I've joked for years: "There are a lot of awful church management products out there. Our job is to pick the best awful product available." That's a very pessimestic view of the church database world, but it seems to be the fact. Where are the churches with GREAT IT solutions for their staff? What products do they use? Are they satisfied? Is there any Church IT organization? We have NACBA for administrators, and there seem to be lots of Audio/Visual/Worship technology resources, but where are the church IT resources? ITDiscuss.org has been useful, and is certainly a step in the right direction, but it's still not addressing the big gap in church software.
Maybe I've just missed it, or been looking the wrong places, but it's sure hard to find any organizations that are devoted to advancing the state of the art when it comes to IT for churches. We have ACS and Shelby out there, and they each keep plodding along, sometimes providing incremental improvements. FellowshipONE may have raised the bar a tad, and just their entry into the market is interesting. MemberSystems was quite promising, but alas, seems to have faded away. Church Community Builder? Hmmm… that may be worth a deeper look. Do they have it together? And there are others. Kintera, RDS, People Driven Software, eTapestry, EzraOnline, and I'm sure there are more. Do any of these really hit the mark and push church technology forward? Not really, at least not in my humble opinion.
Are there churches and people who are looking hard? Perhaps. Terry Storch certainly sparked things, and as a result FellowshipONE was born. But Terry has since moved on to other [good] things. Brian Bailey. Jason Powell. Matt Wilson. Anthony Coppedge. Ed Buford. Terry Chapman has dropped offline. Mark Stephenson -- has real work consumed you? Jim Walton. Matt Perkins. Stuart Cowen (plus his F1 blog). Who else? If someone is really pushing the envelope, please speak up.
What does Willow use? What does Saddleback use? What about Mariners? Who else? If somebody is doing it "right," shouldn't they be easy to find? I guess it's time I start searching harder (or smarter).
Maybe my thoughts of "right" are part of the problem. I'll try to clarify those in the days ahead.
Next: CMS Wishlist
