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!

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

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!

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

1. 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.
2. Build up the competing suppliers, treat all of them with respect, and ultimately bless them whether or not they sell us anything.
3. Thoroughly examine and give careful consideration to each of the suppliers on our short list.
4. Avoid wasting anyone’s time, insofar as that is possible.
5. Ensure that our user community doesn’t lose any important functionality they now rely upon in Shelby V5 Church.
6. 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).
7. Obtain as much “wish list” functionality as possible.
8. Stay within my established budget and time line.
9. 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???

I’m back in the Charlotte airport on my way home after spending last night and today with the senior management team of ACS Technologies. I mentioned that I was having dinner with Robin and Ben last night. I didn’t know that Hal Campbell, President of ACS would also be joining us. Hal is a humble man who has built an outstanding company. The restaurant was a bit loud but the food was good and the conversation was excellent. It was a fun way to begin a relationship with them.

Robin is VERY well organized. She took care of all of the details of our meeting today, which included the same people from last night as well as RoundTable buddy Dean Lisenby, Pattie White, Steve Cumbia, Cindy Street and several others.

I’m glad I corrected my previous error and put ACS on our short list. We talked for more than 7 hours and never once did a product demo – my kind of meeting! I was very favorably impressed by the company. Like my meetings with Shelby and Fellowship Technologies last year, I quite appreciated the openness of the exchange. They graciously allowed me to challenge them as though we had been friends for years. Better yet, they challenged me back with some clear-headed responses. That’s cool!

Pattie did wonder aloud if I might be high maintenance. My wife might affirm that speculation, I fear. 😉 Patti’s concern was whether I would allow my dissatisfaction with the structure of the ChMS marketplace to stand in the way of making progress on Resurrection’s real needs right now. I assured her that Resurrection’s here-and-now concerns were very much on my mind, otherwise I would not have made the trip. That said, when I have the attention of the top management of the top company in the market, I won’t be shy to cast a vision of a future different from present reality. And I might choose to go another direction if I think it is more likely to get Resurrection to my preferred future more quickly. Did I mention this would be a tough decision?

I’m grateful to say I now have a bunch of smart friends in Florence, South Carolina, whether or not Resurrection becomes their customer. I have Florence on my mind …

So far we have a total of 60 people from the following organizations registered for the RoundTable.

Churches:
Church of the Resurrection, Leawood, KS
Asbury United Methodist Church, Tulsa, OK
Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, MN
Christ Fellowship Church, Palm Beach Gardens, FL
Churches in Covenant, Carrollton, TX
College Heights Christian Church, Joplin, MO
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
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
Seacoast Church, Mt. Pleasant, SC
Sheffield Family Life Center, Kansas City, MO
St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church, Fairfax, VA
St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church, Leawood, KS
West Side Christian Church, Springfield, IL
Westbrooke Church, Shawnee Mission, KS

Vendors:
ACS Technologies, Florence, SC
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 Tech Shop, Nashville, TN

Other (not a church, not a vendor):
Trinity Technology for Ministry, Kansas City, MO
Christian Computing Magazine, Belton, MO
MinistryTECH.org, Edmond, OK

Last night I had dinner with Alfred Johnson, head of sales and marketing for Shelby Systems. He flew in to Kansas City just to spend a few hours with me. I took him to the quintessential barbecue place of Kansas City – Arthur Bryant’s. Alfred could eat only half his sandwich. Yes, the beef sandwiches at Arthur Bryant’s really are that big! It’s ridiculous.

Sounds like Arena is coming along nicely. I’m not sure how much of our conversation I’m at liberty to discuss but I can say that Alfred has Web 2.0 and social networking on his mind.
I’m wondering if Dave Winer is right (see this and this). Will Twitter become a de facto standard for identity on the web? If so, could that eventually allow ChMS providers to integrate seamlessly with things like Facebook and Circle Builder? Hmmm …

I’m writing this post from the Charlotte airport. Tonight I’m having dinner with Robin Clayton and Ben Jordan of ACS Technologies. Then I’m visiting ACS all day tomorrow to talk strategy. Standby for a report on that trip.

Brent Cohen e-mailed me a link to this story on CNN saying that GodTube was the “#1 Fastest Growing Website in U.S. in 1st month of Launch.” I commented about GodTube back in March. Do you suppose my less-than-favorable comments were a bit too hasty?

I know most of you out there reading this blog must also be wrestling with the question of how to leverage all of these new developments in Web 2.0 stuff. In particular, right now we’re implementing blip.tv for streaming sermons. Instead of going where the Christians are, we’re using a secular site. What are your thoughts about that? Should we also use GodTube?

The deadline for hotel registration to get the RoundTable rate is tomorrow for the Wyndham. The deadline has already passed for the Holiday Inn.

RoundTable attendee, Kansas City-area church nerd, and all around nice guy Jason Wilson has obtained his church van to help transport people to/from hotels and Resurrection. We also have other local church IT people who have volunteered to make a few runs back and forth to the airport. So if you need transportation while you’re here, please leave a comment on this post and we’ll see what we can do to arrange it.