Saturday was the big day – first service at Imago Christi! A timeline of the day:

7:30 am: Wake up after sleeping in. Feels good. Making mental lists of what I need to remember for the service.

9:45 am: Everyone is fed and dressed. Making a couple final tweaks to the bulletin.

9:55 am: Headed to Noelridge to print the bulletin and pick up the drums.

10:30 am: Setting out 2008 giving envelopes for Noelridge while the bulletins print.

10:50 am: Loading congas, microphones, mic stands, and a small podium into the van.

12:10 pm: Girls are taking a nap, Becky and I are watching Heroes. Almost done with Season One.

12:30 pm: Nate calls and wants to know when we can meet so he can drop off the sound equipment. Any time before 3:30 will work for him.

1:15 pm: Meet Nate at Imago. Set up speakers, amp, adjust the EQ.

1:45 pm: Heading back home.

3:15 pm: Leaving to pick up Andre and head to Imago for worship team practice.

3:30 pm: Made it to Imago, setting up microphones and the keyboard. How will we arrange all this stuff on the stage?

4:00 pm: Finally ready to practice the music. Getting a nasty hum from the passive pickup in Morgan’s guitar.

5:00 pm: We’re as practiced as we’re going to be. Plugging in the iPod. Andrew Peterson will provide background music until the service starts.

5:15 pm: Changing into my ilikeandy.com t-shirt and a jacket.

5:30 pm: Service starting. Must be about 50 people here.

5:35 pm: We’re up. Music starts. People are clapping on the first song. Woohoo!

5:39 pm: This second song is a mess. Timing is off, and I messed up the lyrics to the second verse. Not my A game. Grrrr.

5:50 pm: Music set is done. Still pondering what song to use as the musical meditation at the end of the service.

6:40 pm: Richard has finally wrapped up the sermon. Taking mental notes to give him a review later. I’ve decided on a song.

6:50 pm: First service is over, and we survived. Thank God. Heading down for a fellowship time.

7:15 pm: Tearing down sound equipment. Fortunately we have a closet where we can store it there at the church.

7:45 pm: Everything is torn down and put away. Now to lug those congas back out to the car so we can use ‘em at Noelridge in the morning.

8:10 pm: Home. Exhausted. Putting the girls to bed.

8:30 pm: Watching the last three episodes of Season One of Heroes. Pretty good ending.

I’ve basically narrowed down our web-based CMS search to two programs: Church Community Builder and PurposeWare. I’ve worked with the online demo of CCB for a few days now and liked what I’ve seen. It is very feature-rich and detailed. My fear is that it might be too detailed and might scare away potential users. I haven’t seen PurposeWare up close yet; they will schedule a live demo for me with a sales person, but I can’t just go do it myself. No time to do it this week; I think I’ll set aside some time next week to get the demo.

Both companies have reduced pricing in place for church plants; PurposeWare says they’ll give it to us for free for a year, but haven’t told me yet how much it’ll cost after that. I have a price on CCB that I think we could handle if it’s the best choice. I’m shooting for next week sometime to get a decision made and get signed up.

I’m convinced that picking a good Church Management Software (CMS from here on out) will be an important thing for Imago Christi. So for the past couple of days I’ve spent some time Googling various CMS options. There is no shortage of options; the Google search has multiple pages of primary sites that offer some sort of software, and those software packages seem to run the whole gamut. There are the amazingly cheap and out-of-date packages that are still being offered; there are more expensive packages available. One particular frustration is that a bunch of sites won’t even give you pricing information up front; they want your contact info so they can have someone call you. I hate talking to salesmen, and there’s no sense in them pitching a $1000 software package to me, no matter how good it is – we can’t afford it.

Being a geek and very internet-savvy, it boggles my mind how many really really poor websites there are for these programs. Seriously, the sites look like they were created in 1995 by a high-schooler who needed a weekend project. And like they haven’t been updated since then. I have to wonder how many copies of the software they’re selling if they can’t even afford a decent website.

There are a couple options I have found that have web-based solutions that are very attractive: PurposeWare and Church Community Builder. Both appear to be much more robust than the typical CMS, allowing church members to access the tool online to update information, sign up for mailing lists, etc. Of course, both of these places want me to leave my contact info so they can get back to me… but I think with these two it’ll be worth it. At least these two have websites that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have associated with my organization.

I’ll do some more evaluation in the next week and try to come up with a recommendation. Then we just need to justify it in the budget…