ChMS - BVCMS

Although RefreshCache is generally a meeting of Arena developers, this year two guys that work on BVCMS were invited to present as well. This provided me with a great opportunity to see bvcms and ask questions of Dave Carroll who is the primary driver behind bvcms and the owner of bvcms.com, an organization offering hosting, service and support for bvcms.

BVCMS was the internal database project of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, TN. After putting a lot of time and money into its development, their elders decided to release it as an open source project in April of 2009.

It's impossible to tell how many churches are using bvcms because anyone can download it, install it and get it running without telling anyone; however, bvcms.com has 74 churches that are using the database and paying for their support. Additionally, Dave said there are at least five churches that have contacted him for some assistance that are not clients of bvcms.com, meaning the real number is probably right around 80. Six of these clients have over 5000 records in their databases (averaging 18,347), and 51 have fewer than 1000 records. This data indicates that bvcms is becoming a web based database of choice for smaller churches, but scales well enough to be used by some of the largest churches in the country.

One of the things I did not realize about bvcms until this week is that it is available as a fully hosted and supported solution through bvcms.com. This means that you don't have to have a big IT staff and a group of programmers to run bvcms at your church.

After the initial release by Bellevue, the banner of BVCMS has been carried by David Carroll & bvcms.com. If I understand it correctly, the lion's share of development since 2009 has been done by David himself. At RefreshCache 2011 David said some of the keys to making this possible were a methodology of do the simplest thing that could work, avoid complexity unless necessary, don't repeat yourself and don't build things you're not going to need. David details his approach to development on his blog under the title Agile Methodology.

David also uses a novel approach to support that I really like. He takes support questions by email, writes the answer on the wiki and then replies with the link to the wiki. By doing this he insures that the wiki continually grows with valuable information on how to solve real world problems, and he doesn't spend time rehashing the same solutions over and over again. As a bonus, that creates a nice documentation library for anyone to access on how to use the software.

The biggest shortfall that I can see with bvcms support is that there is no set of community forums for the churches that are using bvcms to help each other and discuss things. With the open source nature of bvcms any church could set one of these up, but so far it does not exist. Based on our experience with the Arena community, this is a big loss. Hopefully as this product grows this shortfall will be addressed.

Because bvcms is open source, you can investigate it yourself if you have the IT staff or expertise to pull it off. All you need to do is download the code and then follow the directions that are posted on Dave's development blog.

So, what does bvcms offer? Quite a lot actually. Aside from the usual basic chms requirements, it has a very nice query builder, online registration, a check-in solution, iphone app, etc. In short, bvcms stacks up nicely against the rest of the market, with the huge benefit of being free out of the gate.

Unlike most of the solutions, there is zero risk to test out bvcms. From bvcms.com you can watch video demos on a lot of the basic features, and then connect to a demo site you can play with. If you want to investigate further, you can download the source and install it and start playing on your own.

There are two ways to run bvcms. The first approach is the traditional open source approach. Download it, install it, and start using it! This is a solid option if you have the technical expertise to pull it off, and if you have programmers on staff or volunteers, you can begin to customize the product and make it your own. The second approach is to contact bvcms.com about getting setup as one of their customer churches, and letting them do all the heavy lifting. Either way, bvcms is a solid option in your search for the right ChMS for your church.

Joel

RefreshCache Reflections

It's almost midnight on Tuesday, and RefreshCache is officially over. RefreshCache was an opportunity to rub shoulders with and learn from the collective wisdom of over 30 individuals representing eighteen of the finest churches in the country.

When we talked about making it a requirement that you had to present to attend, we wondered if it would put a drag on attendance, and if people would step up to the plate. Well, this was the largest group we've ever had for RefreshCache, and people didn't just step up to the plate, they hit it out of the park!

I would say that requiring everyone to present was the best move we could ever do. The end result was that everyone gave, and everyone learned. HDC got some great ideas on how to make Arena better, how to make our website better, and how to be more effective at the things we do. Personally, the time given to me by Tom Powers to help me learn performance tuning was priceless. His expertise and patience as we slogged through a particularly frustrating issue was amazing, and our church will benefit every day going forward with what I learned from him.

I really enjoyed seeing bvcms and getting to know David and Jeremy a bit as well. This is an important new player in the church software market, and I look forward to sharing my review of it with you when it is finished.

This week also presented some wonderful personal ministry opportunities and great time building relationships with some of the brightest technical minds in the church field.

RefreshCache 4.0 is only a year away, but I look forward to seeing how next year can be even better!

Joel

ChMS - RefreshCache 2011

We are in Gilbert, AZ for refreshcache 2011. This is the third year for this gathering, put on by our friends at Central Christian Church. The purpose of refreshcache is to encourage and motivate developers in the area of Church Management Software, mostly centered around Arena. We also had a presentation from David Carroll on bvcms, a product that I have not yet written up on this site. More to follow in another post.

One of the requirements we added this year on all attendees this year was that every church needed to present at least once, if possible. This was initially met with some fear and trepidation but the end result is that RC2011 is incredibly rich and feels like a community effort rather than a few people disseminating knowledge.

Collaboration seems to be the overarching theme of the gathering. One of the things that has really struck me lately is how much better things go when we work together and involve other people. The monday sessions started off with Derek Neighbors talking about collaboration as the second phase of creativity.

After some technical sessions, David Turner showed us some of the awesome things they have been working on at CCV, and then Jon Edmiston got up and challenged us all to work on "Google Car" levels of innovation in the church software field. Jon had very practical things we can all do to make ourselves better, and I really respect Jon as a guy who never stops learning and pushing forward.

One of Jon's closing statements was that we need to focus on major features, not incremental upgrades. While incremental changes are not a bad thing, they take away time and attention from making the next great thing, and church software has a long way to go before we hit real maturity in the innovation sector.

Jon closed with "one more thing" announcing the Spark Development Network, which is a non-profit devoted to developing open source software for the church environment. Their first project is an open source ChMS product simply called Rock.

This obviously is huge news, and I'll post more on it later.

Great meetings so far, looking forward to the rest!

Joel

Steve Jobs Died Today

In 1981 or so I used a computer for the first time. It was an Apple ][. Soon thereafter I was exposed to the TI 99/4a, the Atari 800 and even the cheapest computer of the era, the Timex Sinclair 1000. At the time it was just exciting to use a computer, any computer at all. I had no idea that thirty years later I would still be using Apple products.

The Apple II was the product of the genius of Steve Wozniak and the vision and marketing talents of a very young Steve Jobs. In 1983 we bought our first computer, an Apple //e and I have never looked back. I watched the ugly split with Apple in the 80's, and was in the audience at the MacWorld Keynote when Jobs returned to Apple.

Many have referred to Jobs 2.0 as the best CEO ever for any company. It's quite an accolade, but when you consider that Apple was near death and trading at around $13 per share when he took over, and Apple is now consistently vying for the position of the largest capitalized company in the world.

It's very appropriate that I am writing this on an iMac, one of the brain childs of Steve Jobs. I got the news on my iPhone, another product of his relentless vision and search for perfection. And when I tell my wife about it, she will undoubtably look up the news on her iPad, the most recent success story. Although one of it's two founders has passed, the company they started continues.

It is a sad day. Jobs will be missed.

Joel

ChMS - Charging all of those iPads

If you are using iPads for check-in or in other manners in your church, there is a good chance you have lots of them that you need to keep charged. This device can make that job a lot simpler.

In our case, one of our staff members maintains our iPads every week, cleaning them and plugging them in to be sure they are fully charged. We rarely sync them because they only use safari, but occasionally we need to do that as well.

Griffin Technology announced a product that looks like it will be perfect for churches looking to maintain large numbers of ipads: the MultiDock.

The photo above shows each mac syncing to ten ipads, but you can link multidocs to sync up to 30 ipads to a single machine. This vastly improves the central deployment practices for a large organization, and makes keeping all of your check-in stations charged very simple.

By the looks of it you need to contact Griffin directly to purchase.

Joel

Love Wins & Erasing Hell

Even before the book was released (?) people were asking me what I thought about Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. There was a lot of controversy about this book, and people who know I like Rob continually tried to engage me in conversation about the book. I declined to engage until I'd actually read it. Weirdly, after the book was released, people had moved on to other issues and the questions stopped. It's amazing how fickle the world is. A month or two ago I got around to reading it, but I didn't post about it at the time. My impression after I finished it was that it was an important book, but it was only the opening statement in a long conversation about hell.

When I saw that Francis Chan was releasing a book called Erasing Hell: What God said about eternity, and the things we made up I realized that Francis was the perfect guy to respond to Bell's book. If you've ever heard Francis speak, he is emotional and deeply in love with our savior, and he's also very intelligent and a good writer.

Since Rob's book raises a lot of questions, and Erasing Hell seeks to answer some of those questions, I decided to review these books as a pair.

Love Wins is a typical Rob Bell book, and I mean that in a good way. It is written to engage your mind, and if you don't stop and reflect it's a pretty quick read. I didn't read it quickly, because I found myself stopping and reflecting a bit. Completely lost in the controversy over this book are some excellent thoughts on the nature of salvation in the first few chapters. After sharing the scriptures that talk about how to be saved Rob asks the question about how you are saved:
"Is it what you say,
or who you are,
or what you do,
or what you say you're going to do,
or who your friends are,
or who you're married to,
or whether you give birth to children?
Or is it what questions you're asked?
Or is it what questions you ask in return?
Or is it whether you do what you're told and go into the city?"

Thought provoking stuff.

Another one of the really strong points of this book is a focus on the very real "hell on earth" we have created in a world steeped in sin. This focus on the here and now challenges the reader to recognize that the gospel isn't just about "where we go when we die" but what we will do here, now, for the people around us. "It often appears that those who talk the most about going to heaven when you die talk the least about bringing heaven to earth right now, as Jesus taught us to pray: 'Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.'"

In the chapter on hell, Rob makes a very big point that Gehenna, the greek word translated "hell" was, in fact, a city dump during the time of Christ. Unfortunately for Rob and the reader, this is simply not true. In Erasing Hell, Francis Chan writes "In fact, there is no evidence for hundreds and hundreds of years after Jesus that there was a garbage dump in the Hinnom Valley in the first century. Nor is there any archaeological evidence that this valley was ever a dump...In fact, the first reference we have to the Hinnom Valley, or gehenna, as a town dump is made by a rabbi named David Kimhi in a commentary, which was written in AD 1200."

This is not 100% of Rob's argument, but it is a pretty big error. But then as we get back to the text, it's important once again to read what Rob says, not what other people say he says: "There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously."

The part of this book that causes such heartburn is that Rob appears to be embracing a form of biblical universalism. Rob asks the question if it is possible to repent and be saved after death. He seems to believe it is, but admits there is no way to be certain. "Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices? These are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don't need to resolve them or answer them because we can't, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom love requires."

You aren't going to learn everything you need to know about Love Wins from this blog, you really need to read it and interact with it on your own. But lets move on to erasing hell.

Francis Chan is the perfect guy to write a response to Rob Bell's Love Wins. He is gracious, humble, loving, and someone who I don't believe would ever be drawn into a war of words with another individual. One of the reasons I was eager to buy this book was a photograph that someone took this spring and posted on facebook of Rob Bell and Francis Chan together at an airport, smiling. As I looked at that photograph I thought that it was a perfect example of how we are called to righteous disagreement with one another. They both love Jesus and can love each other, even if they have disagreements over theology.

Another reason I think Francis was the perfect guy to write this book is that he gets the importance of this discussion. "I'm scared because so much is at stake. Think about it. If I say there is no hell, and it turns out that there is a hell, I may lead people into the very place I convinced them did not exist! If I say there is a hell, and I'm wrong, I may persuade people to spend their lives frantically warning loved ones about a terrifying place that is not real! When it comes to hell, we cannot afford to be wrong."

Francis does an excellent job of presenting the "other side of the story" from Rob's book, clearly illustrated with scriptures and well reasoned. Although not written only to respond to Rob's book, Francis answers many of Rob's more controversial points. One of the things I really like about Chan's approach is he makes no attempt to demonize Rob or "call him out" for where they differ. At one point he writes "To be fair, he is not explicitly arguing for this position but listing it as a valid view that would help explain a lot of the tension that we feel when thinking about the hard realities of hell. But he presents this position in such favorable terms that it would be hard to say that he is not advocating it." This kind of careful discussion is what we need more of in this world.

I don't really need to go point by point through Chan's book to tell you that it is an excellent and worthy read. It's not just about hell, but also about the nature of God. Chan (along with his co-author Preston Sprinkle who did most of the research) does an excellent job of detailing what the bible teaches about hell.

I think both books are valuable to read and understand. I would start with Love Wins, and then read erasing hell. I believe that both books are edifying and will draw you closer to God if you let them. On the theological end of things, I find myself landing with Chan most of the time where these books differ, but it's not about being "of Francis or of Rob" but being of Christ in the end.

God is good!

Joel

Ministry comes in all shapes and sizes

last night it was green and chunky!

Our youth team put on a fantastic yearly kickoff last night. Hundreds of kids were there to see the show, participate in worship, and hear a challenge from a great speaker. The night began with a video created by the youth team that kicked of the live event. In the video the team is riding horses, and to tie it all together we had a horse on stage.

While not officially part of the event, I was here because my daughter was in the audience, and my friend asked me to be in charge of "horse safety" meaning that if the horse got too nervous I was to help get it out of the building. Part of that was moving curtains etc. Not a big deal. I wasn't really dressed for the occasion, but my son showed up with a cowboy hat for me, and grabbing my trench coat from my office meant I fit right in (I'm always wearing boots, that wasn't an issue).

We quickly learned why you don't generally see live animals on stage. Lets just say that they have an amazing sense of timing on when they should "let loose the almighty thunder" from the hindquarters. The horse was on stage for maybe 15 minutes, but I found myself cleaning up the "output" twice in those fifteen minutes. I'm sure the kids loved it, and for me it was a pleasure to be part of the event, even if it wasn't exactly a glamorous role...

You never know what shape ministry will take. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter as long as God is glorified and lives are changed. I was happy to be part of it, even if it didn't smell all that great!

Joel