Woolsey Life

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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Hey, I’m back! I have been thinking a lot about my role at Impact Church and how it is evolving and how God will use me in the way he needs me here. As a side effect of that thinking I have given a lot of thought to the tools that we use at Impact Church. Well the list is long and since lately I have been contacted by several pastors and administrators asking my opinion on things church admin I would put it all down here in a blog post mini series. So here is the outline, I will get started on it imediately but this is what you can look forward to reading, or just clicking ‘mark as read’ if this isn’t your thing.

1. Church Management Software
2. Church Calendars
3. Team Communication
4. Event Management
5. Assimilation Management
6. Ministries

Many of my fellow associate pastors write a lot about their craft in the church and share their ideas in the blogosphere. So, to keep with the tradition of sharing ideas I thought I would introduce one of our organization tools.

We call it the Whiteboard. I know what you are thinking, ‘I have one of those!’ Well, its not what you think. We use Adobe Illustrator to create all of our publications and its installed on my computer as well. During our meetings we are usually in my house and I will hook my computer to the TV and put Illustrator up on that screen. I have a 24″x36″ page with pre-made discussion terms that can be moved freely about the workspace. As we discuss them the ideas are being put up on the screen just like a dry erase white board. Using Illustrator I have the freedom to move things around, easily edit or copy information and because its on the screen for all to see, its more dynamic. The best part is when we are done, it makes a handy PDF that gets sent to everyone to use as a reference for things to get done. It also serves as a legal document when we need to pass legal motions for the organization.

If you don’t happen to have a 50″ plasma in your living room, thats ok.  Lots of you have projectors that you use on Sundays or even a regular TV.  Get creative, but it beats the old fashioned dry erase board because at the end of the day, everyone gets their own copy.

Its a fantastic tool and I recommend you try it out. I have it available for download in my resource widget to the right.  If you don’t have Illustrator there are a few open source options that you can use as well.

What is your church doing to keep things running smoothly?