Yesterday I met with my new friend, Boyd, from ChurchTeams.com (a great resource for your church – I encourage you to check them out).  We were talking about the future of the Church, technology and ministry and we talked about the reality that in the not too distant future, churches may not need internal servers. 

I was sharing my thoughts on the Church IT world and how quickly it’s changing. How most IT departments are not keeping up with the rapidly changing world around them and how I believe that we’re just on the edge of all the change coming to our Church tech and IT worlds. 

I talked about how North Point doesn’t use Microsoft Exchange – they’re all Google. Many churches are following in their footsteps. Think about it: North Point is a huge church with a large staff – if they can do it, you can, too.

I talked about how churches are using resources like Unifyer, 360Hubs, Arena, Fellowship One, Planning Center Online, ChurchTeams.com, etc., etc. – all web-based resources. 

Today I had lunch with the Emerging Media professor at the University of Texas Dallas. He started talking about this very reality without knowing I had already written most of this post. He talked about the new reality of sharing information via the cloud. I already collaborate with many people and writing partners via Google docs. 

Some of you may think I’m crazy and disagree with me strongly, but I’ve always been an early adopter and I believe you’ll look back on this post 3 years from now and think differently. In your own church world, how many programs that you use are web-based? How big of a stretch would it be to think of doing away with servers in your situation?