Problem 1: the Aspire website is woefully lacking pertinent details…when clicking the “Tour” button, I’m sent to a page that says “This feature is coming soon…” Note the image below. Screen shots are great, but there’s no explanation about this fitting over an existing Shelby DB or if it is all new.
Solution 1: Hire a web design firm (like Stepframe!) They will help you present your website and email communications more clearly and effectively (and there will be no more “coming soon” pages).

Problem 2: the products (Arena and Aspire / Shelby and Aspire) appear in competition.
Solution 2: Take the plunge and lose the legacy aspects of Shelby (it was designed by programmers for programmers), and create a single web-based application.

I would love to see Shelby aspire to modernity!

Could a small group web space be a core component of an integrated church management system (ChMS)?

In a culture that is increasingly anonymous and individualized, how will the church respond? will it encourage and exhort people to connect on a personal level? Or will the church follow the cultural trends leading to less personal contact and more individual isolation?

As with any power tool, technology can be used for great good or great harm (think nuclear power). How many of us have inadvertently sent an email message to more people than we intended to because mail merge didn’t work like we thought? I’m all in favor of using technology. I do not think that technology and personalization are mutually exclusive. We just have to think extra-hard about how technology is best used within the context of advancing the Kingdom of God.

Given all that, the questions I’m interested in are these:

What if the small group was considered “the church”?
…could a ChMS help facilitate a small group to begin thinking of itself as the church?

what if a ChMS were developed with its core functional goal as equipping people at the small group level to be the church?
…to help them identify their gifiting and provide avenues of using their gifts
…to raise up and train the people in that small group and then empower them to use their gift either in the small group context or within another small group

What if there was a tool that could help link people with different giftings or physical needs? (think ebay meets eharmony)
…people or resource relocation – we have a need for a car in yakima, washington. Oh? we have a car to donate in spokane, washington! we need an evangelist in richland, washington. Oh? we have two evangelists in our small group…we’ll send one your way!
…we tend to gather with people who have similar interests (and similar gifting) as us; could a tool like this help us diversify and therefore maximize our endeavor to advance God’s Kingdom?

If we began to view the small group as the church, how much business overhead is removed? (no payroll, potentially no building, attendance tracking is simplified). In order to do this, though, we’d have to raise up more teachers to teach in all the small groups, and more leaders to lead, more administrators to administrate…but wait, isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?

1. Data loss – just because a webhost says they are backing up their clients’ data, does not mean they are doing it regularly. And even if they are backing it up regularly, there are a host of other data-destroying events (earthquake, hurricane, tornado). A hosted solution must provide a means for exporting the data into a format that can be read easily (is this a job for xml?).

2. Data leakage – not even the United States Department of Defense is immune from leaking personal data. In an age of increasing identity theft, data leakage can be just as damaging to a church as data loss. How many social security numbers do you have in your ChMS database?