The five year lag

The other day I had a brief twitter conversation with @johndyer (whom all my readers should follow) about technology in the Church. John often hears complaints that churches are “five years behind the rest of the world” technology-wise and, being a thoughtful technologist remind the complainers, “Look, its 2011 and George Lucas has JUST gotten…

Re-purposing and expanding

The 4 year old router Central purchased is starting to get a bit flaky.  The hardware of the router is actually pretty good, but the firmware has always been terrible (and never updated).  As the demands of our network have gotten more and more, the bugginess of the firmware has popped up more and more….

The hidden gem of OpenLP

At Central, we use the open source program OpenLP.org for our lyrics projection. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that some of the commercial apps have – but it’s simple, fast, and free. These are three great traits for a church running on a shoestring IT budget. OpenLP recently releases their 2.0 beta…

A funny thing happened on the way to the offering

I love technology, and implementing technology wisely in worship. That being said, one of the points I always raise with pastors and lay-people who are interested in integrating technology into worship (usually through digital projection) is that it will fail – and they needed to be prepared for the contingency. Well, this past Sunday we…

Living Forward

This morning I lead chapel at Riverview Estates. It’s a (mostly) Baptist retirement facility down by the Delaware River. There is a special connection between Riverview and Central Baptist, many of our members have lived, worked, or volunteered down there over the years (some have even done all three) so we feel that Riverview really…

Worship

Christian worship is about honoring the Triune God and celebrating the work of Jesus. When we replace that with ANYTHING we do it to our peril.