 Okay, the recording is on. Welcome to the class today on church and ministry administration. Thank you for connecting to the class. I think the others will connect soon, hopefully. But let's just get started. Let's just take a moment to pray and then we will start. So Kiran, could you please pray for the class and then we will start? Yes, sir. Father, we just say thank you Father for everything. Thank you Father for the goodness and thank you Father for the good. All is told in Father God. Father God, help us to understand the subject Father God and apply to your kingdom. Father God, keep your more revelation and your wisdom and knowledge. Father God, to the situation. Father God, help us to move to your kingdom. Thank you Father God for everything. Almighty Jesus, name be praised. Amen. Thank you. All right, welcome to this class on church and ministry administration. We have been covering different topics that are useful for us to know how to basically run a Christian organization, whether it's a church type organization or some of the ministry. We've been just looking at various aspects. And last week we focused on projects, on managing basically how we execute and coordinate projects. And so we talked about that just give us a little idea on how to do that and not necessarily a full project management course or something. But it's good for us to know what goes in to run a project and many things that we do, whether it's a small thing like planning for an event or a conference or a mission trip or if we are planning something bigger. You know, maybe several years of ministry in a certain area. We usually run it like projects. There are certain things we look at to manage that area of ministry. So all the ministries and the things that happen within those ministries are typically run as projects. This week, we're kind of getting close to wrapping up this course. So one of the final things I just want to make mention about is leveraging technology in the administration of the church or Christian ministry. Next semester, we will have a more in-depth course on media and technology in ministry. We will get into the media aspects and I will talk to you. We will learn about different aspects of the media right from when you run doing a service or doing a live stream or doing what are some of the things we need to know. Now, of course, these things will be handled by the technical people, people who are experts in this field. But as a pastor or as a Christian leader, it's good for you to have some awareness, some understanding of what actually goes in because the fact of the matter is, even though you are a pastor, you're not a technical person. The technical team would come back to you for approvals. They would say, okay, should we do this? Should we not do this? Because they want to make sure that whatever they are doing is aligned to the vision and the ministry of the church or the ministry. It's aligned to the vision of the church or the ministry. So eventually, the technical people, the media people, they're all going to come to you and say, is this okay? Is this not okay? Now, of course, as a pastor, you're not an expert in that. You need to have some understanding of what they're talking about. So from that perspective, I think it's important for pastors, Christian leaders, especially in urban contexts, to have understanding of technology and so on. So we will get into that course next semester. But today, what I just want to give us an idea of some of the things that we could use from an administration point of view when you want to, you know, manage the church or the Christian organization well. And I just, you know, just give you a demonstration to show you some of these things. And some of you who've, you know, you may be familiar with some of these things that we are using here at All People's Church. Now, one of the things that we already mentioned when we talked about finances is to use accounting software. All right, that's important. You know, maybe when things are small, okay, we could manage things in an Excel sheet. But are there after at some point, you know, when you get when you cross 100 people or so, you would definitely need to use an accounting software. And in India, one of the commonly used accounting software packages for small organizations, businesses and so on is Tali. So Tali is the accounting software that you could purchase a license for and use it. To maintain, manage your finances. Now, there are other aspects of the organization for which you can use software. And I'll just show you some of these things. One is for managing staff. Okay, let's get a little basic now. One is just for the work, the office work. We call it just office productivity. That means for the work that's being done in the office. Then of course, many of us are familiar. We can use, you know, if you want to use the commercial Microsoft products, you can use Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Outlook. So that's what many people are familiar with. And I so use Word for writing your documents, PowerPoint for presentations, Excel sheets for your spreadsheets, calculations, charts and so on, and then use Outlook as your email client. Now you have free versions. You could use the whole Google suite of products, Google Docs and spreadsheets and presentation and Gmail. You could use that, which is all free. So, you know, there is both the commercial version and the free version, whichever, but I think it's important for running a church or a Christian ministry that all the staff, you know, work digitally. You know, just working on paper and notebook. You know, it's no longer something that is, you know, I'm using the word something that is acceptable. Especially in an urban context. So encourage your staff and try to get everybody on to using, you know, digital versions. Either Microsoft products or go, you know, the free Google suite of products that can be used for word processing presentations and so on. And of course, there are other open source software available. There is also products from Apple that could be used whatever, whatever's comfortable, right? But that's one set of software that the office productivity software that everybody should be using every organization. And you need to say it has to happen this way. You know, you have to use Word and Excel and spreadsheets and emails to for communication, documentation, presentation, so on. And, you know, we get people to learn those things or provide some training so that people can do it. And this way you can even archive, you know, so you can be mostly digital so you don't have to print paper and have notebooks and store files of, you know, things, documents. Everything, if it's done digitally, saves us all of that effort in space and so on, right? So try to, you know, in the organization from the very beginning, try to be as much as possible be digital. Things can be stored electronically, online or other places. So do that. So that's one part, the office productivity tools that we must be familiar with. And I'm going to put all this in a simple one page document so that you have a reference of this, okay? The second thing is to manage information about people, right? You're basically a contact management. Now, for a church, that it becomes important when you need to manage the information of those people who are part of your congregation. You know, 10, 15 people you can manage, you know, maybe in a notebook or a notice on the phone also, we can just, you know, create your contact list and so on. But when it gets to several hundred people to manage the contact, you know, to know their names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, wedding anniversaries, birthdays, you need to use some form of software. And so that's one aspect or if you're a Christian organization, you may need to take care of your people who are your donors, people whom you want to reach out to keep informed about your, you know, your work. So you need to, again, manage contacts. So that is another aspect of software we need, which is contact management. So we will talk about that. Then you need to manage your own staff. So, you know, how will you manage people who are working for the church or working for the Christian organization, right? Christian ministry, what would be used for that? So here again, you need, you know, human resource management software. So that's another software we need to talk about. And then there is, of course, a communication. You want to broadcast emails, messages and so on. You need an email list manager that you can use to manage. And lastly, of course, you need a website by which you share information with your audience and so on. So the good thing is a lot of these software products are available as free and open source products so that you don't have to pay money to license the software. They're available easily and you can use them and you can customize them. So of course you need some technical people to do it for you and you can customize it. So what I'm going to do is just show you some of these products that we've been using. And I'll just mention, I put it down in the document so you could be aware of it. And at some point you can also make use of these products. Right. So for, let me just go ahead and share my screen. So for managing, so we use our church management software. So this is all running, these are all web based online. This is church management software and it actually is a product that's called Rock RMS. And I will give you, I'm sure you put it down in the document. So this Rock RMS or church management software is, you know, helps us to manage all our information. So we use the same software to manage our congregation. We also have set this up as a portal for Bible College and so on. I'll show that to you. But the same software we're using it for different purposes. So as soon as I log in, I can see who are, whose birthdays are today. So there's a student, ABCBC means ABC Bible College. This is his birthday today. These are church people. These are the anniversaries. Susan George or Susan husband, Christina and Barbara, their anniversary. So I could, you know, immediately wish them. I can send them a message. So these are the anniversaries. Right. And in this software, I can also, you know, so I can search for people. So if I want to find out somebody's name, you know, I can just start typing here. And there's, okay, I just write you. So I can immediately go. I can get information about, you know, I just write you. He's, this is his, you know, whatever information we have tags on these people. So, you know, he's a member, but then central and so many things. And that's his age. He's married 26 years. It's son, wife, daughter information. That's a home address, mobile email. So, right. So, and these are people who, you know, we can have, we can track, we can post comments against them. So these are people who verify details and so on. And so there's a lot of things we can do here in this church management software, which we are kind of extending for our use. But for now we use it to manage all our church people. And, you know, we, we, we have various reports that we could run. We know, okay, who are the people we can get, you know, anniversaries, birthdays, congregation lists, people in life, the life groups or children, you know, so whatever we want, we can. We're also managing Mangalore and Bible college as well. And so, so we can do, you know, we can do a lot of reports we can work with and that we could use for our purposes. But this is how we manage church and then we also have a Bible college integrated into this. This is this is my view. So this is not something students will see. But, you know, we can look at less we can search for people will see the people have applied all of the data is. So basically we use this, we use this software to manage the church to manage Bible college students separately we manage congregation Bible college students on. So this is our church management software. And, you know, we use it like I mentioned here we use it for different purposes. So, for instance, the same thing we have customized it for Bible college. It's the same software product. We have customized customized it for Bible college students and we haven't really launched it work is going on. And this gives us data only about our These these number of students is not does not include the e learning students right it's just as of now it's only the online students at the homepage. Yeah, so we haven't completed this but this is where, you know, we will be able to Students will be able to view their attendance and so on. And so so this is a work the same product we're customizing it and Students will be able to see the grades register for courses download their certificates and so on. So these are things that's happening the same product that's being customized for Bible college. And we use the same product for our code relief. So when we, when we, when we ran our code relief project, and we got people to send it request. We had a huge number of requests come in from across India and all of that data went straight into this management Software and then from here, you know, people would screen them and And, you know, we could example. Of course, we could search for people. Let me just go directly to a list. Yeah, okay. So if I wanted to know who are the people who applied for pastor support, you know, I could filter by language so we have we were doing about 14 languages, I think. And we could filter by all of that and then, you know, these are all the people who had written to us. And then each one would be verified and then we would, you know, either Send them the support or for various reasons, they would be disregarded and so on. But this is how we managed close to 8000 requests and that came in. And then after that, we have converted this project into India care. So we are continuing to. So we did the code relief that is sending help to the people. But now we now continue to reach out to these people. I think the people who reached. There are totally what 11,000 contacts, because that includes the people who were given as references names pastors will give us as references. And we are just, you know, the team is calling them, continuing to care for them and help them spiritually. So we have converted the code relief into an India care project but they're using the same software to manage all the data so it's about 11,000 individuals whose data is being managed through this portal. So these are the examples where the same product, which is called rock RMS rock RMS. That is relationship management software. So it's a free church relationship or church management software which we are using. You can download this and you know, and you can begin to customize it and use it. So this is what we are using and we've customized it for our congregation to manage data for congregation we customize it and use it to manage this covert relief, which now we're calling as India care project. We're also, we also customized it and we are continuing to work on it to do for our Bible colleges. So the same, you know, rock my RMS or church management software, you know, you can use it for different purposes, and we continue to customize it. You know, eventually we wanted to make it a very useful portal for our congregation. Also for our Bible college so that that work is going on. But right now the team is kind of busy on other things, but that's our eventual goal. Right. So this is what we use to when we say contact management or managing information about people. This is a useful product. The other thing that we use to this what I mentioned about staff management, that means for all the people who work with us. So we have full time staff. And then we have people who work from around the country as consultants doing work for us. Close to about 30 plus people. And I'm not including the translators, you know, people who do translation of our books and all that. So if you include them as well, we probably have 40, 40 to 45 people who are in different parts of the country doing work for the for all people's church. So, you know, we have an office here, people are working in the office, but a lot of people are working from different places in India. So what do we do? How do we manage a lot of that? One of the things we have is we use this HRM or human resource management software, which is again an open source. It's what we saw as an orange HRM. So this, so all people are working for us other than translators. They use this, right? So they can, so you're seeing an admin view. So I have an administrative view on this. But when they log in, they will see just, you know, certain parts of this product. And basically, our staff and our consultants can report their time, you know, so everybody reports the work that they are doing, right? So each one for every day we interact time or against various things, what we're doing and so on. So for every week, you know, you could every week. So that was my time sheet for last week. So for all the work we did every day, you report your hours, what you did, right? So like that, you know, every week people will be entering their time sheets. And then we have our, we have our human resource person, our admin people who will I just got the dashboard, who will review the time sheets, approve it and so on. We also request, you know, we apply for leave here. So we manage, you know, so the software automatically keeps track of the leaves that are taken, what are the leaves that each staff is entitled to for that calendar year, so on. So this HRM is a useful way for us to manage staff and consultants, right? So this is a software, again, we would recommend people, organizations using, right? So we have a church management software that helps us manage contacts, people and so on. Then you have a human resource management software, HR, HR software that helps you manage your own staff and consultants, people are working for you. A lot of things happen. I'm not, I'm not going into the details of all the things we do. I'm just, you know, letting you know that these are products that Christian organizations can use and they're open source, whether it's, you know, a church or a Christian ministry, you can use it. A third piece of software, I would encourage churches to use of course is a list email list software and that means when you want to send out an email to people, you know, how would you send an email? Let's, you know, if you want to send an email to say, for example, you know, 12,000 people or so, how would you send it? No, how would you do that? You can't send it manually. So what do we do? We use a list manager. So this is again a free open source software called PHP list. And here you could add all the email IDs. Of course, you add it not manually, but you could push all the email IDs into your, into your, into the database. And you can also create subscriber lists. That means you could, you know, categorize them. So we have different, you know, groupings, like we can go by locations. These are pastors and ministers. These are outreach churches in the, or these are ministers around the world by the college, alumni students. So, you know, you can create lots of different lists. And within that, there could be even further lists. So within categories, you know, we have different lists of people, groupings. And so you can target your emails, right? So you can create as many lists as you want. And one person can belong to more than one list. And then when you want to run a campaign, that means you want to send a, send an email, you can choose, you know, which lists you want to send it to. So every week we send a little outline, I mean, a little email on what, what was a sermon about. So that's a campaign. So, for example, the last Sunday sermon that went out on the 26th, and it went out to about 12,000 people, 12,777 people, email IDs. So far now, about 1,366 have viewed the email and some have bounced. That means the email may not have been right or so. So, you know, you can send out emails. This is a weekly sermon. We can target emails, meaning if you want to send email only to our people in Bangalore, we can send, you know, if you want to send it to other groupings. So for example, this particular email, somebody in Bangalore had passed away. So it was sent only to our APC Bangalore people. Now that was about 2,121 people and out of that so many people viewed it. So you can target your email. So this, this, this email list manager is a very useful software for the church or the Christian organization to use. Right. So we've looked at three different kinds of software, the church management software, the human resource that is a people management that is a staff and consultants, and then also an email list manager. These are three, I would say, are simple but useful pieces of software that any church or ministry can use for their work. Now this is in addition to what we had already mentioned. Having an accounting software. People in the office using their, the office productivity tools like Word and Excel and PowerPoint and email. So in addition to that, these pieces of software are useful. And lastly, for all churches and ministry, ministry is important for you to have a website. So, and I think all of you know it, but just just for completion sake, so we have our church website where, you know, we, we built it in such a way that's easy for people to come know what's going on, you know, especially for new people. They want to know what is all people's church about. Well, they come in, they can just scroll through the web, you know, the first page and they get a lot of information about who we are, what are the resources available. You know, how do I connect to church from a first time visitor, I want to volunteer, I want to join a life group, right. I need a member care assistance. I'm a member needs an assistance. So you make that available. There's information about the church itself. What are the events that are happening of course now it's mainly the church services. What are the ministries the church is involved in. What are the resources available. And later are books that are available in different languages. What are the mission trips mission missions and some of other websites and how do I contact the office and so on. Other locations so having a website that you know is is kept up to date with relevant information for your congregation or for new people is always is a useful thing and perhaps necessary thing in our world. Right, so that's it. I think I will just, you know, stop with that meaning this is, if we are if an our church or organizations able to use this, these pieces of software, I think it's great. Now, of course, there's a lot more you can do like for instance we have the Bible College and the e-learning portal, and the other other things that people, you know, can do. We have specialized websites for different things like chrysalis counseling or politics and other other sites that that work is going on designed for other purposes. So there's a lot that we that a church or ministry can do in leveraging technology. We will get into more details next semester in the media and technology course, but I just wanted to touch on some amount of relevance of in the management and the organization of a church or Christian ministry. Right, so I'll put this up in a one page document I'll post it online and you can just have it as a reference and in the future, you know, for your church for your ministry. And like I mentioned, all of these are available available for free. So if you can just get the help of some IT people, some software developers, some people may even be able to volunteer their time. They can set these things up for your church or for your Christian ministry. And then, you know, you know, it's so good to be able to use it to serve people better. All right. Now, there are a lot of technical people, you know, people who love technology who understand software developers and so on, who want to serve God, who want to do something for the kingdom. They want to use their skills. And, you know, you could definitely invite them to come and say, hey, can you use your skills and help us set up this church management software or this HR software or a website or this email list software for us. And most of them will be very happy to do it. They may be able to volunteer their time, or in some cases you may have may be able to hire people, and they will be able to help with the work of the ministry. But as a leader or as a pastor, if you have some understanding of these things and you can ask for the help that you need, get this thing set up. And it will be a wonderful asset to the church and the ministry. Any questions? Any thoughts on this? Okay, so let's pause here for today. And we will probably have one last class next. We will have a last class on Friday. I just want to wrap up with some, you know, concluding thoughts and just do a full review of the course, what we've covered. And so we will do that coming up the next class. Okay. Let's pray and then we will dismiss it out. Could you please pray and dismiss us? Sure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Connect with you on Friday again. Thank you. Bye now. Thank you.