FellowshipOne

Fellowship Technologies’ church management system, FellowshipOne (F1) is going gangbusters. It seems like a lot of the higher profile churches are switching to it including Lakewood Church in Houston. Having worked with Shelby Systems’ client-server application for the past 7 years, I’m warming up to the Internet-based F1 slowly for reasons which I may post later. To their credit however, Fellowship Technologies is actively working on enhancing the system (which is only 2 years old) and everyone I’ve been in contact with from the head guys to the support personnel are contagiously passionate about the product and about serving you.  This week, I had two “A-Ha!” moments that are drawing me closer to being a “rabid” F1 advocate and both deal with their Internet-based architecture.

The first revelation is in training. A pastor I work with was graciously given the opportunity to sit in on an F1 training session at a nearby church. He told me that while the instructor was going through the exercises, he was able to follow along with data from his church. They way I see it, Fellowship Technologies could host larger church-neutral training sessions or workshops in metropolitan areas where they have multiple clients. This would reduce the amount of smaller individual sessions and man-hours spent in instruction. Also, they could market the F1 to churches expo-style on an RSVP invitation basis giving pastors and administrators a hands-on test drive with pre-prepared mock-ups of what their database could look like in F1.

Second is the potential for summit-style collaboration. I haven’t thought through all that this could mean, but here are a few examples. Let’s say that a gathering of local Pastors and management staff meet at Internet-enabled venues. With each represented church having real-time access to their own data, discussions about the quantitative impact of certain worship styles or evangelism events in different socio-economic regions could spark cooperative innovation. Or churches that have lost a family to another church in the area could offer helpful information to the receiving church for the purpose of understanding their situation and personalizing ministry efforts. These examples might be a bit weak, but I’m sure there could be huge potential for more intra-church collaboration with F1.