From Andy Stanley in ‘7 Practices of Effective Ministry‘:

“The tendency in business, or in church work for that matter, is to mistake activity for progress. We think that just because people are busy and doing a lot of stuff that we are being successful. The fact of the matter is, if all that activity isn’t taking you where you want to go, then it’s just wasted time.”

I’m sure you don’t want to waste your time.

So, are your ministries, events and gatherings taking people to where you want them to go?

This question is what prompted the REVEAL survey:

“Are all the things that we do here at Willow Creek that these people so generously support really helping them become fully devoted followers of Christ— which is our mission—or are we just giving them a nice place to go to church?”

Let’s face it, churches can have suites of ministries that rival the programming at the Olympic games. But these (usually very) good things, can be implemented in an ad hoc manner, without clear direction, purpose or means of evaluation.

So, how do you assess your church’s activities to know if they really are helping people to progress, or are just an extra ingredient in the pot of well-intentioned but  directionless activity?

More and more churches are using cloud-based services to assist with their administration and operations. For example:

• member databases (e.g. Church Community Builder, Elvanto, FellowshipOne)
• rostering applications (e.g. Planning Center Online)
• email and calendars (e.g. Gmail/Google Apps)
• notetaking and organisation (e.g. Evernote)
• email newsletters (e.g. MailChimp)
• form building (e.g. Wufoo)
• …and the list goes on!

These services provide tremendous benefit to churches – I’ve written about these on more than a few occasions.

However, when I wrote the article “3 excellent church database solutions“, a concern was raised with me as to the potential privacy issues that exist with these cloud-based services, and whether these issues preclude churches from using them. It’s a good question, and I decided this was a topic worth exploring further, given the relevance to Australian churches.

At the heart of the matter is the fact that many of the cloud-based services used by churches (and other organisations, for that matter) store data (including personal information) on servers outside Australia (often in the United States). Where the information is hosted matters, because privacy legislation differs in different countries.

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