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There’s been lots of talk about the formation of a Church IT Association (CITA).  Refer here and here and here and other places.  Here’s my thoughts…

I’ve dreamed of a united Christian IT group for at least 6 years now.  When I actually started working in Church IT 3 1/2 years ago I formed a plan.  The first step was to build up a group of volunteers that I refer to as Geeks-4-Jesus.  This group would begin by helping CHCC with it’s IT needs.  Then we’d start connecting with other churches.  We’d include their volunteers and then we’d all help each other out.  And for those churches, and eventually para-church organizations that didn’t have any IT volunteers or staff, we could offer our services to them.  We’d expand throughout the region, and spread this idea of churches helping churches until someday there may be a loosely knit group across the nation that consists of local groups that simply help each other.

Now I’ve made a little progress building up a small group of volunteers here at CHCC, and we have helped some other organizations in the area, but we have been moving at a much slower pace than I had hoped.  Then I discovered the IT roundtable, the Church IT Podcast, and all these Church IT people wanting to connect with each other.  It would seem to me that God is moving all of us towards a common goal.  Unity!!  What I LOVE about this group is that we have crossed denominational lines that would normally keep us apart.  We all share a common goal of advancing the kingdom and we use technology to do it.  So we all have two things in common: a passion for Christ, and a love of technology.

This is how I see things forming.  First of all, I want to work harder at connecting with all the other churches in our area and getting together monthly for a roundtable.  From what I hear from other bloggers I believe that’s what many have already done, or are going to be doing soon.  I believe this will be the key to success.  As we all have learned the thing that pulls us all together isn’t as much the technology as it is the fellowship.  We are the Body of Christ united under One Head, being Christ (not M$).  So we each form a local group where we are, and we work together nationally ( and internationally ) to provide resources for others who wish to form a local group.  ITDiscuss.org is a great place to begin collecting these resources.  I think a single collaborative Wiki is also a great way to share such resources.  We also continue the podcast as a way for us all to communicate and share ideas, and we need some kind of large event(s).  This could be a single annual large conference, or perhaps several regional conferences.  I actually prefer the idea of multi regional conferences.  So we have a Mid-West Church IT Conference, invite ALL the churches we can to it.  Expose them to all the resources at their disposal and encourage them to form their own local roundtables.

Before I heard of the IT Roundtable some of my volunteers and I were talking about putting together a Technology in Ministry Conference in our area.  Our goal would be to expose all the churches in our area (mostly small churches) to some of the possibilities technology provides for their ministry, but even more importantly to network with these churches, find out who their IT volunteers were.  Then we could pull together all our resources and add these volunteers to our pool and offer our services to all the other churches that need the help.  The conference would be more for recruiting and advertising than anything else.  Advertise these two ideas: first of all technology used properly can help improve the effectiveness of your ministry, and secondly let’s all work together!

When it comes to a(n) (inter)national organization I believe those two ideas have to be at its core.   Obviously we are a group of “geeks” and effective use of technology to further the kingdom is a natural goal for us to have.  But I believe we MUST preach the idea of Unity as well!!!  We are already living this ideal out in all that we’ve been doing, but when the goals of CITA are defined Unity among believers and working together have to be at its core.

That’s enough ranting for now…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under Church IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.