The Appian Way

October 06, 2007

RoundTable evaluation - please comment

Rather than having a paper evaluation form at the end of the RoundTable, we decided to take a cue from Tony and solicit your feedback right here on the blog for everyone to see.

Some of you have already given feedback on your own blogs. That's cool. It would be good to comment here too so Terrell (and Terry?) can read everything in one place.

If you were here in any capacity or for any portion of the event, please share your thoughts: good, bad, or indifferent. I have a thick skin, so don't spare my feelings. Better yet, make a specific, actionable suggestion to our next hosts.

If you don't feel comfortable posting here for everyone to see, e-mail me at clif.guy at cor.org.

I definitely benefited from all of the comments after the Sugar Creek RoundTable. Amy and I did everything possible in our planning to take that feedback into account. Let's give the same benefit to our next hosts.

What's next for CITRT?

Tony did a very nice job moderating our closing discussion on "CITRT: Where do we go from here?" Some conclusions:

1. When we get together in future, vendors will be invited and allowed to speak during the roundtable sessions. However, we strongly encourage vendors to send IT, engineering, product development, or consulting people - not sales people. We want to relate as peers with the upper managers who run the data centers, lead the software development, and manage the engineers. Regardless of title, we will start throwing things at vendors if they start getting "sales-y" and they won't be invited back. We know when we're being pitched, and it will make us very cranky! Also, when we're talking about a vendor or competitor, that's the time for them to just shut up, listen, and take a ton of notes. That seems fair enough. We absolutely require the ability to speak openly in our sessions without worrying if we're saying the wrong thing or hurting someone's feelings. As far as I'm concerned, people like Dean Lisenby, Curtis Simmons, and Nick Nicholaou (and others) have demonstrated that they understand our community and know how to be a vital and healthy part of it. Any vendor who patterns their behavior after those guys will be on very safe ground.

2. Our next CITRT will be in connection with MinistryTECH in April 2008. Can't wait!

3. We will plan on two national CITRT events per year - spring and fall. Budget accordingly. Plan to come to at least one of these events each year. If you have multiple staff, you can send some to one and some to the other in order to keep things running back at your home church while others are away at the RoundTable.

4. The CITRT events might be hooked on to other conferences (such as MinistryTECH), but they will be in churches, not convention centers or hotels. A big part of the experience for us is seeing and being in the host church. Let's not lose that.

5. Rather than starting yet more groups, associations, websites, etc., let's look for technical ways to aggregate and leverage existing structures (tagging, blogrolling, feed aggregating, etc.). Eric Busby's talk on Thursday morning spoke directly to that idea. I couldn't agree more. See also the thoughtful post from Jason Reynolds on this topic.

To those of you who honored us by coming to Church of the Resurrection, thank you. It meant more than you can know. God is in this my friends. Let's keep it going.

October 05, 2007

Truly a Blessing

Much like my friends at Resurrection, Clif, Ian, I was filled to overflowing by the opportunity and honor of serving, shepherding, and worshiping with our CITRT ministry partners. It was a blessing to me! There was no one thing during our time together that made the event; it was the event in whole. Being able to host all who attended brought me back to my core of being the servant, being the shepherd, doing everything I could to bless everyone's time and let God work through me. I think everyone on our team experienced scripture lived out. Isaiah 40:31 ;)

I just wanted to say a heartfelt thanks to all, and I'm eager to build new relationships, and continue to renew the existing.

RoundTable posts

October 04, 2007

All I can say is, "wow!"

An open letter to all Fall 2007 Church IT RoundTable attendees:

When people started responding to my RoundTable invitation, it wasn't long before I realized it was going to be "off the hook!" Little did I know.

My friends, the last three days go down as the #1 highlight of my ministry at Resurrection so far. And YOU did it. All it took was for you to gather at our place. That's it. I honestly believe the planning doesn't matter much because the Holy Spirit shows up, is evident in your lives and on your faces, and gets everyone else fired up. It's a positive feedback loop. The more pumped you are, the more pumped everyone else is. Wow!

Remember when I said one of our three main purposes for this RoundTable was inspiration? In the planning for this event, I was very conscious that we needed to create opportunities for inspiration to happen. I hoped, planned, and prayed that YOU would be inspired, but oddly, I didn't expect ME to be the one inspired. Our great God had other ideas in mind. I ended up being inspired - not by any particular content, session, or moment - just by being with all of you.

Only upon reflection this evening did I fully confront the fact that I've been considering quitting. I don't know how long God will continue to call me to serve in my current capacity, but I'll tell you right now that I'm not quitting. Tonight I have rededicated myself to the work God has set before me. Why? Because the Holy Spirit, working through you in some kind of mysterious way that none of us can understand or articulate, has reignited my passion for this work. Thank you. You have been an immeasurable blessing to me.

MinistryTECH won't come soon enough ...

Thursday opening session

Did I hear correctly that this man might be presenting to the opening session Thursday morning? Cool!

October 03, 2007

Day One - Whew!

OK, so the Adobe Connect webcam thing at the RoundTable didn't work, but at least not because we weren't prepared. In this case, the cause was something we couldn't have known in advance. Turns out that 60 users simultaneously in Adobe Connect sessions by themselves chew approx. 1.5 Mb/s. When you try to add 4 webcams to that over a pair of T1s, it's all over, baby. (See Justin Moore's good-natured ribbing about our bandwidth quality!) So now we know. By the way, it totally slammed Internet access for our staff as well, and they were a bit cranky about it. ;-)

Second issue, even if the technology had worked, my "touch point" idea might very well not have worked anyway. Turns out getting everyone to stop at the same time and interact with the other rooms is a cat-herding exercise.

On the plus-side, the rooms are small enough to have really great conversation. My group in Room A has been outstanding. I'm thinking this breaking-up-into-groups idea is generally on the right track. Also, I think it was good to collect topics in advance and have all rooms generally discussing the same themes and topics at the same time. Even though we can't see/hear the specifics in the other room, there is something cool about knowing they're all having similar discussions. That simple fact has created a shared experience in an unexpected way.

Tomorrow we're going to try to get everyone in one big Connect meeting, spanning across all the rooms. Not sure if UMCOM has a room big enough to hold all of us simultaneously, but we'll see. Thanks for your flexibility.

The banquet and worship tonight were, for me, exactly what I needed at that moment. I hope most of the attendees had the same reaction.

Our own Matt Bradshaw built a cool web application that generates a web page from a list of feeds and auto-refreshes. We have dropped in feeds from people at the conference we know are blogging. Check it out at http://bitshepherd.com/planet/citrt/.

Overall, I've had a great day and I'm thankful to all of you who have come to be a part of it. Day 2 is tomorrow. Geeks for Jesus!

Andrew is the Asterisk man!

If you want to know about the Asterisk open-source phone system, ask Andrew Mitry. Amazing stuff.

October 02, 2007

Jason's survey is still down

If you've been trying to comply with my request to fill out Jason's survey but have been unable, it's because Zoho is down. This is outside of Jason's control. (He's sorry.) Please keep trying. Maybe they'll be back up soon???

Who is coming to the RoundTable?

Churches:
Asbury United Methodist Church, Tulsa, OK
Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, MN
Christ Fellowship Church, Palm Beach Gardens, FL
Church of the Resurrection, Leawood, KS
Churches in Covenant, Carrollton, TX
College Heights Christian Church, Joplin, MO
Crestview Baptist Church
First Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA
First Baptist Raytown, Raytown, MO
First Presbyterian Church, Bellevue, WA
First United Methodist Church, Wichita, KS
Grace Covenant Church, Cornelius, NC
Granger Community Church, Granger, IN
Indian Creek Community Church, Olathe, KS
Kansas City Baptist Temple, Raytown, MO
Lakeview Church, Indianapolis, IN
Lincoln Berean Church, Lincoln, NE
Living Word Lutheran Church, Grapevine, TX
Northwoods Community Church, Peoria, IL
Perimeter Church, Duluth, GA
Pinelake Church, Brandon, MS
Pleasant Valley Baptist Church, Liberty, MO
Rhema Bible Church, Tulsa, OK
Seacoast Church, Mt. Pleasant, SC
Sheffield Family Life Center, Kansas City, MO
St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church, Fairfax, VA
St. Michael the Archangel, Leawood, KS
West Side Christian Church, Springfield, IL
Westbrooke Church, Shawnee Mission, KS

Other:
Christian Computing Magazine, Belton, MO
The IT Roundtable, Dallas, TX
MinistryTECH.org, Edmond, OK
Trinity Technology for Ministry, Kansas City, MO

Vendors:
ACS Technologies, Florence, SC
C&M Support Services & Consulting, Elkhart, IN
Circle Builder, Santa Monica, CA
Fellowship Technologies, Irving, TX
iBiz Initiatives, Lenexa, KS
MBS, Inc., Huntington Beach, CA
Ministry Management Solutions, Orange Park, FL
Shelby Systems, Cordova, TN
The ACTS Group, Houston, TX
United Methodist Communications, Nashville, TN

October 01, 2007

Instructions for using Connect at the RoundTable

If you don't want the background, jump to the bullet points below. If you do want the background, here goes ...

You may recall that after the last RoundTable in Houston there was general agreement that our growing group needs to include more people, but at the same time keep it small so that we can continue to enjoy full participation of every attendee around a table. This presents a paradox. Perhaps even a conundrum!

How we’re going to include more people and keep it small

For this RoundTable we’re going to beta test my idea to address the aforementioned conundrum. We’re going to break the 60+ attendees into four separate rooms of approximately 15 people each. In order to allow interaction between the rooms, we will have “touch points” during the sessions where we will be able to pose questions to attendees in other rooms and see/hear them responding.

The technology we’re using for this is Adobe Connect, generously provided by UMCOM Tech Shop. This will be a brave experiment that could fail spectacularly, or possibly be cool. If it works, Woo Hoo! If it proves to be cumbersome or we have technical or facilitation problems, we can always punt. With everyone's input, we hope to devise a way for future meetings to keep it small for the best possible info exchange, to continue to include more people, and to allow at least the possibility of having a national meeting by linking multiple regional sites (an idea inspired by the Willow Creek Leadership Summit).

Since we’re using Connect to provide the A/V link among the four rooms, we figured it would be cool to use it to enhance the experience within each room too. Each participant will join an Adobe Connect meeting that includes the other people in the same room. That Connect session will be displayed on the projector in that room. Any participant can become a presenter in Connect, allowing them to demo, explain, or illustrate something by showing web sites, applications, etc. on the projector. Is that clear as mud? Even if you don't understand the explanation, hopefully it will make sense once you see it.

Adobe Connect is an online meeting tool that will help us:
* more effectively exchange information in each room
* simulate a distributed RoundTable with meeting rooms in different cities

Connect requirements:
* Mac (any OS; Safari 2.x)
* Windows (XP/SP2 or Vista; IE6 or later, or Netscape/Firefox)
* Adobe Flash Player
* a broadband connection
* cookies enabled

To use Connect:
1. Set your screen resolution to 1024x768 (so if you present, your screen will match the projector's resolution).

2. Download and install the presenter client:
* Windows: https://admin.acrobat.com/common/addin/setup.exe
* Mac: https://admin.acrobat.com/common/addin/AcrobatConnectAddin.z
* Alternate: http://www.cor.org/Information_Technology.41.0.html

3. Test Connect by going to the Chat Lobby at this URL:
* http://umc.acrobat.com/chatlobby
* Login convention: (1stname).(Lastname) - (church initials) (for example: Clif.Guy-COR)

4. After a successful test, you’re ready to go to your assigned room and join the meeting for that room:
* Room A - http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtablea
* Room B - http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtableb
* Room C - http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtablec
* Room D - http://umc.acrobat.com/itroundtabled

5. Once you log in, Connect will set a cookie. It's a good idea to add a bookmark so you can quickly re-enter your meeting room the next day.

September 30, 2007

Planter in residence

Speaking of renewal strategies, I think Mark Batterson's idea about a "church planter in residence" program is right on the money. We need a good way to use our resources to support church planters and make them more effective.

Mainline renewal

One of Church of the Resurrection's three primary visions is renewing the mainline church. For those of you who have never heard the term "mainline" it generally refers to long-established denominations with moderate theology. It includes the following seven denominations and others like them: Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and American Baptist.

These denominations, including Methodist, have been declining since the 1960s. When you take a hard look at the numbers, it's depressing. Of the mainline denominations, the largest is Methodist. And Resurrection is among the largest Methodist congregations. So we have a special heart for these denominations and their congregations. We long to see them remember their calling, reverse their decline, and return to missional effectiveness.

My wife is a Disciples of Christ (DOC) church planter. Because of that, I'm privileged to see the DOC's 6 year-old church planting initiative from the inside. This initiative has been very effective, to the point that it's starting to have a real, positive impact denomination-wide. A few years ago I was personally involved in efforts to revitalize a 60 year-old DOC church. Let me tell you, that was difficult work and it produced only minimal fruit. While church planting is very, very challenging, the DOC experience suggests it is a better strategy for denominational renewal than any program I've seen for revitalizing existing congregations.

Up to now, Resurrection's primary mainline renewal effort has been our conferencing ministry. We hold one main conference each year, Leadership Institute, and host a number of other conferences for the Methodist denomination and other mainline groups such as the Beeson Institute of Asbury Seminary. This is a great ministry and I'm certain it has produced some excellent fruit, yet it seems to me that church planting will be even more important in fulfilling our mainline renewal vision.

Last year, we began by starting our first satellite campus, Resurrection West. Just a few weeks ago, our senior pastor, Adam Hamilton, asked me to start working on plans for an Internet Campus for Resurrection, as one of several other satellite campus locations we are planning. I'm very excited about this, but I also recognize a number of huge challenges. I'll continue to post and, no doubt, ask questions as we work through the issues. Any of you with experience doing an Internet campus, let me know. I'm very interested to hear your strategy and how it's going.

September 29, 2007

Tuesday plans

Many of you coming to the RoundTable from outside the Kansas City area will be arriving through the day on Tuesday. If you're making plans for what to do when you arrive, here are some things to consider ...

Check in time for both conference hotels is 3:00 pm. If your arriving early afternoon, you can go to your hotel, check-in and then come to the church. Our official welcome starts at 3:30, followed by a campus tour around 4:30.

If you are arriving earlier in the day, you're welcome to come hang out at the church. Be aware though that in addition to the RoundTable, we're hosting our biggest conference of the year next week. So if you come early, expect us to put you to work!

If you are arriving too late to make the tour, we're having dinner at a restaurant close to the church at 7:00 pm. You can go straight there and join us.

Sunset Grill
14577 Metcalf Ave
Overland Park, KS 66223
Google map is here
Call my cell at 913-642-1875 if you get lost!

Transportation needs

If any of you coming to the RoundTable could help with the following transportation needs, please post a comment and we'll hook you up. Thanks!

Andrew Lang needs a ride back to the airport. His flight leaves Thursday night at 7:40 pm (will need to leave the church around 5:45 pm to make it in time).

David Szpunar needs a ride to the church from the airport. His flight arrives Tuesday morning at 8:20 am.

David Szpunar needs a ride back to the airport. His flight leaves Friday morning at 9:00 am (will need to leave the hotel around 7:00 am to make it in time).

September 27, 2007

RoundTable sponsors

We would like to gratefully acknowledge our Fall 2007 RoundTable sponsors: ACS Technologies, The ACTS Group, Fellowship Technologies, and Shelby Systems. Their generous support has allowed us to cover all conference expenses including all meals while keeping the registration fee to only $34. When you see them, please express your appreciation. We couldn't do this event without them.

Help Jason with his presentation!

Can you hep a brotha out? Jason Powell will be presenting at the RoundTable on the survey data he has gathered from church IT departments around the country. This will be a very informative session that will allow you to benchmark your church's IT operation against those of many churches of different sizes, locations, ages, denominations, and budgets. But to do that, he needs all of you to fill out the survey (especially those of you coming to the RoundTable).

So please, right now, go to http://creator.zoho.com/gccjason/page/1/ and follow the directions from there. This data is going to be very helpful for all of us and will definitely help Jason with his presentation!

RoundTable schedule

Here is the schedule for the RoundTable next week.

Tuesday, Oct. 2 - Pre-RoundTable
3:30 PM Registration open - welcome and refreshments
4:15 PM Resurrection IT overview
4:30 PM Facility/IT tour
7:00 PM Sponsored restaurant dinner (optional)

Wednesday, Oct. 3 - RoundTable Day 1
8:30 AM Registration open - welcome and coffee
9:00 AM Large group opening session - explanation and instructions
9:45 AM Break
10:00 AM Roundtable session 1
12:15 PM Lunch (sponsored)
1:30 PM Roundtable session 2
3:45 PM Break
4:15 PM Large group session 2 - Q&A with Adam Hamilton, Senior Pastor
5:00 PM Video - Leadership: An Art of Possibility
5:30 PM Break
6:00 PM Sponsored banquet
7:00 PM Worship
8:00 PM Hang out time until 11:00 pm

Thursday, Oct. 4 - RoundTable Day 2
8:30 AM Gathering and coffee
9:00 AM Large group session 3 - Jason Powell
9:45 AM Break
10:00 AM Roundtable session 3
11:45 AM Lunch (sponsored)
1:00 PM Topic Bazaar
3:30 PM Break
4:00 PM Large group closing session - Tony Dye
5:30 PM Sponsored restaurant dinner (optional)
7:00 PM Worship concert (optional)

Friday, Oct. 5 - Leadership Institute Day 1
Saturday, Oct. 6 - Leadership Institute Day 2

Wednesday night at the RoundTable

We have planned a very special experience for Wednesday evening at the RoundTable. It will be an oasis of quiet meditation and prayer in the middle of an otherwise brain-overloaded event. Personally, of everything we've planned, I'm looking forward to Wednesday evening the most.

We will begin with a candlelit banquet of the best barbecue in Kansas City. Then the band from my wife's church, Fusion 112, will lead us in a time of intense, unplugged worship. We have chosen songs that many of you will know and are easy to learn if you don't know them. My wife, Laura, will then bring a message based on 1 Sam 17:38-39 about David not being comfortable in Saul's armor. It will be powerful and inspiring. After that we will share communion and have an opportunity to pray with each other and linger as long as we like. Nothing will be hurried or rushed.

It will be a time to pause, to remember who we are and whose we are, to forge deeper bonds with our church IT brothers and sisters, and to make sure the main thing is the main thing. I can't wait!

September 22, 2007

ChMS selection goals

As we go through our NextGen ChMS project, I find myself torn by the competing demands of multiple important goals:

Speak openly and candidly about my thoughts on ChMS (church management systems) in an effort to help my fellow church IT leaders and the ChMS suppliers.
Build up the competing suppliers, treat all of them with respect, and ultimately bless them whether or not they sell us anything.
Thoroughly examine and give careful consideration to each of the suppliers on our short list.
Avoid wasting anyone’s time, insofar as that is possible.
Ensure that our user community doesn’t lose any important functionality they now rely upon in Shelby V5 Church.
Achieve executive management’s desired result – to greatly improve our ability to track interactions with congregants (CRM-type functionality) and to provide better reporting/graphing for decision support (management dashboard).
Obtain as much “wish list” functionality as possible.
Stay within my established budget and time line.
Select a great company with great technology, products, and support that we can stick with for the next 5-10 years.

There! What’s so difficult about that???