Dynamic Church 07 - phenomenal!

It has been a week now since the Dynamic Church 07 conference commenced. What a great time! I want to publicly thank the Fellowship Technologies staff for all the hard work they put into making this conference better than I could ever imagine. The energy and sense of cooperation from everyone was fantastic! And the attendees from our church partners were outstanding! If you get the sense that I was happy with how it all turned out, you would be correct.

We had 330 attendees including folks from either partner churches or prospective churches, plus our staff and guests – in total around 400 people. Some people enjoyed the breakout tracks that dealt with strategic issues while others enjoyed the hands-on training classes. The feedback was positive from both; yet I agree with some comments I heard, so next year we will have both beginner and advanced tracks for training.

I sat in on several of the strategic breakouts and was very impressed with how some of our partner churches are addressing areas like volunteer management, change management and Fellowship One champion teams. I hope it came out in my keynote, I really have a passion for the local church and it warms my heart to see church staff members and volunteers serving others and “passionately attacking” how to help people learn to live fuller lives. See John 10:10.

Tony Morgan’s keynote was on target (he blogged about it on May 19th). Although I think one of the missing items on the list could have been "a church writing their own ChMS system." To dovetail it with my presentation, developing complex computer applications are typically not one of a church’s “core competencies.” I actually told Ed Young this several years ago not knowing I was actually commenting on the development of a system that eventually became Fellowship One. Terry Storch can vouch for the fact that I caused him and his team some heartaches around trying to justify the development of the system. In the end, I think Terry would agree that if possible "buy versus build" unless it is strategic to your mission and the end result offers a competitive advantage to attracting or serving your customers, or in churches' cases your congregation. This is rare in the church market that the ChMS system provides such.

This does not mean it cannot be done. It just takes a lot of time, energy and money to accomplish the full breadth of what a church management system needs to do. The first several features and functions are easy and there can be some quick wins. But the maintenance of the system as complexity of integration is added begins to bog down the progress of additional functionality. When looking at the stewardship of resources, custom development is probably the most costly alternative there is; perhaps not in the short run, but definitely in the long run - requirements and technology simply change too quickly for a small staff to keep up with and large staffs are expensive.

If you were in attendance at Dynamic Church 07, thank you for making our first conference successful – it is all about helping you be better at helping the church and your community! If you did not make it, we welcome you to join us next May when we all get together again for Dynamic Church 08! I have heard several people say that next year they are bringing even more of their staff. So make plans, set aside your budgets because we are already working on what should be another great conference!

Grace to you,

Jhook