Woolsey Life

Its been a long time since I visited this topic. Its not because I haven’t thought of it or haven’t wanted to take a look at it but because I feel that even though Impact Church has some great ideas, we still don’t do this as well as we could. That being said, I am not going to represent myself as any kind of authority on this particular topic. I am also very open to anything anyone wants to add to my thoughts on this matter. So lets take a look at it, shall we?

We use a few printed tools as well as a few virtual tools.  Any of the printed tools can be found in generic PDF format in my Shared Resources widget to the right.

Printed Tools

Weekly Bookmark
Event Info Card
Serving Matrix
‘Engager’ Worksheet

Virtual Tools

Weekly Update
Upoc (Online SMS manager)
Google Docs
Church Blog

Ready to read more?

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Team communication is the single most important component to church administration. Without it we can go no where. There are a lot of dimensions to team communication. There is the required communication between pastors, ministry leaders, oversight, your congregation and your community.  Each dimension of communication has its own set of tools. I will outline for you the biggest components of communication for Impact Church:

1. Church Management System (CMS)
2. Front End Website
3. Ministry Meetings
4. SMS
5. Print

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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?

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Like it or not, every church needs some way to manage information and people. From the little neighborhood church with 25 in weekly attendance to the mega-church that sees 6,000 per weekend they all have the same basic need, keeping and protecting information. For a lot of churches a web based management system works well because it gives pastors and ministry leaders access to information from anywhere they have a web terminal. This falls right in line with the coming software trends in many industries and dimensions of life. Because this software option is the most functional for the church plants I will focus on the web based option. Also, I will not be making recommendations of one system over another because my experience is very biased. I will instead outline how Impact Church uses her system, Church Community Builder. Many of the things I illustrate will be applicable to other systems that are available such as Fellowship One and Connection Power.

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