Second Baptist Houston manages its vibrant prayer ministry and outreach to armed services members through a Web-based ChMS.
Inevitably a congregation will reach a certain size where care and spiritual supervision becomes overwhelming and unmanageable. How can churches find innovative ways to support their congregation as well as ease the burden of staff? Technology can be one of those solutions.
When a church reaches a particular size, it needs technology tools to help facilitate communication, collaboration, delegation and ownership of the God given talents and responsibilities of His church. Technology alleviates the time consuming tasks required to mobilize staff, leaders and members to action.
Second Baptist Church (SBC) in Houston, TX has more than 52,000 members. Founded in 1927, SBC started using information technology in the early 1980s. Between 1999 and 2005, the church grew from one venue to five locations, and within five years, it had an average worship attendance of more than 24,000.
SBC needed a strategic provider that could help accommodate the rate at which its congregation was growing, while adopting the latest technology solutions. In 2004, the church chose Advanced Solutions International (ASI), a provider of Web-based solutions for faith-based organizations, to help them implement a software system to support the needs of its members and staff.
Single database solutionSBC chose the iMIS church management software (ChMS) of Advanced Solutions International, which offered a single database solution that helped SBC consolidate and streamline its data. Having a Web-based ChMS allowed for flexible, real-time reporting, and enabled the staff to better serve and report members’ activity.
Second Baptist now has one place to track worship numbers, event information, Bible study and discipleship attendance, among other things. For example, a staff member can pull up a report to see how worship and Bible study attendance, membership and evangelism was affected by various sermon series, weather or even large community events. This helps them become strategic in developing the church calendar and follow-up efforts with the congregation.
In addition,
Second Baptist is able to integrate its back office ChMS with its Web site, giving each of its more than 200 Bible study classes an online portal to create and maintain a class’s own Web site (as an extension of SBC’s main home page), and to facilitate the outreach and care of more than 12,000 participants. From this portal, SBC is able to post pictures, email members and visitors, and see the attendance rates from the past several weeks. The church is able to facilitate greater ministry involvement via its Web site, increase both members and visitors, and improve stewardship, event planning and other activities.
Helping manage prayerThe church has always realized the value and importance of prayer, but with its membership base expanding and the desire to stay current with technology trends, the organization plans to use the ChMS to help enhance members’ prayer experience and relationship with God. Prior to having any type of software solution, the church would manage its prayer ministry program using email. Although email was effective in communicating and understanding the needs of members, it did not offer the database support that SBC wanted in order to improve its prayer program.
With the addition of the new ChMS, the church will be able to integrate a custom Care and Prayer application that converts prayer requests into traceable database records with ministry operations. They hope to launch this program this fall. SBC’s goal is to maintain the traditional feeling of a small church as well as give members options for prayer.
Members will be able to go online and submit a prayer request, and “activate” the pastoral response of both staff and volunteers — whether that is a hospital visit, benevolence disbursement, pastoral visit or simply a quiet private prayer. The new application will be able to handle more than 2,500 prayer requests each month and track the more than 4,500 hospitalizations that occur each year.
Second Baptist also plans on developing an application for its congregation that focuses on reaching out to those in the military who are overseas. Operation Enduring Prayer will be launched on SBC’s Web site, and members will be able to request prayers for military relatives or friends, receive support from SBC’s Military Family Support Group, find out what the church is doing for those on the prayer list and update addresses.
Serving the militaryThe church will also use this information to mail care packages to soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, Christmas cards to those on the prayer list, letters of encouragement from school children and other supportive materials.
Jim Collins in Good to Great, said technology is an accelerator. It places the right information, at the right time, in the right hands of those who God has called in the ministry of changed lives for Jesus Christ. Most churches need software with more than just contact management and fundraising capabilities.
Churches should look for a ChMS solution that will help manage the congregation, while giving them the ability to customize, extend and tightly integrate custom applications. Knowing what technology solutions your church needs and implementing them into your system will only help streamline your work. The real attention can then be focused on your congregation and helping it build a relationship with God.
Edward Wendling is the marketing director at Advanced Solutions International, Alexandria, VA. [advsol.com]
