What did you learn today?

FTDeliverySvcs — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:53:00 GMT

As delivery managers, we have a responsibility to wisely use the time and money provided by the local church to implement Fellowship One. We are called to help empower the church to more efficiently bring people to the table of the Lord.

I often view myself as an educator (amongst other things). I am here to help people understand how to use Fellowship One in their unique environment, and use the wonderful technology we posses to empower the local church. Sometimes people embrace this, other times it can be more confrontational to get people to leave the comforts of their current church management system and learn something new in the name of progress. It requires people to leave their comfort zone and make themselves vulnerable, not many people like leaving anywhere comfortable.

The delivery team at Fellowship Technologies is an evolving team. There was a day and time where we were all cowboys (and cowgirls), roaming the countryside, going from church to church, each doing our own thing as we best saw fit. Those days are long behind us, and it hasn’t been a painless road, I must confess. But I can tell you that the changes we have made have been for the best. Without a structured process and product (being the service we deliver), we would lose our departmental and corporate identity. We now produce a better, more standardized product, and hopefully a more efficient process, leaving us more time to deal with process change within the church itself. In order for this to work, people must be open to change, and if necessary, the pain that goes along with it.

I have been delivering the Fellowship One product to churches now for over 2.5 years and I have learned so much during my tenure. I have realized that, yes, I am a teacher to many, but those many are also teachers to me. EVERY church I work with teaches me something. It’s that something that everyone in my team brings to the table at regular intervals to help us produce a better, more refined product, making better and better use of the church’s time and money. Without you teaching us about you and what you do, we become stagnant and stale and the product no longer evolves. Each delivery manager learning something new puts us in a vulnerable place. We have to ask ourselves if what we did before was the best way to do things. If the answer is no, we have to admit we could have done things better and continue to work hard to discover where we fall down. We do this all in the name of helping you, the local church; more efficiently bring people to Christ.

If I don’t learn at least one thing new during the implementation with a church, I feel I have failed the church, myself, and my future clients (even if it means learning how to be patient!) I encourage all to make a conscious attempt to learn something daily that will help you tomorrow and the rest of your days. And please never stop being a teacher. We’re a team, and we NEED each other to help make the team successful.

Blessings -

Jeff Lewis
Delivery Manager

Silos… The Unspoken Barrier to Ministry

FTDeliverySvcs — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:40:00 GMT

My name is Matthew McMaster and I have been a Delivery Manager at Fellowship Technologies since March of 2004. In that time I have implemented over 100 churches. Some of them have been very sophisticated in how they communicate within their ministries but many of them have a real silo issue. When each ministry functions as its own separate entity with little or no regard for the larger entity (The Local Church) as a whole, you have a group of silos; not a unified team. An example of this would be when the Youth Pastor gets their new students to fill out a first time visitor card. This seemingly ordinary process is really masking a silo issue. When you look closer at the first time visitor card you will notice it is missing some very important information. What are the parent’s names? Do they have any siblings and what are their ages? What is the best way to get in touch with the parents? Do they have a church home? Now the Youth pastor might say, “That information isn’t necessary for me to reach that student.” This is a silo mentality. The Youth Pastor is forgetting that the student is part of a larger entity of the family. Each member of the family is a potential soul needing to be reached. Each member of the family is the target market for other ministries at The Local Church.

Another example of a silo that I have seen involves working with multiple ministries trying to coordinate volunteer activities. There really is a best first time visitor with children process and it involves “Super Greeters” that can escort a family from one classroom to another explaining the check in and pick up processes. These “Super Greeters” naturally come from the Greeting team which is a separate ministry from the children’s ministry. I have heard from the leaders in this ministry on many occasions, “Why do I need to staff Greeters in the Children’s Building? That is their responsibility!” This silo mentality is detrimental to the volunteers as well as potential guests.

There are many other types of silos but I think you get my point. So now you must be wondering, “What do I do to break down those silos?” The answer is deceptively simple… Cross functional Teams. In future blogs, I will discuss two specific cross functional teams but you can have many more. The first is the Fellowship One Champion Team and the second is the Data Integrity Team. In my next entry, I will be discussing how the Champion Team functions.

Matthew McMaster
Delivery Manager
Fellowship Technologies.

Delivering Change : teams

What did you learn today?

Silos… The Unspoken Barrier to Ministry