3 Tips for Streamlining Your Church Tech

A church service is made up of various systems all working together. Distinct areas like children’s ministry volunteers, greeters, sound technicians, worship teams, and the pastor are all doing their part to make sure things run smoothly.

While it’s possible to have a great service with these systems running independently of each other, that’s not the ideal. Growth and health come when they are interconnected in their communication and goals—all working and communicating toward the same objective. Instead of a bunch of siloed departments doing their individual jobs, you want everyone cognizant of how their work is essential to the church’s mission.

Depending on how you use it, tech can help to unite these areas of ministry or drive them further apart. Here are three tips for ensuring that your tech is bringing your church teams together and not keeping them in separate silos.

1. Determine what you need

The first thing you want to do is sit down with the heads of each ministry area and ask a few important questions:

• What current holes and pain points need to be considered?
  What problems do we have today that could be fixed by adopting new tech solutions? Having a clear understanding of outstanding problems in every ministry area will help you make wise tech decisions in the future.
• What communication boundaries exist between departments?
  Where could communication between ministries be improved? How would the church be elevated by increasing the communication between these systems?

It’s essential that this conversation happens with various ministry heads. Don’t count on your ability to imagine where their holes and struggles are.

2. Take inventory of your tools

Eventually, departments will find tools and solutions that make sense for their needs, but don’t make a lot of sense for the organization as a whole. Maybe one team is using Slack but another team has been using Microsoft Teams for their team communication. This creates bloat and actually encourages greater division between teams.

Here are a few things you want to look at with your department heads:

• What tech or app is a team using that’s being duplicated somewhere else?
• Are we trying to communicate the same things in multiple places in a variety of ways?
• Are we maintaining multiple calendars across a variety of apps?
• Are we using a haphazard or shotgun approach to social media? Does our strategy make sense? Are we trying to do too much with too many different social media platforms, accounts, and pages?

3. Identify solutions that fill holes and consolidate tools

Now that you’ve identified the pain points for your various departments, and the tools they’re using to communicate and get stuff done, it’s time to start considering your options. What tools do you need to roll out to everyone to increase their effectiveness? Do you need to find alternative solutions that will work for everyone and keep the organization functioning and growing together?

For instance, is your church using a variety of tools that could be streamlined into a new solution? Could a single church app cover a lot of the functionality your teams are using multiple tools for? It’s worth doing the research to get your teams on the same page and using the same tool.

Streamlined Tech Can Make All the Difference  

Cutting down on tech drift and bloat can dramatically change an organization’s dynamic. It can create synergy and renew a shared sense of mission and vision. Instead of working independent of each other, your teams will feel like they’re working together to grow your church in maturity and numbers.