ChMS: Buy it, build it, or integrate it?

If you have spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve the Church Management System (ChMS) function in your church, you probably have reservations about buying one of the existing ChMS products (“buy it”) but at the same time realize you can’t afford to build your own system (“build it”). I want a third alternative: “integrate it.”

With the right technical and non-technical factors in place, it should be possible for your team to integrate technology from multiple commercial and open source providers, along with in-house developed modules, to achieve the range and degree of automation that makes sense for your unique ministry.

In my last post, I listed three technical factors that would need to be in place in order for an open ChMS marketplace to come into existence:

1. A common schema for data exchange. (The best technology for this right now is XML. See ebXML for an example.)

2. An architecture for generating and handling data change events (such as a Web Services API).

3. An architecture for single sign-on.

This list comes out of our experience integrating multiple web applications that weren’t designed to work together. Perhaps there are one or two additional technical requirements I haven’t thought of yet. This brings me to the second part of my question ...

What non-technical (business) factors would need to be in place to foster development of an open ChMS marketplace?

I'd like to suggest we work toward the following:

1. Backing of a few influential churches and/or para-church organizations plus one or more open source or commercial ChMS vendors.

2. A funded standards organization.

3. A Kingdom-minded spirit of unity and cooperation across denominational and geographical boundaries as well as among both non-profit and for-profit organizations.

I’ve said before that we have differing styles, mission fields, and theological points of view, but we have one Lord and we proclaim one gospel. We're all on the same team. Could we begin to move together in a direction that honors God and helps the Church pursue the Great Commission?

I look forward to your comments.

Example of how a Standard and an Open Marketplace changed one industry...

I'm on the part-time IT staff at COR, and I get to talk to Clif directly. I agree with his perspectives on ChMS. We've argued out lots of these points over lunches and Skype chats.

I'm also a worship musician. And I was there in 1983 when the music industry figured out something critical: that a common standard could help *everybody*. Even though the manufacturers were scared and skeptical at first, when they finally dived in THE WORLD CHANGED.

In the 70s and 80s, keyboard players (like me; hey it was 1983!) spent thousands of dollars on instruments: music synthesizers with names like Moog and Yamaha. Learning to play them was cumbersome, and each was a completely independent experience.

In 1982 (still pretty much before PC's) my 3-man company became an original member of the old IMA, right along side giants like Yamaha and Sequential. The objective was to develop Dave Smith's idea for a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), which was/is merely a language that all manufacturers could use to translate Black & White key presses into music notes for the sound generator of a synthesizer. If there was a *standard* language for this (the unlikely reasoning went), then instruments could communicate, new grass-roots development from outside would introduce hybrid vigor, and everyone would benefit. But, it was a hard sell: most companies had lots of money tied up in their own systems, and saw things through Old-World colored glasses, hoping for customers to stay "locked in" to the company after learning one instrument's subtleties.

AND THEN: "In a rare example of insight and cooperation, U.S. and overseas companies began working together..." (see Mix Mag's interview with Dave Smith) - - and the 2 companies that spent huge $$ to technically design and implement MIDI gave the technology away to everyone and told *them* how to implement it. (read about the birth of MIDI)

So, in January 1983, at the Anaheim NAMM Trade Show, one guy carried one synth to another synth company's booth, one tiny little MIDI cable linked 2 totally different instruments, and The World Changed. We all quickly discovered digital control, computer mixing, new soundscapes, and a slew of eager new companies hatching new strategies to exploit the newly expanding market. Practically every bit of the worship music I listen to (and create) every day depends on MIDI - a standard that everyone bought into when no one was sure anyone would.

Guess what? Yamaha, and Korg, and the Big Boys are still around, leading their industries, and happy that MIDI came along. The MIDI specification, now nearly 25 years old, transformed the creation of contemporary music. Every church I know of uses it every week, and you've benefitted from it a hundred thousand times. You probably even have .mid files on your PC.

The lesson (of course): working to develop or promote standard schemas will help *your company*, *your church*, and *God's Kingdom*.

More about MIDI at these links:
* Wikipedia - -
* MIDI.org - -

Towards an open ChMS marketplace

See previous posts in this series:
The ChMS conversation we started (but know we’ll never finish)
Choosing a ChMS – the risk calculation

Also earlier posts on related subjects:
Integrating CRM and the Web
Open source Church Management System (ChMS)

No customer lock-in
So what could ChMS vendors do to help me with my conundrum and reduce the risk that I’ll make a bad choice? First, let me suggest a non-technical answer: they need to reject the tempting strategy of achieving and maintaining customer lock-in. They need to go out of their way to make it easy for me to change in the future if I so desire. In other words, they need to set aside their interests and focus on the interests of the Kingdom (and in so doing, they’ll find that their interests are served as well). Instead of competing primarily on a feature list, they need to compete on ease of integration, openness, and customer services. If the vendor can achieve lock-in, they don’t have to be great at these things because they’ll have acceptable rates of customer retention regardless, at least in the short term. On the other hand, if the ChMS vendor rejects the lock-in strategy, my risk as the buyer goes down because I know the vendor will have to continue to earn my business long after the initial sale and implementation.

Second (and this is much more difficult), ChMS suppliers need to find their way towards an open ChMS marketplace. By “open” I mean one in which innovation can originate from many places and come together to meet the needs of a particular church at a particular time. For example, wouldn’t it be great if Granger could run Saddleback’s small groups system with Fellowship’s check-in and WEC’s content management? Wouldn’t it be awesome if Perimeter could run Shelby with Resurrection’s missions opportunity registration system? Wouldn’t it be excellent if Resurrection could run iModules’ online community tools with Perimeter’s Elder system and a web store like OS Commerce? I’m envisioning a marketplace in which there could be multiple for-profit companies contributing technology and services alongside churches, para-church organizations, and open source communities giving away software that automates their process innovations. Wouldn’t that be a major advancement for the Kingdom?

What is stopping us from doing this right now? Well that’s easy enough to answer. The systems I mentioned were built at different times on different platforms by for-profit and non-profit organizations without ever considering the possibility of interoperability. So that’s a big technical barrier. Also, the ChMS vendors don’t see an economic incentive to cooperate with their competitors, which is a big non-technical barrier. Could we overcome these barriers going forward?

To overcome the technical barriers, it seems to me we would need three things:
1. A common schema for data exchange. (The best technology for this right now is XML.)
2. An architecture for generating and handling data change events (such as a Web Services API).
3. An architecture for single sign-on.

Tony posted a comment in which he used the term “platform” to describe what we need. He also quoted me in the ChMS Google group, which attracted a number of comments exactly along the lines I’m thinking.

More in the next post ...

Worship attendance

At the Roundtable we had an extensive discussion of approaches to automate worship attendance. Today Kevin McCord weighs in on the same subject. He thinks printing out a nametag will be enough incentive to get many/most worship attendees to stop at a kiosk and check in.

Choosing a ChMS – the risk calculation

As I alluded in the previous post, a huge consideration for me in choosing our next Church Management Systems (ChMS) is minimizing the risk of making a bad choice. The question of ChMS is the most strategically complex and the riskiest decision I’ve faced since becoming IT Director at Church of the Resurrection three years ago. Why do I say that? What makes this decision especially risky?

The risk is high mainly because Church Management Systems automate core processes. In business or church, whenever you automate core processes you set in motion a complex interplay between your operations and your technology. You adapt the automation system as best you can to fit your processes and you inevitably adapt some of your processes to fit the automation system. You train your staff on the system and over time they develop some deep expertise in its quirks. You purchase and integrate other technology with the system. Before long, the thought of changing the system becomes nearly unthinkable. Companies that build and sell systems that automate core processes understand this very well. Once they get a customer fully on board with the system, they know it will be very difficult for the customer to go another direction. The customer is “locked in” and they're happy (that is, the vendor is happy).

Going forward from the initial implementation, a ChMS is likely to become a two-edged sword. While your operations become more efficient, operational innovation can be held back if the automation technology can’t keep pace. Curtis Harris of Fellowship Tech asked at the Roundtable if it wasn’t possible to have a set of best practices that the system would automate, benefiting all churches that use it. I don’t believe that’s 100% the case (although we all can and should be learning from each other). The best senior pastors are the innovators. They zig when everyone else is zagging. So there’s bound to be some mismatches between what any particular system does and my particular church’s unique way of doing ministry. I strongly suspect that will be the case for other churches too.

Right now Resurrection is too dependent on Shelby. If Shelby doesn’t keep pace with new technology and new ministry models, there’s not a lot we can do because we’re “locked in.” If we go out and find a new system that “stinks the least” and change to that system, we might be better off than we are now, but fundamentally it’s the same strategy. Our risk of Shelby not performing simply changes to a risk of the new vendor not performing. And ultimately, I don’t believe it will be possible for Shelby or any vendor to perfectly, exactly meet our needs.

So what could ChMS vendors do to help me with this conundrum and reduce the risk that I’ll make a bad choice? I’ll share some thoughts on that in my next post.

The ChMS conversation we started (but know we’ll never finish)

After a long day of sharing at the IT Roundtable about everything from WiFi to training and volunteers, we took a break around 4:30 pm and began a lot of conversations in groups of 2 to 5 people. The reps from Shelby, ACS, and Fellowship Tech joined in those conversations. That went on for a couple of hours until the long-awaited Church Management System (ChMS) discussion began. We were just warming up when the pizza arrived courtesy of Shelby and suddenly food seemed more important than ChMS (imagine that!). After pizza we toured the facility and had more conversation in small groups. I think I was one of the last to leave at 10:00 pm. So we started the conversation (or more accurately we continued the conversation that has already begun in the blogosphere and on Tony’s Google group), but we didn’t finish it. Reflecting on that, I realized we will never finish it. So here is another installment in the conversation …

To open the discussion I put up the question: “What do we need the system to do?” This is the usual starting place because we typically think system selection is mostly a matter of determining which system’s features have the best match with our needs. Everyone around the table, with the notable exception of Terry Chapman, agreed with my assertion that no available system perfectly meets our needs today. (Terry is the CIO at Fellowship Church, so Fellowship One is a hand-in-glove fit for them.) John Dolan then rephrased my question as: “Which system stinks the least?” And Tony Dye focused in on the “we” in my original question. “Who is ‘we’?” he asked.

Exactly. Depending on who “we” are, a given system might meet our needs. But unless we built it ourselves, as Fellowship Church did, we’re probably stuck forever with the question, “Which system stinks the least?” (And by the way, Terry said he doesn’t recommend building your own ChMS.) So we start with the assumption that, at a high level, the first issue is “build it or buy it?” And most of us get to “buy it” pretty quickly, perhaps without even consciously considering “build it,” because that option is simply not feasible for most of us.

I then wondered out loud whether “What do we need the system to do?” is the right question with which to begin. I would like to ask what I think is a pre-requisite question. In fact, my question challenges the assumption that our top-level options are build it or buy it. My question challenges the assumption that we have to choose a commercial or open source system and run with it. My question is, “What kind of structure do we need in the ChMS market?” Or, “What kind of business model would optimize the relationships among churches and ChMS suppliers?” Or, “Why should I have to choose whether to run Shelby, ACS, or Fellowship exclusive of the others?” Either/or choices might be our only choices today, but can we imagine a marketplace in which both/and is a possibility? That would radically alter the risk calculation and make my job as IT Director much easier. What technical and non-technical principles would need to be in place for such a world to come into existence?

Ruminate on that a bit while I compose my next post. And feel free to comment. ;-)

IT Roundtable at Granger

What an awesome experience it was to be at Granger Community Church with a bunch of other “church nerds” talking about church IT! My only complaint is that our time together was too short. It was great to meet so many of you in person after reading your blogs, and great to renew acquaintances with old friends.

A big “thank you” to Jason for organizing the event and hosting us. Granger is a place where God is doing remarkable things. It was inspiring just being in their facility and interacting with their people.

We definitely need to do it again some time.

To block or not to block?

We're blocking both MySpace and Facebook at our firewall. Our youth pastor and his boss decided to do this because the school districts are doing it. Their argument is: Why should we be less restrictive than the schools? I'm conflicted about it.

Do you have web content filtration in your network? If so, do you block social networking sites? What are the pluses and minues?

By the way, Scoble says MySpace is for kids; Facebook is for adults. Makes sense.

Comparing a podcast to "teleportation" in Acts 8

This morning Mark Batterson posted about how after leading the Ethiopian Eunuch to Christ, Philip "teleported" to Azotus (actually the text says "the eunuch did not see him again ... Philip, however, appeared at Azotus ..."). Mark compared this to his ability to "teleport" all over the world via podcast. Those of us who are church IT nerds and not pastors really need people like Mark Batterson to put what we do in theological terms. Thanks, Mark. Hopefully I'll remember this the next time someone asks me about church podcasting.

Tony Morgan asks a great question

Check out Tony Morgan's post today "Lifting people up or loading people down?" Tony, it's not only volunteers we need to be concerned about. Sometimes it's staff.

This issue of work/rest balance in life is resonating with me, particularly in light of the talks by Andy Stanley and Wayne Cordeiro (thanks Tony for the synopsis) at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. I attended the Summit with my whole team, several of whom said Andy and Wayne were talking to me. I needed to slow down, they said. So the next week I took a day off and moved my daughter into her dorm for her freshman year at Park University. That was important, but I have some more resting to do.

It's been a difficult summer:

• We lost a staff person in IT - the 3rd one we've lost this year (and it really hurt)
• We had the usual vacations
• I had the most unfortunate experience of passing a kidney stone
• We hosted the Willow Creek conference
• We've had emergency outages in our phone service and our database server (which hosts Shelby and Track It)
• We've had a number of major infrastructure projects going on including new firewall, new web content filtration system, new anti-virus software, new phone company, new online bookstore, new online box office, updated web site navigation, and the biggest of all, our new location - Resurrection West
• And all of this is on top of our routine workload of tech support, computer upgrades, new staff coming in, and on and on

We simply haven't been able to keep up.

So Tony, I'm with you. As one of the burdened, I'm wondering if sometimes we're adding to the burdens of our congregants, volunteers, and staff. If they've had a summer anything like mine, they're ready for some rest. Yet others are ready to take the next step if only we will challenge them. We need wisdom to know when to push and when to relax.

Volunteering at Promise Keepers

This weekend I had the honor of serving as a volunteer Evangelism Supervisor for the Promise Keepers conference in Kansas City. Around 300 men responded to the altar call on Friday night, more than 100 of which were accepting Christ for the first time. I've done this before. It's an amazing experience every time.

I was too busy with my duties Friday night to take pictures, but here are a few shots of serving lunch to approximately 7,000 men on Saturday.

Promise Keepers has been serving lunch at the conference for years. They have it down to a science. A refigerated semi-truck rolled in, a forklift unloaded pallets of boxes, volunteers stacked them just a certain way, and finally the volunteers opened the boxes.

Each box has eleven lunches. They're all the same so people won't take time looking for their preference.

And here they come! (By the way, I saw Jim Walton in this line. I hope you had a great experience, Jim.)

Blastoff

Resurrection West Blasted off today. And I do mean blasted. More than 700 people were in attendance at the LAUNCH of what is essentially a new church. Thats gotta be some kind of record. I think of today as the Wedding, now comes the marriage....

The venue is a Junior High School about 10 miles from the central (original) campus. We use a high definition feed from the central campus (ask cliff if you want to understand all the technology...I just think its cool). Above Left Adam interviews some folks who restore classic cars, and over on the right pastor Molly Simpson gives announcements in front of the HD screen.

Leadership Summit

This is the first time we've hosted the Willow Creek Leadership Summit at Church of the Resurrection. Ian helped me setup a laptop to connect to the Windows Media video stream for use as a backup to the main video feed that comes in over satellite. Turns out, we needed it in the very first session on Thursday morning due to storms in both Chicago and Kansas City. Good thing it worked!

Here's the rigged-up rear-screen projector:

This is the laptop showing the video stream full-screen:

Conference attendees in the sanctuary:

People in the Narthex:

My wife, Laura, and daughter, Beth:

A new Arena?

Jason and Tony, thanks for letting us know about Arena. We're very interested.

Reflections on the TYPO3 Conference

I previously posted about the TYPO3 Conference, but wanted to expand on it a bit. Thinking back on the event re-affirms my excitement to be a part of the Web Empowered Church ministry. This was the second conference, and the second opportunity I had to meet Kasper Skårhøj, the creator of the TYPO3 CMF. Kasper is a character, and a great individual with a strong passion for quality and perfection.

This year, Kasper was in good spirit from becoming a new dad just a few months earlier, but was also excited to renew his connection with WEC. In the past, Kasper expressed how he struggled with the motivation to continue maintaining TYPO3, as it was not a perfect fit for his desires as it was earlier in time. At this years conference, he expressed how deeply connected he now felt to the WEC ministry, and how he wished to contribute more than was able. When he released TYPO3 in the open source world his vision was brining it to the church world, enabling them to perform ministry on the web with ease and ability. It seems WEC has been formed to help push the ball over that goal line. His motivation was renewed with TYPO3 being brought to the church like he initially envisioned.

At the same time, those of us performing WEC tasks have become much more knowledgeable in TYPO3, not leaning so heavily on the TYPO3 community to make progress, and we are giving back to the community more. The WEC ministry is now in full swing, more capable than ever, and more supported than I ever imagined by Kaspers personal commitment who believes it a God match.

So coming back to my reflections, I am excited to be a part of WEC for all of these reasons. God brought me to Church of the Resurrection five years ago for some purpose, and although I don't feel worthy, I believe it was to do my part to bring WEC & TYPO3 to churches. It is exciting to be a team mate with these individuals, and partner with those supporting WEC. I'm looking forward to what the future will bring and where God will lead us.

Blackbaud's open API

In a post last week, Tony Dye quoted Blackbaud's CTO regarding their open API. I hope other ChMS vendors are reading Tony's blog and took note of that post.

I'm done with Pluck

I'm done with Pluck.

Last summer when I began blogging and reading blogs on a regular basis, I surveyed the available RSS readers and ended up liking and using Pluck. I liked Pluck because it integrates with IE and it allows me to mark posts as read so at any time I can come back and see easily the unread posts.

Unfortnately, Pluck has been neglected. It hasn't been updated since last November and now certain bugs are really starting to bug me. Recently I realized that Pluck was missing new posts in some of my favorite blogs. It also frequently has errors reading feeds, which show up as messages I have to mark as read.

I tried Bloglines, which is cool, but it won't import my OPML and I don't have the patience to re-subscribe to all of my feeds in Bloglines.

I'm playing around with Vista beta 2 and Office 2007 beta 2. Vista comes with IE 7 with its built-in RSS reader. So that's my new reader, at least for now. Goodbye Pluck, I'm sorry to leave but you let me down.

United Methodist Worship, North Carolina Style

This past Sunday morning the Web Empowered Church team attended two churches to give our guest, Kasper, a taste of different worship services here in North Carolina, US. First we attended the Long's Chapel UMC worship service. This was a modern church building which extended off an original stone building. The sanctuary felt new, with pews on an angled floor, and a beautiful wooden roof having a look of yellow pine. The roof was flat, and angled upward from the corners of the room up to a square center, which raised up to let light in through small windows at the top. It reminded my wife and I of a Catholic sanctuary we visited last year while we were in Wisconsin. Both created a beautiful vertical space that gave a very personal feel to the room, and left you with a sense of awe.

The service was contemporary, with songs that were thoroughly approved by my wife, and we had the pleasure of witnessing a baptism. Everything had a touch of Southern style to it, which is hard to describe here in words other than "a comfort of home." This was the weekend before Independence Day, so the theme was patriotic, along with the sermon. The pastor spoke about church and politics, Chucks favorite topics I might add, and mentioned Jesus' response to paying taxes, "Give to Caesar what is Caesars, and give to God what is Gods." The message, as it should be - simple, hold God above all things in your heart.

The second service we attended was at the Stuart Auditorium at Lake Junaluska, through the South Eastern Jurisdiction. The auditorium was an open gathering hall, originally constructed with a tin roof and sawdust floor. The building we were in now was more modern than that, but still considered strange, with a very high wood roof and this large white structure coming out of the middle, descending down into the center from the ceiling. The only way to describe this thing was it looked it like it could sprout legs and walk off like a some version of the mechanical beast from the movie, Wild, Wild West. The sides of the building were very open, with fans hanging down to cool the inside temperature.

Other than the distraction of analysing the strange structure, I thought the service had a well seasoned choir, and the speaker of the week was William Willimon. He did use some "churchy" words in the sermon, and lightly dusted the sermon with dry humor about the disagreements between liberal and conservative churches regarding whether the Christian church needed a full body resurrection to believe in Christ. It was delivered in good taste, with no names mentioned.

It was wonderful to be able to experience not one but two Sunday services, both of which my wife attended and survived to my surprise, and something I'll be able to remember quite a while.

Conference - TYPO3

I've been here in North Carolina at The Foundation for Evangelism at Lake Junaluska over this week, learning more of the TYPO3 CMF. This in relation to the Web Empowered Church ministry. It has been the second opportunity I've had to meet and be inspired by Kasper Skårhøj, the creator of TYPO3, and although we drove quite deep into the technical, what stood out the most was Kasper's expression of his original mission with TYPO3. He always saw TYPO3 as a tool for ministry, which is now being realized with Web Empowered Church.

I try to step outside of myself and realize how truly unique it is for Christianity and technology to come together in such a way. The room is filled with twenty people who have come to have Kasper impart knowledge about TYPO3, but all have come to imagine new ways that expand the Lord's Kingdom through Internet Ministry utilizing TYPO3. We have people representing Web Empowered Church, freelance consultants, church staff, and ISPs. In short, Christian technology geeks, a categorization I happily place myself in. :p

I began as a WEC developer in January 2006, coming on board for multiple reasons. The short list being empowering the local church with tools for ministry, the fact that WEC is a global ministry with the ability to affect people on that scale, and most importantly because I felt God calling me to do this, which tells me all I need to know about WEC. Also, as Kasper expresses in his corner of the web, what better way to honor God than using the ability he gave me?

I rather enjoyed visiting The Foundation For Evangelism and experiencing their culture here at Lake Junaluska. It is the first time I've visited this part of the South, and I have to say you can hear all you can of southern hospitality, but until you experience it - you won't get it, trust me. The Foundation staff were extraordinary.

Although I came away with a deeper technical knowledge that will empower my ability in this ministry, I also came away with an experience being another notch on the pole of my spiritual growth. As some in the community would say, +1.

Podcasting sermons

Dan Bryant, a Disciple pastor in Eugene, Oregon, recently e-mailed a question about the Living Water site. Rather than answer him individually, I am posting the answer here. Dan writes:

I am exploring podcasting and found yours. Nicely done! Can you tell me a little about your experience with it, how much effort it takes, how useful it is, software you use, etc.?

Dan, start with my post explaining the simple technology behind how we publish the Living Water podcast on the web. Next, take a look at the post where I talk about the process of getting listed in the iTunes Music Store podcast directory.

Now, all of the above assumes you can create MP3 files of your sermons. At Living Water I do that by recording the service live off the house mixer, through a DBX 166 compressor, and then to a Tascam CD recorder. After the service, I use FreeRip to rip the sermon track to WAV. Then I use my 5 year-old copy of Cool Edit 2000 to trim it, adjust levels, and save it out as an MP3. Finally, I use MP3tag to fill in the metadata for the MP3 file. Yes, that is quite a few steps. None of the steps are particularly difficult, but it's a lot of fiddling around.

Looking for a simpler way? Try Sermons Online. I haven't used it, but my fellow Appian Way blogger, Chuck Russell, highly recommends it.

As to whether it is useful, we are excited that we have many people across the country and around the world downloading our sermon podcast. In fact, our weekly podcast downloads exceed our average worship attendance. A statistic like that will really make you take notice.

Thanks for the question, Brian. And happy podcasting!