Church in the clouds

For those Star Wars fans among you, you might immediately think of Cloud City, but strangely enough(?) that’s not what I’m talking about here (although I’d like to).

In these days of public and private clouds, 3G and 4G data, iPhones and iPads does it still make sense to for churches to have offices equipped with traditional PCs (Mac or Windows) for pastoral staff? Sure for administrative staff, that make sense, but does it for our pastors?

Here at Crossway I’m currently smack-bang in the middle of three IT projects of varying sizes. We’re upgrading our servers (and adding several tonne more storage space), replacing about a third of our PCs (and equipping our media & communications peeps with shiny new Macs), and expanding our Wi-Fi to cover the whole campus.

All of those projects have caused me to reflect, are we doing IT all wrong? Should we get rid of half our PCs and equip our pastoral staff with iPads and get them out of the office to where the people are?

What’s your church doing? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

Let Earth receive her King

I have to say this in a public forum. I just have to.

On the weekend we attended Crossway’s Christmas show, and it was simply awesome. Of all the things we (IE Crossway) have done in the past, this year’s show would have to be the tightest, best paced, most well produced show ever.

Well done to all!
Well done to:

• The media/production team who again pushed themselves to even higher levels
• The creative team for devising and producing a quality products
• The band for playing so wonderfully (off stage for the first time)
• The singers for, well, singing so fantastically
• The dancers for bringing such great energy
• The players for linking it all together so well
• The soloists (singers & instrumentalist) for sharing their special talents
• The many many other backstage and front-of-house people who did their jobs so well that they were invisible

Brilliant! Thank-you for putting on a Christmas show that everyone will remember.

IT and the small church office – Intro

Being the IT Admin at a large church affords me the freedom to do things the way any medium sized business would do things; First-tier PCs, multiple (virtual) servers, terabytes of RAID 5 disk, redundant DSL links etc. But don’t don’t think I don’t know how to do things on a small scale. In fact before I was full-time in my current position I did a day-a-week supporting a smaller church with just a couple of people in the office. Recently I’ve been thinking, how would I do it small-scale? Some of the ideas are mine, others came out of a group discussion we had at the very first Aussie CITRT hosted at this years Crossway Conference. So over the next few days, I’ll be sharing some of these ideas.

NB: These ideas are equally applicable to small businesses or home offices.