Church Tech Part 1

There are sometimes I lament being a techie at a church.

Perfect example: staff meetings.   When the children's workers say "12 kids made Jesus their forever friend this weekend" the High school/Middle school workers say "we baptized 23 this weekend" First impressions team "was able to pray with someone and lead them after to Christ of this message this week" the worship was "absolutely incredible".
I never get to say "we managed to bring 3 people to Christ because of the dutch angle on camera 4 this weekend"  or "camera 2 did an incredible job of demonstrating God's love with that pan" I mean come on that is just silly, and I know it is not a competition of "which ministry can be to most spiritual" (Spiritual Formations of course) But do you see my point? No one comes to Christ because of a camera angle, no one.  So why have cameras? why have tech at all?  I am going to explore/unpack this over the course of a couple of posts. I will let you in on a little secret, I am a little bias about the tech ministry.  To be honest, this is something I have to ask myself regularly, and my answer isn't always the same.

Let me start by saying, yes I see how many times I said "I" in the last paragraph, yes I am aware that prolly means I am treading on dangerous ground since this topic shouldn't be about me.  I agree, that said it's MY blog... this is how I am going to unpack my thoughts.  As I write this I am not really sure how it ends yet, so lets start looking through some standard arguments for/against.

For: The purpose of a tech ministry is to remove all obstacles from between the congregation and their worship/ learning.  Over simplified we make it so people can hear and see the worship and the pastor even if they can't from where they are sitting.  True and good.

Against: Sometimes though the tech actually creates more distractions the it removes.  True.    Sometimes that is because it's technology, and as is the nature of the beast if it can be plugged in it can fail. True and bad.