Church Admin | Calendars

We all use calendars in our daily lives, they keep us on track and help us to figure out when stuff is happening. Who doesn’t have a calendar hanging on their fridge or on the wall in their kitchen? And if most of you are like me then you depend on that calendar to know when everything is happening and when your family’s things are going on. Have I beat this obvious observation to death yet? Well, a church calendar needs to be something that we count on just like the family calendar. It needs to be somewhere people see it and it needs to be something that we all refer to regularly, not just staff. In my last Church Admin post I mentioned the calendars that are provided in most CMS’s (Church Management Systems) and noted that they are often not useful for normal people. This is why Impact Church abandoned our dependency on the CMS calendar a long time ago. What did we switch to?

Simple, our calendar is now based in Google. Google Calendars are really the perfect solution for any church, let alone a portable church with no central office. They are smart, easy to use and they offer subscription features so that lots of people can have access to info contained in them. Impact Church employs Google’s Partner Pages to run our email and calendars. Google’s Partner Pages offer a really cool data sharing experience for your church. Its like sub-leasing a virtual office from Google where everyone can share info. I will go into more detail on Google’s Partner Pages in Team Communication.

I assume that if you are reading this far into this post you have already had some experience with Google Calendars so I will skip the explanations of how to get one of your own. I will get straight to some applications from our model ministry, Impact Church. First, the calendar is something that is opened up during every staff meeting. We are constantly looking ahead and trying to plan our schedule in the most convenient and logical way possible. To accomplish this we use the calendar layers that are offered by Google. On our base layer is the Impact Calendar. This is the calendar that holds all of the church events including iGroups, staff meeting times and topics, trips and in-house events like baptisms or communion. The base calendar is tied to the general info account, info[at]impactchurch.tv. We recently added another layer called Murrieta Community Events. We populated this calendar from the city’s list of events. And yet other layers contain serving team rotations for all of our different ministries.

Why layers? The first reason for me is simply that I don’t want to navigate through all that information on one calendar. I can turn layers off or on as I need them. If I am looking for a specific city event I don’t need to try to differentiate it from all the iGroups and youth calendar entries. Also, having different layers makes it more convenient for our people to subscribe to the information that they need. At Impact, a large percentage of our people are accustomed to using technology to manage their lives. So, if they use iCal or Outlook or even Google Calendars to manage their lives, then its not overwhelming for them to subscribe to a specific serving schedule calendar because it won’t crowd their personal calendars with things like ‘Church Planter’s Luncheon’ if all they want is to know when they are scheduled to put up EZ Ups.

The last reason is that since its web based its constantly up to date and no one has an old version. If we need to make a change everyone is updated immediately. I personally use a Windows Smartphone to help me manage my life and it will automatically subscribe to all of my Google Calendars and keep my mobile calendar current on whats happening as well.

I know that our calendar use is pretty straight forward and its possible that many of you are using these tools already. But regardless of how common of a tool it is, its an invaluable component of the administration of Impact Church. It helps us to keep our calendar right in front of us all the time. The subscriptions that our people have to it keep us accountable to keep it accurate and its versatility makes it something that anyone at Impact Church can include in their lives. And as you already know, getting info to your people is always of the highest priority. If you haven’t already looked at Google Calendars for your church calendar I encourage you to spend an hour and get one, populate it and check out how it can improve the way you manage your itinerary.