In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. - Genesis 1:1
I wanted my first few posts on the official Fellowship Technologies blog to be an introduction about the company and what we are all about. If you are reading this, you are probably aware that we were originally birthed out of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX. Several years ago, Fellowship Church, in an effort driven by its COO/CTO Terry Storch, decided to write its own church management system due to what it considered a lack of support for some of the requirements of a mega-church by the then current commercially available software vendors. However, after writing a good piece of it, Fellowship Church realized that writing it was one thing, supporting it and keeping it up-to-date was clearly a totally different level of commitment. After all, for most if not all churches, writing software is not a “core competency.”
After much prayer, some fairly extensive business analysis, a dash of fund raising and even a little due diligence, a group of seven guys (five guys from the church who developed the software: Rick Chatham, Curtis Harris, Chris Kemp, Kevin Merritt, Daniel Reznicek; a former colleague of mine, Robert Fredella, and me- sorry, no girls at that time) bought the software from Fellowship in December 2003. We officially launched Fellowship Technologies at the C3 conference that next month. We were off and running – we had code, a stack of hardware and one customer, Fellowship Church.
Even before that, we had churches asking to be our customers, but we lacked the infrastructure required to support them – no contracts, nothing more than a plan for a data center, as well as no implementation methodologies, procedures or processes. Although we were lacking many things, we did have vision – one that I am convinced is, and this might be a little tough for some of you to swallow, inspired by God. And that is one of the things I want to get across in this initial blog post – this is why we do what we do – it is all about God and His son, Jesus Christ.
Because we were willing to step out on faith and create processes, write contract templates, develop implementation methodologies, and build a data center of very complex equipment, churches are able to do things with Fellowship One that they could not do before – things for the Kingdom. That is what we are all about, building tools using advanced technologies so that you, the local church, (church staff, children pastors, senior pastors, volunteers, etc. - everyone in the church) can create new and improved ways of expanding and supporting the Kingdom of God.
Grace to you as you go out to create!
Jeff Hook