A few weeks ago at the national meeting of the Church IT Roundtable at Saddleback, Rick Warren made the following statement, “The purpose of technology is to make the church more personal.” He is right, that is indeed one of the purposes of technology in the church. Unfortunately, churches often misuse the technology they have or fail to use it altogether. Here are a few technologies, most of which we have used at Second Baptist Church, that can enhance and preserve the personal and pastoral care of a large church:

1. Prayer Pagers: We have a supply of prayer pagers for those in the midst of a health crisis. We publish the names and the numbers of the pagers on our church intranet and our church website. One of our first recipients of a prayer pager, Rebekah Tauber, received such a following that the chain emails detailing her situation became an urban legend and earned an entry on snopes.com. Her prayer pager was a highly personalized reminder that people were praying for her. The pagers we use are through USA Mobility.
2. Social Security Death Index: We occasionally receive late death notices of church members or regular attenders. As part of our pastoral care, our senior pastor sends personal letters to family members on the 1 year anniversary of the loss of their loved one. It is important that we have correct information if it was not included in the death notice to the church. To verify our church records, we have used the Social Security Administration’s death index. If you need to verify a large number of records, I recommend CDYNE who provides a tool to search against a list of names. Otherwise, Ancestry.com underwrites the cost of a free search tool for single searches at RootsWeb.com. It is impressive how much information is returned in this simple search tool.
3. Task Centre by Orbis Software: Task Centre is a great 3rd party tool to use with any ChMS that monitors changes in your database and kicks off any defined stored procedure, task, or notification. Using this tool, you can setup email or SMS reminders to staff at the anniversary date of a birth or  loss in your church family, or a follow-up notification after a church member has not attended after a certain number of weeks, or schedule a weekly hospitalization report to be auto-generated and sent to your senior leadership. For us, it has been a very valuable tool!
4. Google Voice: Before you setup a designated prayer line, consider using Google Voice to give you even greater flexibility in managing calls for prayer. With Google Voice, you can have your prayer line ring several phone numbers concurrently ensuring that you don’t miss a call. You can also have the voice mails transcribed and sent to you by email or text. You can even forward calls on a schedule…allowing calls at night or on weekends to be routed to an alternate number.
5. Care Calendar: CareCalendar is a web based system to organize meals and other help for families during a time of illness or life changing event, such as the birth of a baby or death of a family member. Although it is cannot be integrated with your church’s membership database, it is still very much a worthwhile tool to recommend to your church family.
6. Caring Bridge: CaringBridge.org provides free websites that connect family and friends during a serious health event, care and recovery. It is similar to a blog but more defined in function and easier to use for the non-technical. There are other sites similar to Caring Bridge such as CareFlash and CarePages. Each of these organizations are very open to creating a branded account with your church as a service to your church members. I have not seen a comparison chart for these, so do your homework before deciding on the preferred provider for your church family.
7. The Funeral Negotiator: This isn’t a necessarily a technology or a software, but a great online resource. As a pastor, I have used the funeral negotiator before and he is the real deal. If you have someone in your church family that is overwhelmed with funeral costs (and who isn’t??), then I definitely recommend they contact the Funeral negotiator. He will save a grieving family a lot of money.
8. iPrayerWorks: iPrayerWorks.com is a hosted prayer management software that helps track and disseminate prayer requests, hospitalizations, and homebounds. It is a very much needed software and is one of very few that even exist.
9. Prepare-Enrich Marriage Preparation: Prepare-Enrich is a marriage prep program that includes an online couple assessment. Pastors can login to retrieve the assessment scores and access any number of relationship building exercises to include in the marriage preparation process. We have used this tool as a part of our Marriage Prep ministry for several years. While it is not a Bible based or Christian based tool, it is a very valuable tool and can be used well when facilitated by a pastor.
10. Legacy.com: Legacy.com provides tools for families to create websites in memory of lost loved ones. It also provides a service to post obituaries with an optional guest book for people to sign. It does cost money and probably could be just as easily accomplished through a free blog software, but I thought it worthy of mention.