Driving the Church: Spiritually and Logistically

If you've been attending Grace or listening to our messages for the last few years, you've grown accustomed to the mantra, "Evangelism is the engine that must drive the church." I'd like to add to that statement.

Evangelism is the engine that must drive the church, spiritually.
Logistically, the church database is the engine that must drive the church.

The church database is the core system for tracking people - it's our earthly version of the Book of Life, if you will or the 2007 version of the Book of Numbers. It identifies the people in our church body, it provides channels for us to stay in touch with them, among a lot of other things.

Our database has lacked since I started here some eight years ago, but since January, we've been making huge improvements, thanks in full to Jodi's help. After serving in the Children's ministry for many years, Jodi, who's professionally trained in database programming (her service in the Children's ministry was a total Aaron/Moses type things - "God, I'm not, nor do I feel qualified to do this ministry, but if it's how You want to use me, here am I, send me), turned the Children's ministry over to other leadership in January. Though phasing out of that ministry she was interested in helping us in the office, particularly our databases. I have so appreciated having her on board so that every time I uncover a list of addresses someone has in a Word file, I can ask Jodi to go talk with them and explore if there are more efficient ways to track the data and produce the same end result. In just a few months, we've consolidated countless Word documents of address lists, address labels into our main database. We've introduced the concept of a mail merge!!! And Jodi's dug into the backend tables of the database to create links and other things to manipulate the data for our needs. It's a thing of beauty. What makes it even more cool is to see the smile on Jodi's face. Though way behind the scenes and details that don't interest many, the background work that Jodi's doing that will enable the rest of us in the office to enter and track more data all combines into the engine that must drive the church logistically.

Following the examples of Moses (The Book of Numbers) and Nehemiah (Nehemiah 7:5), we too keep track of families.