Fellowship One Goes Live at Park!
November 17, 2006 by Steve
Filed under Church, Inside Park, Methods & Strategies, Technology, Weblog
As Park has grown, we have grown in our organizational ways like any small organization. We cobble together individual solutions by ministry and try to work together on church-wide information needs. About four years ago, we began a process with a developer in our body to build an open-source Church Management System (CMS) in conjunction with another church. Stephen Rylander poured his soul into making this CMS work for us as we expand and grow in the city of Chicago.
However, even with his excellent skills and total dedication to the project, the team came to the conclusion after three years that this homegrown solution was good for the present, but would not take us to where we wanted to be in the future as our church pursues the vision of seeing 1% (30,000 people) of Chicago reached with the Gospel through church planting, church partnerships and para-church organization partnerships here in this world-class city.
We spent about four months researching all of the available solutions, from desktop, to client server, to web-based to total outsourcing. We spoke to a bunch of churches to understand their use of different systems and the pros/cons of each. Knowing that we have a lot of unchurched folks who are on a spiritual journey, a congregation who is very mobile and working long hours, and a ministry structure moving towards decentralization, we were looking for a solution that did not let new people fall through the cracks and would be web-based so leaders could use the system from wherever they are that day.
We implemented the Fellowship One solution and have been live for about 3 weeks now. The implementation process was smooth but a lot of work, as is the case with any system install. So far so good — the F1 folks have been great. We also have had critical buy-in from the Ministry Directors and have been championing the change required. The important point to know in any system implementation is the need to continually champion the change management inherent in the process. More to come.
