unfortunately, I've spent my whole life honing my ability to communicate with words. That skill will be nearly obsolete by the end of my life. Seth Godin points us to an example of how ordinary people can use video technology to communicate. Wouldn't it be cool to use this video to teach church staff about web technology? Would it be even cooler for all of us to learn how to communicate this way?

From Vision to Reality

This past week in our bi-annual all staff meeting Adam, our senior pastor, said something that coalesced a reoccurring thought I'd had for a while. He mentioned a list of large projects our church had either completed, or moved from the idea stage to a living process. Then he suggested that to do this repeatedly and continually succeed you have to go through a strategic planning stage. That's a simple statement right? So now - everybody go do that and succeed much more often .... If only it were that easy.

I'm sure that statement is in a thousand books and repeated by even more people, but the reason I'm blogging about it today is that it seems to be one of those statements where the absorption and understanding of it are worlds apart from the action and ability to perform it. Why is that? Is it simply a factor of the human condition, or is a skill that can be learned and honed? I would lean toward the latter.

Pastor Andrzej from
Katowice, Poland

The idea that strategic planning is a critical ingredient of any vision to reality project is at first too simple to be so profound. One of the questions I have been asked on multiple occasions, after people learn I work at Church of the Resurrection, is "Why is Resurrection so successful?" The last time I was asked this it was from pastor Andrzej while I was visiting him in Katowice, Poland. Pastor Andrzej has been a United Methodist pastor for more than 25 years and is currently positioned in a thriving church with a congregation more than 100 strong. To put this in perspective, the United Methodist presence in all of Poland is less than 4,500 people.
Pastor Andrzej, spoken in my poor English as "ahhn-jay," is a person who comes off very calm, with waters just underneath the surface that are roaring to bring God's Word to the non religious.

Up until now, my answer to the above question has been these things, in short: One is leading with prayer. Another is effective leadership, and the last is an uncommon hive of people who possess a drive from within to do things with excellence. These are still accurate, but what I may now add to those is effective strategic planning.

I think if there were a great suggestion for pastors striving for success in ministry, it would be to educate yourself in strategic planning. When Adam spoke about this at our all staff meeting, Andrzej came back to my memory. He and I had discussed the importance of prayer, and asking for God's guidance. No one should underestimate this, but God rarely lifts those of us up who are sitting back waiting for Him to take the wheel and drive.

It made me wonder what programs or resources we have set up for our local pastors, as well as our International pastors. I couldn't find much searching through Google, though it may have been the keywords I was using. My co-worker Chuck, who you can see in this post's picture, recommended this book by Kennon L. Callahan.

Would anyone else who has read this recommend it? Does anyone know of other resources out there that focus on strategic planning in the church?

Nerds on retreat!

We got out of the office for a day-long retreat yesterday. Most of my IT team was there:




Clockwise starting from left (goofy guy with Texas Tech t-shirt):
Chuck Russell - Internet Communications Director
Jeremy Grabrian - Desktop Support Specialist
Ian Beyer - Network Administrator
George Smiley - Desktop Support Technician (part time)
Brian Slezak - Software Developer
Leo Johns - web consultant (part time)

Oh yeah, and the end of the table with a laptop, a flat-panel monitor, and no one sitting there - that's me. ;-)

Fun With Statistics

So I am perusing the new Umc.org and looking at findachurch - which has been vastly improved - see Resurrections Page here. I decided to play around with the Advanced Search functions - mostly because I couldn't type in 66062 - my zip code, and see Resurrection come up - that's crazy do you know how many resurrection people don't live in the Church's zip code - I'll tell you - most of them, anyway tangent averted back to my point I found some interesting stuff when i searched for churches by size. Here are my results (More than 1000 means between 1000 and 2000 etc)

33 United Methodist Churches with more than 2000 in attendance
136 United Methodist Churches with more than 1000 in attendance
649 United Methodist Churches with more than 500 in attendance
3093 United Methodist Churches with more than 200 in attendance
5348 United Methodist Churches with more than 500 in attendance
8746 United Methodist Churches with more than 50 in attendance
10905 United Methodist Churches with more than 20 in attendance
4648 United Methodist Churches with less than 20 in attendance

So 818 who have made it to 500 + and 3900 approximately who have made it over the 200 barrier. Interesting stuff. Of course since our worship attendance is over 8000 now and they have us listed at 6300 (This is GCFA's fault not UMC.org's by the way) - I dont know how accurate those counts are but there probably pretty close.

Chuck

Who is using the new Blogger?

Who out there is using the upgraded version of Blogger? Is it cool? Should we upgrade?

MailFrontier is nearly perfect again

Last week we finally had time to focus on our spam problem. With some assistance from our friendly SonicWall tech support person, we installed a software update and tweaked our configuration. Turns out that at some point we white-listed everything from cor.org, no doubt to address a false positive situation, but that was a bad idea - too much spam is spoofed to come from your own domain. With the new software and the tweaks, we're back to nearly perfect, and just in time for the long Christmas-New Year's break when many of our staff take vacation. Almost no spam is getting through to our users' inboxes. Wee hoo!

SonicWall, I owe you an apology. When properly configured, SonicWall Mail Security is every bit as good as the spam filter built-in to Outlook 2003.

Guy Kawasaki talks about evangelism - the Christian kind

In case you missed it, I found it very interesting to see Guy Kawasaki reveal a bit of his personal faith in this recent blog post. In the post he includes this link to presentations at a church leadership conference in Hawaii this Fall. I'm glad to know Guy is interested in the original meaning of evangelism and not just his borrowed use of the term.

WEC Update

Now that Web Empowered Church (WEC) has been underway for a couple of years, Mark Stephenson has come to the belief that it won’t reach its full potential without Church Management System (ChMS) functionality, or at least deep integration with an existing ChMS. I totally agree with that assessment. So Mark and I thought it would be a great time to get together with Rubin Perry to discuss how ChMS fits with WEC’s vision and strategy. Like my meetings with Fellowship Technologies and Shelby Systems, our conversation was detailed, candid, and thought-provoking. While I’m not free to disclose everything we discussed, I can say that WEC has deep pockets, a passion for helping local churches use the Internet effectively, and a long-term view.

I’ve noted previously that combining content management (CoMS) functionality with ChMS and Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) functionality in a single, integrated system would be ideal. Most forward-thinking church IT leaders I know agree with this. WEC is looking for churches and church IT leaders who will partner with them to build just such a system based on the LAMP stack and TYPO3. As I mentioned, another possibility would be to do a deep integration of a market-leading ChMS with TYPO3. We’re in the process of discerning whether it makes sense for Church of the Resurrection to be one of those partners.

WEC is fully committed to open source software. By that they mean basing the software on the LAMP stack, licensing the software they develop using the GPL, and employing open source development methodologies. The advantages of this include risk reduction, ease of integration, competitive diversity, and distributed innovation. Already WEC is being adopted by churches around the world that have the technical ability to make use of complex technology. Such churches appreciate the fact that open source means WEC doesn’t have the licensing cost barrier associated with commercial software.

For churches that lack technical skills, however, adoption is challenging. TYPO3 is more than powerful enough for even the largest churches, but it is quite complex, it is difficult to learn, and it suffers from poor usability in some areas. Accordingly, addressing these issues represent top priorities for WEC.

1. WEC is actively working with the TYPO3 Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) team to improve usability.
2. WEC is developing TYPO3 training videos.
3. WEC is working on improved processes for providing tech support.

So that's a summary of how WEC fits into our ChMS analysis. I'm praying for clarity.

Ben Hill UMC

On Wednesday I had the pleasure of visiting Ben Hill United Methodist Church, just a few miles from the airport in south Atlanta. The Foundation for Evangelism’s technology leader, Rubin Perry, is a member of that storied church and one of its hardest-working unpaid servants. After 100 years of ministry, Ben Hill is still learning, growing, dreaming, taking risks, and serving. It has purchased the former headquarters site of Delta Airlines, a large acreage with a number of corporate-style buildings that have been sitting vacant for 20+ years. The site, adjacent to the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta, has huge potential but carries many challenges. With Rubin helping to manage the project, the church is in the process of remodeling and renovating the first building, which will be used as a worship center when completed. The Holy Spirit is moving at Ben Hill and for that I say, “yeah God!”

The Spam Wars – What Does Microsoft know that SonicWALL doesn’t know?

The New York Times confirms that spam is getting worse, due primarily to two factors: 1) spammers are using farms of spambots running on insecure computers, which are abundant in homes with cable modems, making it ineffective to identify spam by originating IP address. Distributed security threats are always more difficult to block than localized threats. 2) A new type of spam with the message in an image that’s changed slightly each time it’s sent, making it impossible to recognize spam by a checksum on the contents.

I mentioned that the effectiveness of our spam filter, SonicWALL Email Security (formerly MailFrontier), is declining. On the other hand, it seems that Outlook 2003’s junk filter is keeping up. Since I began my experiment the week of Thanksgiving, I'm seeing 94-99% daily effectiveness from Outlook 2003 alone (with MailFrontier disabled on my mailbox). Yesterday it was 100% effective. Other staff we put on Outlook 2003 for our test have given similar reports.

What does Microsoft know that SonicWALL doesn't know? Why would we pay SonicWALL thousands of dollars per year for filtering that is LESS effective than the filter built-in to Outlook? Jerry, my SonicWALL reseller, has tried to get their attention. I also e-mailed one of their product managers nearly two weeks ago, with no reply at all so far. Jerry says we should hear something on Monday. Grrr.

Flurry of posts

Look out for a flurry of posts from me. It's amazing how much writing you can do in an airport and on a plane with no Internet. ;-)

Speaking of the airport, this is what greeted me when I tried to check the price to get WiFi today in Atlanta ...







Note: Because you are using an outdated browser, you may only view the raw textual content of this site. In order to view, use, and enjoy this site to the fullest at the maximum security level, please refer to our Browser Upgrade page to view a list of browsers that support web standards.

Let me see if I have this right, Sprint. I’m using an OUTDATED browser (IE 7) that should be UPGRADED to something that supports WEB STANDARDS (such as IE 6)??? You guys have had months to fix this page. Doesn’t anyone at Sprint use Sprint’s WiFi in airports? Haven’t at least some of them upgraded to IE 7? Even if they were asleep, it’s difficult to understand how they could have missed this. (Yes, Sprint is our friendly, neighborhood, telecom company located only two miles from Church of the Resurrection.)

Which ring makes the most sense?

Here's how I see the Church Management System (ChMS) marketplace. We're confronting the question of which ring of the market makes the most sense for us.


As you move in toward the center, the functionality is a closer and closer match to our requirements, but fewer and fewer organizations will be running it. On the outer rings, more organizations are innovating and influencing the feature set. On the inner rings, fewer organizations are innovating, but the features are more likely to be directly applicable to us.

Atlanta, here I come

This week I'm going to Atlanta to meet with Tony Dye as well as Mark Stephenson and Rubin Perry. Tony has graciously agreed to show me around Perimeter Church, introduce me to his A-team (A is for "awesome"), and talk about Church Management Systems (ChMS). Mark is joining in on the fun. Separately, Mark and I are going to meet with Rubin at Ben Hill United Methodist Church to talk about WEC's fledgling ChMS project.

This is my second trip exploring ChMS options, following my trips in October to Fellowship Technologies and Shelby. I should know by the end of next week whether my budget request to replace Shelby V5 has been approved for 2007.

Point, click, make a product to sell to the world

My friend Jay points us to Amazon's grand new scheme. Now let's see, how do we point, click, and plant a new church? Or, better yet, point, click, and lead people into a deeper relationship with Jesus? Hmmm ...

Birthplace of the web

Wired posted some pictures of the new particle accelerator under construction at CERN. At the end is this picture of CERN's "Internet Exchange Point," birthplace of the web. I'm feeling all weepy!

MailFrontier is struggling

We have been happy users of spam blocking software MailFrontier since 2004. MailFrontier was purchased by SonicWALL in February. When we first heard about the purchase, we weren't concerned because we respect SonicWALL and are happy users of their 2040 firewall with web content filtering.

Over the last few months, our satisfaction with MailFrontier (now called SonicWALL Email Security) is declining. We don't know if the issues have anything to do with SonicWALL taking over. We only know that spam blocking effectiveness is going down while total volume of inbound spam is increasing. Last week we saw a huge spike in inbound spam (Tony noticed this too) that coincided with most of our staff being out of the office for the Thanksgiving holiday. When they returned to their Outlook yesterday, they found large amounts of spam that got through the filter. With one voice they rose up in open revolt and stormed our IT office with pitchforks and torches.

Ahh the life of an IT Director. Now we either have to make MailFrontier work or start scrambling for other solutions. SonicWALL are you listening?

Mark's questions for staff evaluations

I will be conduction staff evaluations in January/February. This year I'm going to use Mark's questions.

Visual communication

At Church of the Resurrection we're working to get better at visual communication. Visual communication is much more effective than communication with words alone. The problem is, most of us (me included) spent the majority of our education years learning how to communicate with words. And most of us (me included) have spent the majority of our careers communicating with words -- memos, e-mails, talking with co-workers, speaking in front of groups, etc. We need to learn a new skill: visual communication.

Kathy Sierra is one of my favorite visual communicators. Her recent post on creating graphics illustrates why. Kathy, thanks for helping us with this. (Notice that even this post on visual communication has no visuals. See? I need to learn it too.)

Perry Noble provokes his fellow pastors

Most, if not all, pastors I know have thought the same things Perry shares in his post today. They agree with Perry. Acting on those ideas is what they find difficult. (Everyone in my family is a pastor except me, so I have a lot of opportunity to know what's on their minds.) Thanks, Perry.

Shelby is stable! Hallelujah!

In case the suspense has been killing you, yes the awful problems we had with SQL Server and our Shelby database are finally over. We're new now running Shelby 5.6.2009 on SQL Server 2005. It's rock stable and noticeably faster (though still not fast enough by a long shot). Praise the Lord!

Of course, we have had a number of issues with 5.6.2000 and 5.6.2009, which is hardly surprising given Shelby's track record, but all of that seems trivial compared to the database pain that has been relieved. Can I get an amen?

How NOT to move to a new database server

We bought a new server (a shiny Dell 2950 with Windows 2003 x64 and SQL Server 2005) back in May with the idea of moving Shelby and our other SQL databases to it in a planned, smooth way in June or July. We needed to free up a server for our new Rez West office so we figured it was a great opportunity to upgrade the server hardware and maybe speed up Shelby a good bit.

Due to a number of delays in the Rez West office completion, we had plenty of time to play with the new server. As June melted into July, we systematically moved our non-Shelby databases to the new server and started configuring it for Shelby.

When we updated to Shelby 5.6 in early August, massive performance problems followed. After some investigation, we came to the conclusion that 5.6 placed enough additional resource demands on the server that the old guy, a Dell 2500, wasn't getting the job done any more.

Before we could plan a cut over, the real adventure began. The old server crashed on a Wednesday morning, a time of the week when Shelby is typically under its heaviest load. In response, I divided our IT staff into two teams: one team would work on repairing the old server, while the second team would work on moving to the new server. We would go with whichever team finished first. In the course of that, we discovered that Shelby 5.6 still wasn't compatible with SQL Server 2005, despite the fact that we had been told that the May 2006 update would be compatible. So we finished restoring the old server (the crash had been caused by Windows registry corruption) and after a 6-hour outage we had no choice but to stay there - as painfully slow as it was.

By early October, we were faced with a dilemma. We had to move off of the old server to free it up for Rez West (not to mention the fact that it was so slow it was nearly unusable), but we still didn't have a SQL 2005-compatible version from Shelby and we already had databases running on SQL 2005 - there was no going back. That's when we got the idea to use the free version of VMware to create a virtual server for Shelby that would be configured with SQL 2000 and run on the new 2950 server. Our thought was to run this configuration temporarily until Shelby's October update, which was promised to be SQL 2005-compatible. Seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. Little did we know.

We have been on that configuration for the last five weeks, suffering from massive instability the entire time, including another server crash causing a 12-hour unplanned outage two weeks ago. The source of our grief was SQL 2000, not Shelby, but the user experience was that Shelby would randomly get disconnected from its database and start throwing errors. Shelby error handling is an awful mess of infinite loops, so the user's only recourse was to bring up Task Manager, shut down the client, and restart it. We spent hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support. They had us apply all kinds of updates and patches, including an unreleased hotfix. We also tried a number of changes to our VMware configuration, some of which actually made the problem worse. Each time we and our user community hoped that stability would finally be achieved, only to be bitterly disappointed. Not only was this frustrating for our users, but it was embarrassing for us. Though they were characteristically gracious, the users must have been thinking, "Does our IT Dept. know what it's doing?"

Our goal for this time was simply to hang on until we could install the SQL 2005-compatible version of Shelby, which was released last week. Every day the database was flaky and users were inconvenienced. Then we had something go bad last week in Bank Reconciliation, preventing our Finance folks from reconciling October. Shelby tech support concluded there was a damaged software component, which would be reinstalled by updating to the latest software version. So we scheduled the update for Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, the Shelby update procedure didn't work. We fought that all day Monday and finally got all desktops updated.

The last step was to install new backup software because the version of Veritas we were running doesn't support Windows 2003 Server x64. To address that, we installed a trial version of ARCserv yesterday.

We finally had all the pieces in place to cut over to SQL Server 2005, running directly on our 2950. Then today the Bank Rec thing started crashing SQL 2000 every time we ran it. Since it was crashing and has been completely unstable for five weeks, we figured we would go ahead and cut over with yet another unplanned outage.

So there you have a tale of how NOT to move to a new database server. By the way, so far it seems stable and faster by 50-60%. Now we're praying it's really over.

SQL Server woes

Our Shelby system is down right now because of ongoing woes with SQL Server. When you are responsible for IT in a very large church that uses Shelby for every aspect of church operations, "Shelby down" is not a happy thing. This is an unplanned outage made necessary by the fact that every time we ran a bank reconcilliation this afternoon, it blew up SQL Server 2000 (errors in the log and the need to manually restart SQL Server every time).

In response, we're moving our database to a new server running SQL Server 2005. This is something we've been working on for months. The final step before moving to 2005 was to install Shelby 5.6.2000, which we did earlier this week. (Since we're down, we're installing the 5.6.2009 brand new patch right now.)

We're now 105 minutes into an unplanned 30 minute outage. Remind me again why I have made a 22 year career in IT???

ChMS budget, timeline, and short list

I spent 75 minutes on the phone with Tony yesterday, which is great for me because I'm always smarter after I've talked with Tony than I was before. Perimeter is just ahead of us in the ChMS selection process. He has a deadline of this month to make a final decision. For us, our only looming deadline is to put in our budget request for 2007 this week. I met with our executive management on Monday. Based on that meeting, it seems very likely that our budget request for ChMS will be approved. If so, 2007 will be the year we make a change, but we still have a couple of months to decide what to do.

Here's our short list:

MSCRM 3.0 plus add-ons from Microsoft CRM partners
Fellowship One
Shelby Arena
Build-our-own open source system in partnership with WEC

Interestingly, two of my finalists overlap with Tony's three finalists.

Tony's third finalist is Blackbaud. I'm intrigued by that and enjoyed the chance earlier this year to discuss it in detail with Shelley Hildebrand of Tony's staff at Perimeter. Unfortunately, the cost of Blackbaud is up there near what it would cost to build our own, so that's not a feasible option for us.

Also like Tony, I know there's a chance our short list will get longer before it gets shorter. Did I mention this decision is risky and complicated?