tweet

A guy I know tweeted something the today that has kinda been sticking with me.  I met Anthony Coppege a few years back at WFX,  years later I presented with him at the same conference. I would pretty much just go to a conference to hear him because he has such an awesome heart for God, a wealth of knowledge and experience and is just an all around awesome guy. One of the things I always love about listening to Anthony is one the same things I about Mike Lee.  There are times he says things that I am pretty sure were just for me. 

So when he tweets something like "I think today's church tech arts is in greater need of leaders than skilled technicians. The focus must shift from the gear to the people."  That gets my attention.

He qualified it later with "In my opinion...because church leaders have been satisfied with tech = support instead of tech = ministry."

Ouch

I would really love to say he is wrong here, but I can't tell you how often I hear about tech guys getting burned out of have bad experiences.  I have seen lots of TD's quit their jobs and lots of churches posting open TD positions and it really saddens me. I think a big part of it is because the people they work for see them as providing a service not as working in a ministry.  Yes, I absolutely think Church leaders need to treat their tech team the way they treat other ministries.  They need to be casting vision to, praying with, worshiping with, doing Church with their tech teams. I think that would be a great start halting the steady decline I see in tech ministry as a whole.  

But, where this gets me is if we want to be treated like a ministry we need to act like a ministry.  I wish I could remember who it was I read this from, but somebody once said a good TD is 1/3 tech geek 1/3 cheerleader, and 1/3 pastor.  Two of those I am really good at, that last one, not so much.  I am not going to make excuses about it, I am just flat out not good at that side of it.   

So I am going to place this challenge to TD's (myself included) work harder at the ministering side of the job, focus on the people.