Woe is me – too much work

Have you ever been dragged down to the brink of “burn-out” at church because you are the only tech guy? I was! It was bad too because I started to begrudge Kingdom work which is not a good place to be!

In my church I was the only techie guy – small church – and it was getting way overwhelming. Pastor suggested it and I ran a 13-week tech class. The class was announced as a course about computers and related technology with the intent of every person doing tech work around the church when we finished. We told them from the start and all through the course that we weren’t training them just to help out their “day-job” boss but so they can help build God’s Kingdom.

It went well and we started with I think 18 people. Of course a few just wanted free computer lessons but when everything was aimed at ministry work, they started dropping.  That’s ok, God’s work is usually done by the remnant and not the masses.  When I finished I had 8. Two moved and one got bored (which is fine, it’s not for everyone!) and a new one joined so we now have 6 people on the team not counting myself and it’s almost 2 years later!

Here’s what I learned:

• Give them something and enable them to return it for the Kingdom of God. We taught them at first and their knowledge has exploded – learning much on their own or just by asking.
• Don’t treat them like dummies. I didn’t talk over their heads, but I also didn’t talk to them like I would my mother who hates
  computers and will never get it. In turn, they got the mindset that they could do it and they are!
• Don’t hold them back. I have had to fight the urges of “I’ll do it – you’ll never understand it” because it’s a tough topic and I have been surprised every time. These people that want to learn do so fast and well!
• Never underestimate them. Things I was sure they didn’t know were the things they would just sit down and do without my help.
• Accept the fact that everyone is at a different level and accommodate that. Get yourself a task manager tool (we use toodledo.com which is free and good) and enter all the tasks you know need to be done and when new ones arise enter them. Assign jobs to people according to their abilities. One girl works on our sermon CDs, another does some web page work and the guy that’s not great with computers is helping with getting the stats on all our equipment for an inventory (which we created in Zoho).
• Don’t let anyone sit idle. If they come to the church to do the work make sure you have something for them to do. There is usually plenty to do but we think of it as lowly but it may be perfect for someone else.
• Don’t apologize for a job you give to someone. What you may hate, he may love. It may be the one thing she really loves doing and if you apologize for it then you will perhaps make them think less of their contribution.
• Always encourage your workers. If someone learns how to pull a picture from Flickr to the website in WordPress then congratulate them on it and encourage them… even if it seems trivial to you, Mr. Tech Guru.
• Start with the big stuff but split it up so they can start helping right away.  Our biggest task was to redesign the church website.  “Hello class, here’s WordPress, now go to it!” wouldn’t work, but taking one session to explain the basics of WP and what themes are let me “assign” them homework to each go find 2 WP themes they like and then the next session we got together and looked at them all and decided which to present to Pastor.
• A cool name never hurts. We started as Technology Ministry or TechMin for short, but when spoken it sounds like we are all guys and I have more women than men in the group so I flipped it to MinTech – Ministry of Technology.  Ok, it’s not a great name but it is a lot better than “the computer group”!
• Adapt as the ministry changes.  When we started we were “the computer class”.  After 13 weeks it stopped being a classroom setting and started being a do-things ministry.  At that time we had to stop calling it the computer class and I saw attitudes change with the name change.  It is important to call it what it is so that it can be.

The end result is unknown because we are still going strong and I don’t see us ending any time soon, but what I can tell you is that we went from a stale website that I was too busy to finish and too burned out to care as much as I should have to a website the Pastor likes that grows every day and has fresh pictures every week or two and news articles when appropriate.  We also have the same for our daycare – changing pictures and news and the monthly paper newsletter.  We have CDs made of each week’s message and on the table for those who ordered them a few days earlier.  We have a growing inventory of every piece of equipment we own.  We are revamping our entire music collection – consolidating duplicates, renumbering when it was done amiss, etc.  We have everything proofread 3 times before printing it.

We have all of this and more and I am not stressed at all – in fact, I can do more now that I have my friends working with me on the stuff I consider mundane or un-fun and that they enjoy.

The best thing of all is that instead of sitting at home watching TV or whatever it is people do at home when they are bored, they are learning new skills that will help them in their jobs or when doing things on the computer at home AND they are working to further God’s Kingdom in a very real way that will not be overlooked by the Lord.

This has been a wonderful adventure and it is proving to be a lasting one as well.  In all of this I just keep thinking back to Tom Sawyer and that fence he needed to paint.