Church 365 didn’t start as an idea or a plan. It started when I got involved in my local church and was asked to take a look at “the IT stuff.” I’ve done IT for over 30 years, from small business networks in the 90’s to Fortune 50 consulting as a Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect. And I’d helped out a few churches before, but I was on a different mission this time. And I found something different. My church had recently gone through some challenges that resulted in some folks leaving, and some of those folks were the technical people. The process of reining in IT, especially during Covid, was challenging and the easy answer was to outsource everything. There was overlap in paid services, redundancy, wasted effort, and needless expense.
Unlike past churches, this time I also found that the church had just onboarded to Office 365. And I realized they were only using email; they didn’t know about OneDrive, Teams, or Azure Active Directory (although they were using it, they didn’t appreciate its potential). As I dug deeper into this grant they’d gotten from Microsoft, I realized they were also eligible for a grant of Microsoft Azure (a hyper-scale public cloud service, where anything compute-driven can be leased by the minute).
I set about to do some training, while also consulting to try and clean some things up and level-set the IT environment. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit. In addition to my small business consulting experience, I’ve also done a fair bit of full-stack (from client through to the server) software development. I started writing small programs to help streamline some of the repetitive operations they performed, like publishing digital signage from PowerPoint. I also started leveraging things like Azure Storage (cloud storage where gigabytes of files can be saved and transferred from fractions of a cent) and Azure Functions (where tiny repetitive automation jobs can be run, also for pennies). I could see that these things would not only save money, but also simplify the processes that staff had just accepted as “how things work.” Most of my career has been spent showing people things that they didn’t know they didn’t know—at one point someone said, “Your job sounds like you’re an IT therapist.” It’s an apt description.
Ultimately, I realized that what I was building could be replicated and shared with other churches. In my Microsoft job, I’d had the opportunity to work with the Identity engineering team in Redmond during the roll-out of “Azure AD B2B”, which is a feature of the authentication tools that allows a business to invite “guests” (vendors, customers, temp employees) to log into their systems and collaborate with staff on a temporary basis. My job was to build the sample code that demonstrated how to use this service automatically, embedding it within other software. (Outside of that role, my other main role at Microsoft was to advise companies on how best to leverage all the services available in Azure, stressing cost savings and designing new architectures that improve operational efficiencies.)
I realized that this feature could be a “killer app” for churches: staff can gain access to the Office 365 tools for their daily work, and church members can be invited as “guests”, where they’ll be able to login and participate in Teams calls, file sharing, and email distribution lists. So, I started putting together what eventually became Church 365.
But all of that’s just the prelude for the title of the story.
I’ve explained something that is compelling and obvious in retrospect, and most folks that hear it see that. But in a time when many churches are about at the stage of most ’90s era small businesses in terms of embracing technology as a benefit versus as a reactive cost center, staff (read, “people”) can be just as resistant to change as those small businesses were 25 years ago. And more to the point, many of these kinds of efficiencies require that people embrace the idea of “IT Controls” and implementing an “IT Function.” And “control” can be construed as anathema within a church, where we all know that only God is in control.
But churches totally understand and accept and embrace the idea of financial controls. They create and approve an annual budget, they perform audits, they route spending through an approval process, and they submit to the will of the folks charged with maintaining accountability. Those people volunteer their time to ensure that accountability is transparent to the church body, and they typically include folks that have finance and accounting in their backgrounds—in other words, they typically find experts to volunteer their gifts in this manner.
So, someone proposing to make those kinds of changes is going to meet a lot of resistance. While everyone may keep up with their bank balances, most are ready to concede that accounting can be a mystery and so are happy to cede this control to professionals. Meanwhile, everybody in the building carries around a computer in their pocket that has more capabilities than the computers that launched the Apollo missions. So, they’re far less likely to concede that they need an expert, let alone submit to controls.
I love these people, and you love yours, and we’re all in the Body of Christ, but just know that God already saw this coming, as Dr. Gerald Bontrager explains below in an excerpt from our session at the Church IT Network conference in West Palm Beach last November. It’s part of our nature, our sin nature of pride. It’s why we resist change, along with idolizing comfort. As has been said, the last 7 words of the dying church are “But we’ve never done it that way.”
So as you envision bringing your church into the 21st century, be ready to be the ox, because you’ll need the Strength of the Ox.
Proverbs 14:4 – “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.”