Aug
25
I recently received an email from a worker in a creative access country, letting me know that she had unfriended me on facebook because of a burst of sensitive information that I had posted on my facebook profile. Now this sensitive information, was not even close to compromising in a North American ministry sense. It was simply some links to a photo album of a monastery I visited in another country a couple of years back and two imported notes based on blog posts discussing dynamics of the Christian faith from my personal
blog.
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Jun
3
As a member of the missions committee for my church, I was asked several months ago to create a tracking tool to deepen our understanding of our support and interaction with the 57 people, and 16 organizations that we support financially and in prayer.Currently we are tracking, name(s), organization, location, ministry scope, date of last correspondence, current support %, and % of our Church’s missions budget on an excel sheet. For future applications in a wider context I would like to create a database tool to track not only this information, but member care by the supporting church, ministry plans, local situations of concern, and current prayer needs gleaned from recent correspondence.
From a philosophical perspective, tracking this information is valuable and quite useful for encouraging additional involvement in the lives of the people that a church supports. However there are a number of questions that also must be answered in a personalized manner for each congregation’s situation. These questions include. What are we hoping to learn? What is our purpose in tracking this information? What are we committed to do with the data once we have it? How are we going to protect the privacy of the people and organizations involved?
In these data intensive 21st century times a tool like this offers the potential, when properly used, to process the information flood that a mission committee wades into on a monthly basis. With better understanding of people’s situation(s), the potential to forward some of this information on to the general congregation and prayer warriors of the church for wider congregational mobilization becomes a reality.
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