A fundamental building block that will allow a church to better care for its people is better quality information. However, if the church’s ministries are allowed to NOT use the church management system and its underlying database of people, they will end up keeping valuable information somewhere else. That central database is then a subset of the information about the congregation. If a pastor cannot look at a family’s or individual’s records to see what their current indicative information is, how involved they are, what small groups they are in, who their kids are, etc., etc. – then they have an incomplete picture of who they are attempting to help. That kind of data problem becomes a “congregation service” problem similar to a “customer service” problem that any organization that deals with the public might have when the information they have is incomplete.
True, I was simply pointing out the problem, but churches cannot fix problems they are unaware of or do not have an appreciation for. Too often churches “play” at church instead of “work” at church. When people “play” they are doing something for recreation, for enjoyment and leisure purposes. When people work, there is a sense of accountability, people measure performance and work towards improving the metrics. Now I am not saying that ALL churches are like that, but too many are. If churches refuse to measure themselves and their performance, they will not know whether or not they are improving.
To answer your last question, culture change is a tricky situation because I am unaware of the dynamics of your current culture. I cannot help you get somewhere if I do not know where you are coming from. Also, frankly, some cultures are worth the effort to change and some may not be. In general, cultural change requires leadership. Some churches may not be able to institute this kind of change without a “burning platform” crisis.
The Harvard Management Communication Letter says if you don't have a burning platform to push people away from the past then you need a compelling vision of the "The Promised Land" that is strong enough to draw people to it. In identifying the burning platform, do not overstate the extent of the crisis, it warns, or you will destroy credibility. And involve everyone in the solution or they will go in all directions.
On a tactical level, begin a project to identify all of the current data sources in place that the ministries rely on – every database, spreadsheet, 3x5 cards, etc. By documenting these, a church can have an appreciation for the inconsistencies of the data – how out of date some is, how many duplicates there are, and a better picture of the total number of ‘silo’ data stores.
Once there is an appreciation of the level of the problem, look at the congregation service issues that arise from the disparate databases. Ask yourself how much “customer service” can improve if all ministries are singing from the same hymnal; I mean working off the same information. If everyone is responsible for the quality of the data, although it creates work, the data quality will improve. Caring about people is also caring about the information that is a reflection of those people. Hope this helps!
Grace to you,