[CS-FSLUG] Church Management Software

[Josiah Ritchie]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:14 PM, <pastor.george at nehemiah-center.org> wrote:

> I love you Ed truly I do but this pastor has NEVER drawn a salary.  Fact
> is I pay the rent, oil and electric more often than not.  I think there
> are a lot of small churches like mine that have pastors that are making
> tents all day long and then have to put in 40 - 60 hours being pastor on
> top of it.
>
> HELLLLLP
>
> Whoop love to stay and chat but I got to go plunge the toilet!


Seems like what Pastors like this need is a full management system that
would install onto a computer that would be different from their office
computer, dedicated to management, ready to be networked if desired and
loaded with nothing but church/non-profit management software. It also
should be setup to update itself for security. It should also simply detect
USB hard drives and use them as a backup medium by default. Very
specialized. Perhaps the potential for remote-access from outside help
through a script that could build an SSH tunnel to a support org would be
good. That way support wouldn't have to deal with firewalls, etc. The script
could be written in such a way that the person running the script would tell
where to connect to so some guy in the church could help if he's available
or they could pay a central support agent by the hour to get things working
again. Maybe this should actually be an appliance instead of software. If
so, it could be headless and have a small 4-port switch built in, even an
off-site backup service based on Amazon S3. :-) I think I've seen similar
all-in-one boxes for small businesses that worked similar to this. Perhaps
the better overall solution is the web-based service instead of specialized
software.

In a situation like this, to put such critical information onto a regular
old desktop seems insane. You can almost guarantee that the person
maintaining the system doesn't know how to. This is a great risk to the
data. Such a situation means the system needs to be rock-solid dependable
with little maintenance required.

Oh, and before I'd think tech classes in seminary make sense, I'd like to
see mission classes, but that's another rant entirely. :-)

JSR/

-- 
Our Mission
Technology and Hospitality for God's Workmen
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