 Okay. Hey, welcome back everyone to our second lecture on BC314 and media and technology. And I've just been sharing some of the software platforms that we use at APC for our church work. I'm just sharing it with you. I'm not saying everybody has to use it or everybody has to do the same thing, just sharing some of the things that we find useful and that help us in the ministry work. So let's just pick up from where we pause. Let me share the PDF and then also share some stuff. I was talking about a church app. So we are actually rebuilding our church app. So it's useful. I mean, again, what we are planning to do, the roadmap for this product is that we are going to be having our congregation really relate, I mean, use the church app for registering for events, accessing a lot of our content and doing a lot of things through the church app itself. So that's kind of the direction we're going and so we are building it ourselves. Now, for our e-learning, we are using an open source product, which is called open edX. So, and some of you are already familiar with this. Now, before the pandemic, we had explored some of these e-learning portals. So we were thinking, okay, Bible College is there. Why don't we kind of also set up an e-learning platform? And we had looked at a open source product called Moodle. And then we also looked at open edX. And, you know, we were just playing around with it, testing it. This was before the pandemic. And then, and the idea was, why don't we, you know, record our Bible College lectures, put it there so that people could use it. That was the motivation. And then the pandemic happened. So we were forced to close down physical Bible College. We went online with Google Classroom, like what we're doing right now. And that's when we said, hey, why don't we also extend this on an e-learning platform? And so for us, it was already easy because prior to the pandemic, we were already, you know, playing around with Moodle and open edX. And our preference was open edX. And we were just setting up some, I would say, test classes and doing all that. So immediately we said, okay, we're going to go with open edX. Let's set it up. Let's get our e-learning platform up. So in 2020, sorry, was it 2020? 2021, I think, yes. So in 2021, we set up our e-learning platform. It uses a free product called open edX. And it's actually very easy to use, but easy to set up the classes and the coursework. So we trained all our Bible College faculty saying, okay, this is how you have to use it. So all of them know how to use it. And there were other people. Initially, we had assistants. We had some people who would help our Bible College faculty to do all the setting up of the classes. And eventually all of them learned how to do it. So it's very easy to learn platform and it's free. So here again, you can download this product and set it up and use it. And many of you are aware about our product, the e-learning platform. You can see our e-learning platform. I just switched to the screen. Can you see the e-learning platform? Okay. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah, so many of you are familiar with this. So this, you know, we actually don't charge it for this. We keep everything free. And if people want to contribute, they can. And so we have, you know, students from 105 countries accessing this resource, our resources. And it's, you know, basically all these lectures come up here as well. And we can always improve on it. We are planning to actually, for the future, you know, record different short, short courses, put it out here. People can come and learn on their own whenever they want, so on. So this actually really helped us extend everything we're doing out to more people. We have, for website analytics, it means to know what's happening on our websites. Again, they're using a free product called Mutmo. So this basically, it tracks what's happening on all our websites. So we know what is a traffic, what are the people coming to the website. I mean, from which part of the world are they coming to the website? How many visitors we've had and so on. So we use this in addition, of course, to Google Analytics. So we have both of these products connecting to our websites and giving us information on our websites. For our mail server, that means this is where we set up our email IDs. Again, this is a free open source product. We use PostFix. The reason we set up our own mail server is because, you know, we don't have to pay. So if you use a hosting service provider, they will charge for every mailbox you create. So every mail ID they will charge, like, you know, I don't know what it is, let's say $5 a month or something. But that's a lot of money if you have, you know, 50, 60 or 100 email IDs. That's a lot of money to pay. So we set up our own mail server. Again, it's using a free product, PostFix. And here we just keep creating all our email IDs. So when you add new stuff, we give them an email ID. It doesn't cost us other than hosting our mail server, which is a fixed, you know, cost running on a server. We can create all different email IDs and so on, manage it ourselves. And PHP List is, again, another open source product that manages email IDs of people. So I think we may have 30 or 40,000 email IDs in that on PHP List. And so these are people from all over the world and who have subscribed or who have contacted us in some way and they get added to these various lists. And so when we want to send an email, an email out, a communication out, we send it through PHP List. So it's like our, it manages the email IDs and it also manages our outgoing email communications to broadcast to these various lists. So if you want to do that, you can use this free product called PHP List. And, you know, so that helps you. Another product we use for inventory and asset management is again an open source product called Snipe IT. Now I'm not logging in there because it has all the license numbers and all the details of products. But so whenever we buy a product with the hardware or software, we first, as a part of our procedure, we tell other people to enter it into our asset management. So especially expensive things. I'm not talking about small, small things, but, you know, if you buy a new mixer or speakers or microphones, or computers or software licenses for a software license product, everything gets entered into our asset management system first before it is given out to people to use. And we also record who it's given out to. So we buy a laptop, a new person joins, we buy a laptop, okay, this laptop, it's entered here, it's given to this person. So we know who has what device, because there are so many staff working and so many things, so many locations and all that. And if a product, you know, is broken and something, and it's no longer used, we update it here. So we know that this product is gone. But this helps us manage all our assets, software and hardware assets. And keeps a record of their condition, you know, maybe they're gone for repair or they are in good condition. So that's how we track all our inventory and all our license numbers and everything is kept here. So we know, okay, what license are we using, for which product, et cetera. So that's this, again, it's an open source product. Anyone can use it. That's what we use. Our Bookstack app is what I showed you, it's our repository where we keep all our documents for different areas of ministry, so that people can go and access it based on that area of ministry. They can go and access it. These two products we don't, the church metrics, I just put it here, is if you want to track your attendance and so on. We, right now, we track our attendance in simple spreadsheets. But you can use, you can set your church up on churchmetrics.com and put data in there. And they will do analytics for you and tell you, you know, this is how your church is doing and so on. We used to use it for a little time for a few years. Then we stopped using it. But I just shared that information here. Right now we just track on Google spreadsheets. And so we know, you know, what our average, what our attendance is week by week. So we have real numbers. So we can say, you know, APC central, eight o'clock service, so many, this the average attendance, 1030, etc. So we have that for every year, you know, all the years that we've been tracking it. There's again a free open source enterprise resource planning software. If you want to use one software to manage your whole enterprise, you can do that. But of course they have a lot of restrictions and limitations. But I just put this in here in case you are, you might be interested in looking at it. So this just gives you an overview of different software products or platforms that you can use for church and so on. And what I just want to mention is that, what I'd rather want to say is I want to encourage you in your church, in your ministry, to try and leverage these software products or platforms to whatever extent you can. It's going to make managing data and, you know, doing the ministry work now that much more efficient and also it helps you reach out to more people. So that's our motivation, right? How can we reach more people? And so these software tools and platforms helps us do that. And so although it's an investment of time and energy into, you know, people are needed to set up these platforms, the benefit is you can serve a lot more people. So keep this in mind as you think about these software platforms and, yeah, these are useful, okay? Any questions on software platforms so far? Anybody has any questions or any thoughts? So generally, do you feel that church should take or make use of technology in this sense or do you think it disconnects us from people and make us less connected to people, you know, leveraging software platforms to do ministry? Do you think churches should do it or do you think it's actually an hindrance to ministry? I think that just should do it because it helps in doing it in a very organized way and also makes it easy for us to manage rather than doing it in a hard copy way. It's always good to use a software tool. It makes the work easy and helps us to be more organized. Thank you. Anyone else? I think if the church can keep the cones of technology into check, we must use it because this is the way forward. Otherwise we will be left backward. Thank you. That's true. That's true. Thank you. Anybody else? Okay. Okay. All right. So next week, I want to just deal with, I think we'll finish next week. Okay. Sorry, there's a question on the chat. I see Subhash's comment. Yes, church should do it. Thank you. Subhash is sharing your thoughts. Rosalind's question. I have a question. Should all these software be used for growing churches, even a small gathering also can make use of this? Yeah. Actually, I would recommend, I mean, you don't have to use everything that I put down in that list. You can pick, you choose whatever is relevant. But I would say even small congregations can start using these, you know, especially if you have people in the church who know, you know, they are IT people. And for them, it's a way to serve the church. It's an opportunity for them to say, come, you're good in IT. Please come help us. I've set up one or two of these things, you know, so even small congregations can start. And I would say, you know, one of the most important things are like the important things would be one is to manage the data of people, which is, you know, their name, their phone number, the email address. That information is you need to maintain because if somebody you want to call somebody, you don't have the number, how to call them, how to reach out, you know, so having a church management system is good. Similarly, to want to send email, suppose you want to send an email, you know, to 200 people, 100, 200 people or more. If you have an email list, it's easy to send. Otherwise, physically sitting trying to send email to 200 people is very difficult. So even a small congregation can start using it and these soft platforms can handle large volumes of data. So even if the church grows to many thousands of people, it will be good. You can handle it. Yeah. And nowadays, you know, a lot of young people are actually good in technology. So if you get them involved, it's a way for them to serve in the church. Okay. So next week, I think it will be a last session. I want to talk about two things. One is artificial intelligence. And I'm not going into great detail, but just to talk about the pros and cons, you know, how it is affecting church administration and ministry and so on. You know, I heard, I don't know personally, but I heard one pastor. He preached a message, then he asked his congregation, you know, who wrote the sermon. They all said, we thought you wrote it. Then he said, no, no, no, I, I got chat to write the sermon and I just came and preached it. So that is, that is one extreme where this, this whole artificial intelligence is going. But then there is also some good things that can happen. I just want to talk about it and think about the pros and cons, you know, how can we use it in a positive way? And how we, what we should avoid, you know, I don't think I will ever preach a sermon written by chat to PT. I don't think I'll ever do that, but some people are doing it. What, you know, what to say about that. But in a, just we'll discuss, we'll discuss next week and the pros and cons, you know, of artificial intelligence. We'll talk a little bit about that. And then the last section is about data privacy. So, you know, because as a church, you actually have the data of so many people. Other people are interested in that data. And that has happened, you know, some, some business might have come, has, has come. So as he has a business, he wants to promote it. So I don't know what is, you know, whether it was innocently asking or whether the motivation was wrong. I don't know. But he came and said, can you, can the church send an email to all these people about what he, his business has to offer? Now he's a member of your congregation. What will you do? You know, what will you do? He's a member of the congregation. He's not asking for a bad thing. He's saying, hey, can you send information about the service he's offering? You know, it could be a general service, something, whatever. To all the people you have a data, you're the database, you have so many people. Can you do it? So that's where then you need to know what to do, right? And for us, we have a very strict policy. We don't do that, right? Because people have given us their data as a church for the church to use to serve them. So the church, if we have an announcement to make, we have some information to share from the church about ministry, okay, we will share. But we cannot allow somebody else to use this data for some other other reasons like business, so on. So those are things we need to be careful about when we are using software, you know, because people have interested their data to you. Like I said, you know, we probably have about 3000 just here in Bangalore, their birthdays, anniversaries, their address, their mobile number, email ID, all the data we have, they haven't trusted it to the church. Family members, children, all the data is with us. We have to be careful. We'll talk about that. So these are two things we'll cover next week. Artificial intelligence and data protection. And with that, we would have covered this course that I'll just give one assignment for us to review everything. Okay. All right, so let's close in prayer. Somebody could lead us in prayer and then we will dismiss. Thank you for this opportunity to learn. And as a searcher, God, we pray that you would make use of the technology that you have provided and help us to use, to glorify your name. Your kingdom be established in the response to the world that ever we are ministering to. And let us use it wisely. You would be good stewards of the grace that you have given us. Thank you. Amen. Thank you, everyone. Have enjoyed the rest of the day. We will connect again tomorrow. Thank you.