 Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this course, the lecture for this course on media and technology ministry. We have gone through this chapter on digital equipment. So we're just going to quickly review that. And then we will go forward into our next chapter, which is on the software systems that we want to discuss for the use of media, for the use of technology in ministry. That's what we will do today. That's our quick word of prayer. And then we will get started. Okay, Aaron, would you please pray if your mic is okay? I'm sorry. If your mic is not okay, then no problem. Somebody else can pray. Or maybe, okay, maybe Aaron's mic is not okay. I forgot about that. Okay. Konan, could you pray with us? Thank you. This morning that you've come your throne and I was to come before you. As we are going to study this media and technology lot, help us so that we can understand well and apply in our ministry in the coming day slot. And bless us in this time and full speed, guide us so that we can equip in your input. Amen. Thank you. All right. So we, over the last several weeks, we've been talking about digital equipment, where I went through, or we went through together, several different, you know, areas where we need to become familiar with the kind of equipment that we are using for ministry, ministry purposes for the church and so on. We talked about some of the software that we use. We talked about the camera photography, some information about cameras. We talked about the PA system or the sound system. Then we talked about just running through the documents here. We talked about the video production, how do you make videos, some of the things that are involved, the equipment and then lighting, how we go about doing the videos. And then finally, we spoke a little bit about live streaming. We can live stream to many different platforms. And that's very important. These days, especially under lockdown, people were connecting online, watching services online and so on. And very interestingly, you know, we, since we reopened our services since February this year, we kind of resumed, we did resume in between for brief times, we had closed down again, so on. And now in February, we again reopened our church services, in-person services. Very interestingly, I met a few families. So at least, I'm thinking about three families who came personally to me and said, you know, they were watching our online services from another city during the lockdown. And then they moved to Bangalore for whatever reason, they had to relocate. And now they are coming and attending in-person services. So for over two years, they were watching online from another city, then, you know, whatever happened, job or school, college, family, they moved to Bangalore. Now they are coming, attending in-person services. So I found that very interesting that, you know, when we were doing live streaming, we didn't know, you know, we don't know all the time, you know, who are watching the services. Of course, in YouTube and in the analytics side, you could go and you can see people from which countries have been watching. So that data is there. We know that data, but we don't have the individuals. And then when you later on meet some of these people and they come and tell you, you know, hey, you've been watching the live stream, it's been a blessing, that it's very encouraging that, you know, that live streaming has been, you know, somebody's watching far away different cities and then now they're coming in-person. So live streaming has become something very useful for the church, for ministry to reach out to people. So and the thing is there are, it's continuing. So even though in-person services have opened up and there are people who are coming or who are slowly returning, you know, getting back to in-person services, we are seeing that our attendance on the live stream and those who watch either while the live stream has happened or those who watch after, you know, at a later point, that number has either stayed steady or actually is on the right increase. So that is also an interesting observation and I'm not sure I can always explain why, but it seems like that there are people who have, you know, adapted to the idea of listening to sermons and receiving spiritually through online media. You know, so even though our services open and lots of people are coming back in-person, the attendance or the viewership of the online service has not drastically fallen and when you look at also those who've watched the service online, and you can see all this data on YouTube, it's actually increasing. So that's an interesting observation. So I'm just trying to share that with you so that to say that, you know, live streaming of services is something we should really think about and continue pursuing. Then the last thing which we saw yesterday was just a little bit about, you know, stage design, how we can use LED panels and lights, play with that and, you know, just make the stage look nice when you are having your services. And I will give you the document for the last couple of classes. I will upload it. I will also mention the two software that we use to control the graphics that come on the LED panels and also the lighting of the stage, right, and the panels. So I will just mention software, just good for you to know so that when you do, you know, get into the stage where you're using LED panels, make sure you have these two pieces of software on your computer and you connect to the control, the LED panel control, and from your computer, from your laptop, you can actually control what's coming on the LED, change the graphics, change the intensity, the lighting, all of that. So basically, it's a very, very easy way to control your stage design. We also use it for our video recording. So, you know, one option for a video recording is you have to create the set. That means, you know, you have to physically move chairs and tables and props and all that make it look the way you want it. The other option is you have a LED panel and you can play with the graphics and the lights, create your set for the TV recording. That's also just an option which we started using these days. So, you know, it's very easy because you're controlling it through your computer. You don't have to worry about, you know, I have to bring this thing, bring this prop and bring this prop to create a set for TV recording. So that's, again, another option. Okay, so with that, we leave our thoughts about digital equipment and so on. Finish that chapter. And the last chapter I just want to get started with today, and we will continue this next week, is to talk about software systems, yeah, or software platforms or software systems, which we need to use in, which I'm not saying, which are available for our use in ministry. Now, some of these things I covered, I think, in last year or last semester, again, when I mentioned three different piece of software, software systems that we use. So some of this may be overlapping or maybe a little repetition, but for the sake of completeness, I will mention them again. But in our use of media and technology for the work of the ministry, making use of software systems is very important. So we will start off with a very basic, that is, any church or ministry these days should have people, the staff in the church, in the church office, should be comfortable working with office software. So that means the software that we generally use for word processing, that is your word processor. So whether you know, of course, you know, you can use Microsoft products, or but then those are licensed products, you got to pay for licensing, which is okay. Nowadays, they're very reasonable. Now, Office 365, you can get it at a very reasonable price. So you can use those products. So if you're using Apple, you can use products that are, you know, related with Apple, or you could use the free or Google products, you could use Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google presentations, which are all free. So all you need is computer and you connect to the internet and you could use these things. But these pieces of software for office productivity are important. And I want to encourage, you know, all of us, as well as, you know, when you hire staff or even if you have volunteers in your Christian ministry or in the church working, it's important just to get them all to, you know, learn how to use these basic software products, right? So our goal here is just to say that, look, these are things that you could use. And these are things that it's good to have people on your team use. So you're moving more and moving away from just paper into just doing everything digitally. And so, for instance, what we are doing, you know, when we started, say, you know, 20 years ago, our membership forms were paper forms. People had to write their name and sign paper. So now we have moved our membership application just online. And so anybody, you know, I mean, the first people were interested can just go online fill up a membership form, they submit it immediately becomes a PDF. And it is sent for review. And once it's reviewed, you know, so the whole membership application itself, we are moving away from getting people to fill in a paper form to doing it online and immediately get it as a PDF. It's stored as a PDF. So you're not storing paper. Now we have these physical files of membership forms that people filled up, you know, the last 27 years. But now we have, you know, you can imagine we have files in church office, all paper. But now we're saying, okay, let's just do it as PDF because, you know, we don't need to store all these big files and how long are we going to store them? Similarly, water baptism forms, you know, if somebody wants to have, you know, be water baptized, they fill in a physical form. And then we have to keep a record of it that they have filled up the form physically and sign. But now we've moved that off digitally, right? So they fill up of online form. We have a PDF. Of course, we have a record of it. But it's stored digitally. So we don't need these, you know, stacks of files with paper that people have signed. So I'm just giving simple examples about even these regular things that we do. It's good to move them to, you know, just getting people to do things online, using software systems, so that we don't have to worry about physically storing paper here and there, you know, then you're going to take care of the file. And if any, if the file is damaged or the paper is lost, how, what do you do? Whereas when you have something stored digitally, you can make copies, keep it in multiple places. And, you know, and it's also it doesn't take up physical space in storing those things. So I'm just, you know, sharing that if we get people to use these office tools, things can, you know, and going forward, that's probably the way to do things. So we are transitioning from paper based work to digital work where we are creating digital documents and storing these things digitally. So at a very basic level, you know, if you just look at what Google offers us, and this is probably common knowledge for many, many of us already. So I don't think we should spend too much time on it, but I'm just sharing this here. Right. So we all know, right, for if you set up a Gmail account, Google, you can have email, you can use Gmail for your email. You can use docs for writing documents. You can use sheets for your spreadsheet work. You can use slides for creating your presentations. You can use your calendar for meeting, you know, just managing your calendar. And then of course, we have these other things where you can use, like you can use contacts for managing your contacts, and then, you know, meet and so on. You can use that forms if you want to do surveys, questionnaires, so on. So, and then meeting is what we're using right now. Google will need to talk to people, have conferences. So Google, and I'm not here to, I'm not promoting Google. I'm just saying that, you know, just setting up a simple Gmail gives you access to so many things. You can store things online, email. These are the office productivity things that people can become familiar with using docs, sheets, slides, calendar, and personal productivity. You can manage your contacts. And then there are a lot of other products that are available for free. Right. So I especially want to mention where is the list, Google lists, Google keep. So you can store your notes and things like that. You could do that here. And so you can add this as another tool for your, that if you want to just keep notes and so on, you can make notes and keep them. You can add reminders for yourself and so on. So there are a lot of these tools available. And of course, so, you know, you have your Google keep, you have your tasks, you can, you know, create tasks. And I'm showing you my Bible college account, so I don't use this, but for my personal account, I use it so you can create tasks and set up reminders for yourself. Plus, there are a lot of other add on apps that you could add, you know, there are lots of things that are available. Some are free, some are paid, that you could add to your Google workspace and, you know, just to improve productivity. But like we said, these, these, all of these apps are available for free. So at a very basic level, for your church staff, for your ministry team, you can get everybody to use, you know, psychology mail and get them all to use, you know, these products, these apps, and you can work very efficiently. And, you know, take care of a lot of the office work by just by using these free products available from Google, right? So I want to encourage all of us to think like that for your ministry, for your church work, get all the church staff to begin to use these products. And these are free. So you're not paying any annual subscription. You're not, you know, they're not paying a lot of money to Microsoft or anyone else to, you know, use their products. These are Google products free. You can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, groups, interactions, a lot of things can happen just with these products. So think that way and get everybody to use it. It takes, it may take a little bit of learning about get everybody to use that. And all the other thing is you don't need heavy duty computers. Just simple computers that have internet connection. You can use these products, right? So you don't need to have large computers with large disk space and large memories. You can just buy simple computers, cheap computers, laptops, get them to use these products. You've got an office easily set up, ready to go and people to be able to collaborate and work together just by using these office productivity tools that are available for free from Google. So that's, just wanted to start, mention that as a way to get started. There's a software for office work and I'm making use of these apps. The next piece, of course, in using technology platforms is to make sure you have a good accounting or a financial management system in place. That's very important for your ministry. So we're talking about software systems for ministry. This is very important that you have a good accounting system in place. Now, you can initially, I mean, if you're getting started in a very small way, you can manage this information in an Excel sheet, all right? Maybe example, example. Let's say you're getting a church started, you have a ministry started. Okay, you have one bank account. All transactions are coming in and out of that one bank account. There may not be that many transactions. And, you know, if you want to track what's happening, maybe a simple spreadsheet, a Google spreadsheet would be enough to track what's coming in, what's going out, where the expenses are, give a summary. You can manage with that for the initial period, right? So maybe the first year, your financial information is managed in the spreadsheet. Okay, not a problem because, you know, you're just starting off. But at some point, the one, the information is going to get more. There are going to be more transactions, more people contributing, more, you know, off money coming in, more payments being made, etc. Second, you will want to search your data. You'll want to work with your data. And then, you know, you want to put your data under various heads, that means expenses for Sunday services, expenses for certain conference, expenses for certain kinds of ministry. So you want to do all of that bifurcation of information. And that's where, you know, you would outgrow a simple spreadsheet and you would need a proper accounting software. So in India, and of course, this could vary in different parts of the world, but in India, and I would think even maybe in Nepal, a software product that is good for, you know, medium-sized, small to medium-sized organizations is called Tali. I have mentioned this before, but Tali Accounting Software, right? So Tali Accounting Software is what we use at all people's church right from the very beginning, you know, right from the time when we were less than 50 people till today with all kinds of things happening. So it's been very good for us. So whatever accounting software is available in your part of the world for your needs, of course you can use it, but what we are using is this product called Tali Accounting Software and everything is entered into Tali. So that's the second thing. So one is all your church staff, all your ministry staff are using office software of, I'm not Microsoft Office, but the personal productivity office-related work software like Word document, Excel sheet, presentation software, emailing, calendar, task notes, and groups, you know, interaction, all of that, they're using that. It makes your interactions very efficient. Secondly, for your office to manage your finances, you use accounting package accounting software, right? So make sure that you start doing that, I would say early on in your ministry. So that from very, you know, from the early stages, you start putting in information, your accounting information in various categories, then you can work with the data, you can do analysis. So you can say, you know, for this certain category, what's been spending over the last, you know, three, four years, five years, what has been the income, what's been the expense. So you can, you know, generate those kinds of reports for your ministry and that will help you do an analysis of, you know, where and how and if you're using money properly and so on. So that's something I would encourage us to do. The third part of software that I'll just talk about, and then we will close off for today, is people management. And so that means how do we manage people, you know, so especially now in a church or setting, you're talking about the congregation, right? You need a way to manage or to manage the store and to manage the contact information of your congregation members these days, especially, you know, their proper names, their address, email, phone number, these are very basic things. You can add to it the birthday, the anniversary dates, right? This information about every person is very important in a ministry, in a church. So that at any point in time you want to contact them, you have it available. Of course, you can store it on your phone, but then if it's on your phone only you have access to it. But if you want to keep it as part of your church organization, so that all the people are working together, can have access to it, can update it, and can use it to serve the people. And then, you know, that's very important. Now here again, if you're having 50 people, 100 people in the congregation, yeah, a simple spreadsheet with this data is easy. It can be a shared Google spreadsheet and different people can see it and they can use that information to call people and send them emails and all that. That's very easy if it's a small number of people. But when you have a growing congregation with, you know, hundreds and maybe even thousands of people, it's good to have a software system to manage this as well as to track interactions, you know, so if somebody called the person that they have people or to call the the church people just ask how they're doing, they can make a record that we called them on this date and this is what they said or this is what their need was. So that can be recorded. And so for that, again, there are many systems available, but what we are using at APC is a free product called Rock RMS. And I have shared this with you before, but I'll go over it again. It's called Rock RMS and we have our own installation. So we use Rock RMS for managing our church, but we also have Rock RMS for managing other kinds of data. So for instance, we have our own congregation people who people who have been part of the APC. Then we have over, I think, 10,000 pastors from around the country in India, 10,000 some something like that. It's not an exact number, but 10,000 plus pastors from around India and they're part of our what we call as an India care project. So we try to care for these pastors and we have a team of people who will call them, will speak to them, so on. So that's, you know, that's a large number of different languages. Then we have our Bible College. So again, we update our Bible College students, which again, now was, you know, crossed over a thousand people. So that's another set of data. So we have a congregation, we have India pastors, we have Bible College. And again, when you say congregation, we include people who are attending plus those who have just contacted us, you know, or not part of a congregation, but they're part of the people who reach out to us, maybe they ask for our books or user, whatever they contact us, maybe they're just part of the visiting the crowds. So how do we manage all this data? And the numbers are in thousand plus, basically in thousands of people. How do we manage the data? So for that, I would definitely recommend this product. I will share the screen and you have seen this before, but I will share it again and I'll take you a little bit into what we are doing. Right. So we have this, there is this product Rock RMS. It's a church management software and it's available for free. Now, you could download it for free and have your own installation. So a lot of churches around the world who use it, you can download it and have your own installation or you can use their hosted solution. So there's this pricing here that they have and they can, you know, they can customize it for you and host it for you if you pay some amount of money. Right. So we have our own downloaded version of Rock RMS that we run and then we we've customized, our IT team has customized. So you can download Rock, you can download the product and you can use this product if, you know, your own IT team can manage it or of course you can take their hosted solution and, you know, pay them for that amount. Okay. But this is a good product that I would recommend to manage church information. Now, so okay. I wanted to log in to Rock, but I'm actually, you know, in a different user mode. So let's say now. Okay. So this is Rock RMS. This is our installation of Rock. So as soon as I log in, I'm able to see people's birthdays. So these people, it's their birthday today. Right. So I can message these people, which I will do today after the call. I will message these people to wish them for their birthday. You know, so this is a very nice thing to do. It's a very simple thing, but it's a nice thing. So imagine, you know, now we do have a member care team, which is people who do this. And, you know, for those of them who are in Bangalore, we, you know, we work one month ahead to make sure that on their birthday they will receive something from the church. So this year we are sending a cake to every person. So these, these one, two, three, these three people will receive a cake today from the church sent to the house. This person is not, you know, it's not, so these people are in Bangalore because they're part of South Central. These, this person is not in Bangalore. So she won't be getting a cake, but I'm just saying, you know, we can wish them, you know, we can greet them. And then we have a member care team that takes care of other things that is done. And if there's anybody's anniversaries today, their names will show up here. So I could even, you know, wish people for their anniversaries, right? So this is a very nice thing, you know, you just log in and your home screen, you're able to do this right away, wish people. Now we have, of course, you know, all our data here and this separate first installation for India care and a separate installation for a Bible college. And we continue to customize it to, you know, to do things. But just to show you some of the features, so if I search for somebody, I can search for their name and it will take me straight away to that person's details, right? So I see, okay, this person, that's his birthday and, you know, email ID, mobile number, etc. And, you know, you can see his wife, children, home address, and this person verified eight months ago, verified the details and so on, right? So these things are here. Now, there are a lot of other things that we could use this product for, you know, the membership, you know, whether they're going through various, you know, steps or things that you want them to go through. For students, those who apply for Bible college, they'll have a BC profile, other pieces of information that we haven't been not using all of this at the moment, benevolence can track their contributions and so on. We're not using all that. We just right now, mainly using it to maintain their information and also to track, you know, interactions from the church office with them and membership related things like their membership certificates or water baptism, you know, as and when they do it, we record that here, right? Now, so I'm just showing you this person, then we put tags. We can, you know, you can create as many tags as you want so that if you want to pull out data for those who are fathers, you can pull it out. Those are husbands, not those who maybe are church staff or which location they're attending, members and so on. So you can pull out information. You can do that. So just to give you an idea, you can create views on the data. So this is some views that you can create on the data. One is you can look for people who are part in Bangalore, those who are part of and within Bangalore, you can, you know, pull up people with, you can pull up an anniversary list, birthday list. You can pull up people from, you know, which congregation, you know, so here you're doing all this work with data very easily. Those are first time visitors. Those are attending life groups. If you want to look at women, you want to look at children, you know, those are part of Bible college. So you can create a lot of reports, views on the data and work with that, you know, so you can easily generate that data and then you, of course, access to this data is restricted only to the people who are actually working with the data. So it'll be our pastors. Only our pastors can see this data, this particular site. And we have what we call as a member care team. That means the other ones were calling people for their birthdays or who are, you know, regularly calling people. So only they have access to this. Not everybody in the church office has access to this portal. You know, only those who are authorized and they'll be very, very careful so that not everybody uses this data. Okay. So what our member care team does, for example, is they have this birthday list or this anniversary list. They will pull it out one month before and they will plan on, okay, these are the people who are having birthdays coming up, anniversaries coming up. This is the address. We're going to deliver a cake or we're going to deliver a certain gift to these people. So that's their responsibility to make sure that the gifts go. You know, this all made ready one month ahead. So all the arrangements are made so that on their day, on their birthday, on their anniversary, they get a gift, you know. So that's a simple thing, but you can do that when you have this data available for you. You can work ahead of time just to make sure things happen on time. Similarly, we have all the Bible college data here. Students available for us. We can look at it country-wise and we can, you know, work with our Bible college data as well. Right. So let me stop sharing. So this, this church management system or people management, I'll just call it people management, which has to do with managing church people data or other kinds of data. Like I said, in our case, we have, we're looking at pastors, we're looking at Bible college students managing their data and working with that data is very important for any ministry. And so I would recommend having a software system in place right from the early stages. Now, you know, when, when you have small numbers, an Excel sheet will do. But it's always good to think, you know, what will I do when there are hundreds of people? How will I be able to work with their contact information, their data? And so you can do that. Now, there's a lot of work we have to do in this area. I'll just mention it and we will close. For instance, when you have all this data, some of the things that we are thinking about is for our church people data, we're thinking about helping people find jobs. So right now, you know, we have all the people. Now we are, you know, part of what we want to do and we will get to it hopefully later this year or even next year maybe is we want to create a place within that environment. So first of all, we're going to make this people, individuals data available to themselves so that they can update their own records if their address changes or email ID or mobile number changes, people can come and maintain their own personal information. But then when they log into other community portal, the church community portal, we want to create a place where they can look for jobs. So people are working in companies if they have job openings there, they can post it here in the community portal, and people are part of the community portal can become aware, hey, there are jobs available, maybe I can reach out to so and so. Or if people indicate their experience, their expertise, their capabilities, others may be able to search for them, find them and contact them saying, hey, I have this job opening, would you be interested? So that's one thing we can do. Another area, of course, in our context, which is this whole marriage thing, we always have parents approaching us saying, can you find somebody for my daughter or can you find somebody for my son? And then pastors, I know this may not happen in other parts of the world, but in India it's like that, parents approach the pastor or the pastors saying, please help find somebody. And so if we have kind of like a marriage, matrimonial thing, which is common, that people put their profile, they're able to within restricted access, they're able to, they may not know somebody who's in another location or somewhere, maybe they moved to another city or whatever, but if you have a matrimonial exchange kind of thing, something can be facilitated. Of course, we are not going to make decisions on that, but just to facilitate connections happening within a safe environment can also happen. So a lot of things can be done. Once you have the data, clean data, you can create community around it and provide certain services that help the community in areas of their need. So yeah, so I just wanted to start thinking about it, where you can use software systems and technology platforms for your ministry and do useful things. And of course, you need technical people, you need to have IT staff, you can start with some volunteers and then later on, when you're able to, you can hire people to work full time for the church, working with all the software and creating these things that will be useful for the people. So we will stop here and we will continue this next week, we'll talk about other, maybe a little bit more on this people management, managing people's data. And I will mention towards the end about confidentiality and privacy of data, that's very important. So we are very careful whenever people join us, we have them to sign part of their joining our staff as they have to sign off that they will keep all the information very confidential. Then we only give access to various portals to the people who need access are going to work with it, you know, like member care and so on. So it's not open to everybody. So that is very important, the confidentiality and privacy of people's data is open, people shouldn't feel their data is being misused in any way. So those are things where to think about and I'll mention that towards the end of this chapter. All right, let's wrap up. Are there any questions, any thoughts here on this? Okay, let's pray and we'll wrap up, we'll continue this next week, talk a little bit more on managing people's data on how we handle that. Could somebody close in prayer please, maybe, yeah, we couldn't pray it in the morning. Okay, Aaron, can you pray? Oh, your mic is not okay. So, Dave, can you pray and dismiss us please? Thank you. Thank you, Jesus. We thank you for this time once again Lord Jesus. We thank you. We had the pleasure to be able to learn from the best of God. I think it's one of a few. Give us wisdom and knowledge about God, to give the technology that has been developed like that, or to serve the people more. It's also good that Dave, it would be easier for all of us to do ministry of God. I hope it's going to be something that thank you for this time. Thank you and bless the rest of the people. Amen. Thank you everyone. Enjoy the rest of the day and enjoy the weekend. I'll see you next week. God bless. Bye now.