I am a big fan of technology. I believe there are to be great efficiencies when technologies are used appropriately and correctly. For years I have been integrating social technology into the 612 Student Ministry. My early vision for the use of technology and the student ministry was to create a seamless one stop location for information for the student ministry, and to create a place for relationships to built (via social tools). At first I started with Joomla as our church was fairly young and did not have a real way (via the web) to capture and utilize data for the congregation much less the students. Joomla was great, it allowed me to develop newsletters, customize the user experience and much more. What I did not like was the fact that I had to spend a lot of time convincing the students to utilize the chat and social aspects of Joomla over the likes of Myspace (which was the still king over Facebook at the time). In addition to the Joomla, I opted to open a Myspace page. This seemed appropriate as all the students were on Myspace. Even though our student ministry had an ‘official’ Myspace page I still had a difficult time communicating with the students and was very frustrated at the effort afforded versus the fruit yielded (with respect to the ministry communication). The problem was that even though I had a lot of effort going into the Joomla site, I was duplicating effort with Myspace, thus breaking my cardinal rule of Technology, which is ‘it is no longer efficient, then it’s no longer a technology you need to use’. Although I was not sold on the fact of abandoning either Joomla or Myspace, I needed to look for something different or change my vision for what I wanted this technology to do
With this I decided to do something radical, I wanted to shake things up, I decided too…
Tune into Part 2 of Technology/Communication int he Student Ministry for a continuation of this saga.
Photo Credits: Leonard John Matthews