Online Calendar

Last night, I attended the Youth Group Parent's Council meeting. During that meeting, we discussed the future youth mission trips as well as the monthly and bi-weekly meetings the youth have.

As I sat and watched, I saw an amazing process unfold. Everyone in the room had an idea of things that were scheduled in the church that we'd need to work around. The problem was, no ONE person knew all of them. As I sat there trying to wrap my head around all the schedules going on, it came to me. "We need a web resource for scheduling!"

So, I found a great company that has a service that specializes for church web calendars. Take a look!

Time to develop a training class

Our luck finally ran out last Sunday! Over the past two years, we have come to rely on our laptop/projector setup more and more for our services. During that time, a few of our congregation have sort of evolved into our in-house experts at running the DVD's and Powerpoints during the service.

We've never really kept an organized list of who's running the computer for each Sunday--at least one of the experts is usually in the service and steps in. Well, Labor Day weekend found all of our experts on vacation! And worse, we didn't realize it until 10 minutes before the service began!

So, a few of us teamed up and attempted to run the system. "How hard can it be? It's just Powerpoint and a couple of DVD's? Right?" Not quite.

So, we learned our lesson. The New Tech team met last night and we've decided to organize this effort a bit. We're going to develop a curriculum, draw up a list of operators and devise a schedule. We'll make sure we're not caught without an AV driver again!

Projectors at Spring Branch

Last week, we attended the Leadership Summit at Spring Branch Community Church. It's a great facility. Their main worship hall had amphitheater seating with a balcony. In that room, they had two big projectors mounted on either side of the stage. For the Summit, they had another huge projection screen, which was projected from the rear. The center screen seemed to be temporary just for the Summit.

When we were in church on Sunday, it really made me take a hard look at our projector/laptop combination. The way we use ours set up requires a person to sit right in the aisle and control the laptop. Sunday, it also seemed a little dim.

It would be so great to be able to have a permanent projector mounted on the ceiling in our worship room. It may look a little funny to us at first, because it would hang down into the space where we could actually see the unit. I'll bet we'd get used to it though.

I'm going to do some checking and see just how much money we're talking about on these things.

New Tech Tests Out Blogging

Yesterday at the Leadership Summit, I thought a lot about the value of blogging for churches. While I work with the Session to get a GCPCPA blog started, I wanted to create a New Tech blog to capture the events in our ministry team and the events in technology in our church as well as other churches.