I learned the hard way. People need to be reminded.

Back in my student ministry days I thought that grown adults could remember meeting dates and times. After all, they get kids to soccer practice, keep doctor appointments, show up for work, and remember birthdays. All that’s true. And maybe that’s the point: it’s ALL true. There’s a lot going on.

It’s happened to all of us. Weekend service. You’re ready. You’re on time. And someone else isn’t. You cripple through the services or services on a shoestring, hoping to not miss any critical elements or people as you attempt to provide a welcoming space for your guests. It happens. People aren’t always blowing off responsibility. Sometimes people just forget.

Here are some thoughts about serving as a full team:

• Create a schedule. Put it on paper. Make sure everyone has it.
• Make the schedule easy to remember. Build some pattern into it. Monthly. Biweekly. Find a rhythm.
• Send reminders. Make phone calls. Send postcards. Tweet. Text. Email. And you must, you must, you must – not choose the easiest and preferred communication for yourself as the leader. Learn how everyone on your team is best connected. You’ll likely call some, text others, and email the rest.
• Follow-up when someone doesn’t show. This is a simple and opportune chance to care. You may discover they’re facing difficulty, illness, or worse. Reach out. You made it past the weekend. That’s good. But, it’s not all there is to the team.
• Expect the schedule to be kept and followed. By planning it, printing it, reminding, following up you’ll communicate that people matter – the team matters. “We’re counting on you!”

Sunday’s coming! Is your team?

Excerpt from becausepeoplematter.com | by Mark Waltz, Pastor of Connections

One other suggest I would like to add is make the schedule accessible.  Post it where people can find it and even sync with it with their calendar, PDA, etc.  I highly recommend using Google Calendar for this.

Someone else asks “why do we take time to read the announcements?” and someone else wants to know “why didn’t I heard about ______?”

Some may think we are choosing favorites … and everyone thinks that “fair” is a biblical mandate! (NOT!)

How we connect to the people we want to get our message to is important to all of us, and it’s becoming harder and harder to break through all the noise and clutter in life.

Whatever you believe, we all know this; the way we communicate is changing, and it’s changing fast. This video shows how change is making it easier to reach a wider audience, but harder than ever to actually connect to it.

click here if the video does not appear above…

Many churches print a photo directory once a year with color photos of each person and a nice family photo.

There’s also church directory software tools that help churches do their own photo directory and try to keep up with the changes.  They can add new people as they get them and publish new versions, periodically.  (Kind of like the phone book pile in my closet – where we just add the new one to the top of the pile until the next bon fire.)

These might work great for churches where few new people come, but this Sunday when someone new comes to your church for the first time, how do you help them meet people? Do you hand them a directory and tell them to call people?  I don’t think so.

Then there are the privacy issues.  You have names and address and phone numbers for people, but who do they want that information given to?  Shouldn’t each person decide who they want to see their information?

And who keeps all of this information up to date?  Not just the new people being added and the people that leave being removed (if you even dare do that), but what about their contact information?  This could be a full time job.

Many large churches with large budgets attempt to use a web based system that gives each person the ability to edit their own information on the church’s website.  That sounds great, if you can get them there.  The problem is, people are busy, so this is not usually a very high priority on their “to do” list.  Even these types of directories quickly become an outdated list used primarily by leaders.

Some of these “church management” systems have attempted to add social networking pieces to their software in an attempt to get more people to use them, but that’s not working either.  If people are going to use social networking, they are going to be somewhere were their friends are – and the fact is, not all their friends are ever going to be at your church.  Jesus said to “go” and make disciples in “all” the world, not just your church friends.

We’re experimenting with solutions to some of these problems AND we’ve managed to take back a piece of the internet for good … it’s called facebook.  We’ve been working with MapleGrove to help them use the most popular social networking (just a new word for fellowship) tool (a website) as a public member directory (and more) using a free feature of facebook called “pages“.

With a facebook account, each user can decide who they want to share their personal information (contacts, photos, videos, etc.) with.  In just a few months of talking about it, most of our members (that didn’t already use the system) went and created accounts.

Our members (“fans” in facebook lingo) can post stories to our page, share photos with other members, ask and answer discussion questions and invite their friends.

Our administrators can create events, send short “status” messages to members, and moderate the page when needed.

We’ve tied our church management software into facebook as well.

I’ll be writing more about how to use this tool in the near future, but if you want to get started right away you can create a page for your organization here.

Spam filtering
The best spam filtering I have ever seen.  I had spam filtering before changing to Gmail, but I spent hours a week going through filtered messages because of over zealous “rules based” filters.  And I was still getting way more spam than I wanted.  Once Gmail learns your preferences you get almost no spam.  On a slow day I get well over 500 emails, and over 75% are spam messages I never have to see.  And if by some slim chance one of your important messages gets filtered, you can find it, un-spam it, and mark it so that it doesn’t happen again yourself.

Search
Everyone knows that Google is the best search engine in the world.  “Google it” is now a popular term for finding information.  Now you can search just as fast on your own email.  Try about one second on over 25,000 messages.

Archive vs. Delete
Most productivity experts tell you to delete messages you no longer “think” you need as soon as you are done with them.  To keep your inbox cleaned up.  But have you ever wanted to find a message you thought you wouldn’t need a few days or a month later?  Gmail’s archive function moves mail from your inbox but keeps it searchable for years.

Labeling vs. Folders
The old way to organize information was to drag it into a folder.  Great, if you can remember what “folder” you put it in.  Not so great if it applies to more than one????  With Gmail you can apply multiple labels to a conversation and even create filters to automatically assign these filters.  And, even through you have a label on a message it can still be in your inbox.

Threading
Ever had someone reply to your email as if they are the only person you ever talk to.  Something like “yes”, but they don’t include your email in their reply?  Now your conversations threat together and show you what you sent them, even when they don’t.  And when you archive, or label a message it applies to the entire thread too.  Twenty messages back and forth between you and five other people now appear in your inbox as one message.

Personalization and Integration
I now have one place for all my email accounts.  My multiple personalities (company names, organizations I work for, etc.) are all in one place, each with their one personalized domain and signature (I use some great add-ons that we’ll talk about some other time).

Storage Space
As of this writing you can store up to 7GB of emails, attachments (any files you want to) up to 20MB in size.  If you’ve ever used Outlook, you know that when you get over about 250MB performance starts to lag and the program eventually stops working completely.

Portability
You can access your email from any computer (Mac, PC, Linux) or your web enabled phone anywhere, anytime.

One of its features is to create a sideshow with an album. Example here.

Another way of displaying them would be to embed the slideshow into your website like this -

So, how’d I do that?  Easy…

Sign in to (or sign up for) your Google Account for Picasa Web Albums at http://picasaweb.google.com using your Google Account username and password.

Upload some images.

Click the My Photos link and select the album you’d like to make a slideshow.

Click Link to this album on the right panel.

A new Embed Slideshow option should appear. Clicking this option creates the code for a Flash slideshow from the album you’ve selected.  When you update this album, your slideshow is automatically updated to show the latest photos. You can select from five photo sizes for your slideshow (up to 800 pixels) and you can also edit the resulting code for more flexibility.

To embed the slideshow, copy and paste the HTML code that’s shown into your blog or webpage.