Church technology should help people participate without wearing out the people who run it. That sounds modest. On some Sundays, it would be revolutionary.
We’ve become surprisingly good at accepting the opposite.
The microphone only works if you hold it just so. The slides live on someone’s personal laptop. The livestream needs three passwords and a small act of intercession. One volunteer knows how everything connects, and we’re all quietly hoping they never go on holiday.
Then we thank them for their extraordinary dedication.
We should thank them. We should also ask why extraordinary dedication is required to get through an ordinary Sunday.
Reliability is a virtue
There’s a lot to be said for a microphone that faithfully makes someone louder.
It doesn’t need to surprise us. It doesn’t need to explore feedback as a form of congregational participation. It needs to work, predictably, for whoever’s using it.
The same goes for the website, the roster, the shared files and the church’s internet connection.
Reliable systems free people to pay attention to what’s happening around them. The person on sound can listen to the service. The office administrator can finish the newsletter. The preacher can concentrate on preaching.
That’s worth investing in.
Volunteer goodwill is precious
“I’ll just sort it out” is one of the most generous sentences in church life.
It can also conceal a system that’s been quietly broken for years.
Every workaround takes something: time, attention, patience, another evening. When the same person keeps absorbing the cost, the church may barely notice there’s a cost at all.
A workable system needs to cope with a tired volunteer, a substitute operator and a perfectly reasonable holiday.
Write down the steps. Give someone else access. Fix the recurring fault. Make it possible for the person who always says yes to occasionally say no.
Buy for the people who’ll use it
A system can be technically impressive and thoroughly unsuitable.
If an ordinary task requires an expert, we’ve made that expertise part of the weekly running cost. If nobody can explain how to use something without opening six menus, perhaps simplicity deserved more weight in the purchasing decision.
Churches have changing rosters, mixed confidence levels and limited time for training. Those are design requirements.
Choose equipment and systems that fit the people you actually have. Then give those people enough support to succeed.
Make the ordinary things work
Before buying the next exciting thing, deal with the thing everyone’s learned to endure.
The unreliable cable. The missing password. The instructions that exist only in Brian’s head. The website still inviting people to last year’s Christmas service.
Ask a few plain questions:
- Can someone else run this?
- Can we find what we need?
- Does it work consistently?
- Who carries the burden when it doesn’t?
Then fix one thing.
Church tech should be boring enough that people can trust it, simple enough that people can share it, and well supported enough that nobody has to hold it together by sheer force of goodwill.
There’s plenty of room for adventure in the life of the church.
The microphone can leave the improvisation to the organist.
Illustrations created using AI image-generation tools for d|c|t.