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June 14, 2004
Church Impact of Technology
Brian Bailey, from Fellowship Church, has some interesting points in his posts "Expand your Territory" and "Risk and Reward".
I forwarded Scoble's original article to a few friends who are involved with church and technology (either volunteer like me or professionally). Those emails led to some thoughts about the message getting lost amid all the technology. Scoble points to Bernie Simon who asked the same things. Reading Brian's posts and checking out their website, it looks sure looks like Fellowship Church attempts to keep the message at the core of all they do. But I watched ten minutes of a sermon about some topic that I don't remember because I spent most of the time watching the Ferrari that was on stage. So for me, the message was lost because of all the "extra stuff". But, I'm not FC's target audience. According to Brian they are reaching out to those that aren't comfortable in a "regular" church and are used to ESPN, MTV, etc. So those type of individuals would probably be distracted at KSBC by the hymns, lack of polish, or just the single preacher with the aid of only PowerPoint instead a quarter million dollar sports car.
My other thought is how does any church, but specifically one as large as Fellowship Church, make decisions about how to spend money on technology vs. say something like missions. How many missionaries or Sunday school classes could be supported for each plasma TV? But if the church didn't use this technology would they be able to support all their members? It's obviously a tough choice. Taking Prof. Goldman's IT Economics course has increased my inclination to measure everything to prove the efficiency or lack there of. It had a business bent, but the same thing is true in a church. It doesn't matter if your goal is to make more money or save souls, you hope to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible. God has command us to effectively use the talents and resources he has given us. As always, the technology isn't what is good or bad, it's our use of that technology that needs to be questioned whether you're a church as large as FC, smaller like KSBC, or a business (large or small).
Posted by mikel at June 14, 2004 11:24 PM
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