Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

“Who’s your IT person?”

A few months ago I asked the vestry this, after I recognized that almost every small business in America seemed to have an ‘IT guy.’ During the weeks before that conversation, we’d been dealing with some, shall we say, weird issues with technology: A lightning surge fried some computers and routers, and we’d been wrestling with the local cable / internet company who, with their hyper-sensitive spam filter, keeps blocking messages sent from our church email address to their customers / our parishioners.

Luckily, my tech savvy brother-in-law was in town when the lightning surge happened; he got us back to where we started, pre-surge. And, luckily, our folks have been relatively patient with the vexing email issues. But the system, overall, wasn’t in good shape. It was put together by one parishioner and another maintains it from time to time. Our email is hosted by another guy with a remote server and there’s no way to share files except to email documents back and forth. Add to that some minor glitches which caused the whole thing to nearly collapse and you can tell we were getting to the point of maximum frustration.

That’s when I brought it to the attention of the vestry, half-heartedly expecting them to volunteer themselves or their ‘friend’ – because everyone knows someone who knows something about techie stuff – and she’d come and take a look at it. “We don’t have money for this,” I feared they would say. Or even worse: “We don’t need help,” I could almost hear them saying it; “I’ve got two computers and a wireless printer at home and I don’t need tech help.”

So I said: “Look, this is really frustrating. What should we do?” “Get someone in here to help,” our senior warden said; “my company has an IT guy we work with. I’ll call him.” The next day, our parish administrator reminded me that the company from which we lease our copy machine is actually more into information technology solutions for small businesses than they are into renting out Xerox machines – a brighter future in the former, obviously. Within days, we had two representatives from two local companies in our office and ready to listen.

I described what we were dealing with, what we were hoping to accomplish, and asked whether they could help. “Of course,” they said, understanding that they’d also need to spend some time (and complimentary time, at that, once we sign a Service Agreement) getting our network set up to their specifications and standards so they purposely don’t have to come back and move wires and undo someone else’s work. They really don’t want to have to come back out – hence the exorbitant hourly rate if you need a tech on premises – so, instead, they’ll spend time, up front, and set it up right. Sharing files? No problem. Email and web hosting? A snap. Secure document storage? Of course. Remote, password-protected access to shared files? Yep. Ability to have you, the professional techies, interface with our annoying local cable/ internet company? That’s what we’re here for.

The Service Agreements and plans they offered were pretty similar and not at all prohibitively expensive. For less than $100/month, we could be in business with a professional and safe and secure information technology network.

And the biggest takeaway, for me: most folks are already doing it, including several congregations in my community. A congregation, at least in this case, is markedly more similar to a small business than what you’ve got going at home with your home-based IT network. Add to that, in an increasingly hyper-connected and tech savvy world, wouldn’t we want to fund this future movement and ensure that when we reach out we’re actually connecting?