The difference between supplementary and necessary things is time. If you think about it, most of the things that we feel are necessary today were nothing more than impractical embellishments not all that long ago. Before that, chances are they didn’t even exist. Here are some examples: cars, microwaves, air conditioners, dishwashers, radios, and televisions. These things have all gotten better over time through technological advances and have become necessities to the vast majority of Americans.
The danger of seeing technology as a necessity is that we begin to rely heavily on it. It’s a calculated risk, but we’re often at a loss when technology fails. Technology has become such a necessity that many companies have entire departments devoted to helping people when it fails. It’s inevitable that the more technology you use, the more like you are to face problems with it.
Even with the risk of catastrophic failure, the supplementary has become necessary. This seems to be more and more true for large churches. The current trend for churches right now is multi-site. This trend is technology heavy and I get the feeling that many churches don’t have a backup plan other than having campus pastors preach live at the other sites. Where cameras and editing equipment used to be supplementary for churches to do cool things with, they are now the necessity to make reach the current standards of making church happen in other locations.
At North Way, we’ve had the occasional corruption in a video file or glitch in equipment, but thankfully we have never had to deal with catastrophic failure. We use an HD tape deck as a back up recorder in case a computer fails during service. We’ve dealt with audio glitches by recapturing a line or two from the pastor after the Saturday night service. In the case of catastrophic failure to multiple pieces of gear during a sermon, the options for us are to either have the Pastor stay late and recapture the entire sermon again, or make the call to have campus pastors preach live at their locations the next day.
I’m curious. For those of you that are involved in multi-site churches, what kind of contingency plan do you have in place in case your equipment fails? To make church happen, how necessary is the technology you are using?