I’m not sure how to respond to such a ‘simple man’ who because of an issue entirely unrelated to church website design would hunt Mr. Boyink down to a third party, and then publicly double post a message under two different email addresses (both from the same IP address) to express your disagreement over a private business mattter in a manner contrary to Matthew 18? Especially when such a person claims to know God.

My first thought was to erase your message, but it is my opinion your clear lack of genuineness with regards to the operational and software lifecycle issues facing RidgePoint, coupled with your total disregard of the property of my technical blog to liable someone who has to me provided countless contributions, speaks loud enough for your voracity and integrity – and demonstrates to me the type of inappropriate behavior that gets one ‘excommunicated’ from any message board on any topic.

Good luck and thanks for all the trout!

Signed….

One of the Pastors at your church!

PS: It’s all about communication! I see our site through “normal peoples eyes” Dean sees them from the geek side of things! Please don;t take any of this personal! Dean and I have been working together for 5 years! Aagin… it’s all about communication!

Signed….

One of the Pastors at your church!

PS: It’s all about communication! I see our site through “normal peoples eyes” Dean sees them from the geek side of things! Please don;t take any of this personal! Dean and I have been working together for 5 years! Aagin… it’s all about communication!

I’d have to agree with that summary. This whole topic opens way too many open sores personally with me to comment objectively, but it is an area that needs to be covered. Thanks Dean. Thanks Mike. God Bless!

While this might be one of those times where discretion is the better part of valor, I do feel inclined to respond to a few comments that have been posted. I’m hoping to do this in a “learn from what happened to me” mode, and apologize in advance if I slip into “salvage my pride” mode..;)

First and foremost – my family and I didn’t leave RP because a couple pastors decided to replace the website. We had already decided to move on — yes based on some of the things that had happened while working on the site, but also based on many other factors like wanting to find a church that was more focused on simple Bible study for believers.

The work it took to move off the pMachine site was begun the night that I formally handed over all site materials to the staff – which was the week of spring break 2004. In church terms I think you all know what spring break means — a mostly empty office. The move to the eZekiel site was a spur of the moment decision by one person working largely solo – hence the lack of response to Deans request for any formal justification for the change.

Dave J wrote: “Part of the problem with church websites is that no leader is responsible for it, no one authorizes it, and, unfortunately, no one cares.”

This was not the case at RP. The responsibility for the site had been formally assigned to the director of development, who also did any advertising and program/bulletin creation. She was very involved during the entire project – but sadly was also left out of the loop when the decision was made to go to the e-Zekiel version of the site. She cared very much – and was deeply hurt by the move.

On the volunteer/for hire subject, there actually was a short period of time where I billed RP for my work. This was late in the project, when the staff (mainly the director of development) realized that they were asking for changes that required large amounts of my time, and these changes were last minute, reactionary, not being well-thought out, etc. The requests for changes were starting to interfere with my paid work, and my hope was that by charging for the changes the church staff would be more careful about both the nature and timing of the changes. It worked to a degree – it’s kinda funny how much more resourceful and self-reliant the staff became….;)

OK – onto the project management aspect of the discussion:
Doug wrote: All I can think of is to keep them involved in the design and maintain a team atmosphere.

Kristen wrote: Then to sit down and discuss the game plan. What are their needs, what are their expectations, and what are their wants? From there draft up a specification that meets all of those issues.

Members of the RP staff – including Liske – were heavily involved in the entire site design project. Look at the numbers that Dean mentions – 18 month project, and over 350 hours of my time (that actually got logged). The actual production of 95% of what you currently see on RP’s site took 50-60 hours over Spring break 2003. The remaining 300-ish hours mainly consist of discovery meetings, audience definitions, brand definitions, backend and front end functionality requirement gathering, lunchtime communication sessions, design reviews, training sessions, etc. I’ve posted an overview of this process on my site:
http://www.boyink.com/portfolio_more/105_0_4_0_M9/

I do need to note, however, that there was one staff member who was not involved with the site until right before the first planned launch, due to being hired at RP late-on in the project. And even though we met with this staff member and went through the history of the project, and gave him copies of all the documents created, and gave him a tour of the site front-end and back-end, this staff person was ultimately the one mentioned above who started the work to replace the pMachine site.

After the e-Zekiel site was put live the question haunted me – What could I have done differently that would have prevented this from happening?, and the answer was, nothing. I had approached this project in the same manner as any web or software development professional would have – doing all the discovery, due dilligence, stakeholder interviews, specification documentation, etc.

In the end – after almost endless discussions between ourselves and with other current and former RP folks, my wife and I firmly believe that this event ultimately happened due to a faulty church organizational & leadership model. RP is part of the “Pastor as CEO” church movement, and in RP’s case there is both too much responsibility put at the feet of the Senior Pastor, and a lack of formal “buck stops here” staff and leadership accountability to the congregation. We believe this structure is the root of many of the problems we’ve seen over the years at RP, and it was another major factor we looked at when deciding to leave the church.

I welcome it because my site doesn’t exist by itself but as part of the Church here – so it should in some way reflect the Church, its character, ministries and personality – my Pastor is able to give great insight into that because he is the Pastor! He is also not an experienced browser so can give a lot of insight into how usable the site is for the uninitiated.

I fear it because he’ll ask me questions like ‘Can’t we change the font?’ or ‘Why can’t we have 10,000 images on this page?’. He doesn’t care that the site avoids tables or that it uses mod_rewrite for nice urls and neither do 95% of the sites users. As techies we are impressed by techie stuff but that is not always the best way to look at a site!

It became evident recently that my Pastor thought you could design websites like you could a powerpoint slide. I showed him some PHP! A lot of Pastors might misunderstand the techie because he doesn’t care about standards, accessibilty and the box hack – in fact in many cases they are just like the people browsing the site!

By no means did I wish to suggest that Mike Boyinck was either inflexible, or not good at communicating, or demanding. However, a pastor with dreams about how he is going to boldly lead his flock into the digital era etc. etc. might very well use these, or the ‘no time’ excuse (and as an excuse for himself before God) to do what seems to us as nearly unthinkable. Trying to think on the pastor-side of things, ‘how could this have happened’? Having known a number of different pastors, I can see this happening very easily. My language may have been less than clear – the thought that, for example, the pastor might ‘throw the webmonkey a bannana’ by, for example, mailing him a note that says ‘nice site’ or say some sweet words about the webmaster’s hard work, talent, and dedication to God yadda yadda in front of the congregation, and there, he threw the webmonkey a bannana, webmonkey should be happy and now site is pastor’s, pastor should feel free now to add text with the blink tag – or replace your work with a flash site or whatever else glitters.

There are indeed stick-in-the-mud techiweenies out there, even churches have BOFH-like characters – and this knowledge is probably enough for pastors to assume that you are such a BOFH. How could a person possibly be emotionally mature if he/she can do so much stuff with computers? The church is about helping people, not about machines! (heard this one?)

Kristen: like this idea, but it’s only likely to be effective if your pastor truly thinks laypeople exist who are endowed with enough wisdom to be worth listening to when he thinks he has a really bright idea, and you’re not just somehow or other preventing God’s will from happening. But hopefully in most cases it should at least help some. Bugtracker for a church site, you’re really going high-tech! If you can’t do a bugtracker, you can always have closed forums – people in charge of site can go there when they want and don’t feel they’re overwhelmed with your mail on every last techie point. Also good if you’ve got a number of people submitting the site to directories etc., to keep track of which one’s you’ve already covered.

Richard, this Pauline insight contains so much truth, but is so difficult to live by. I think technoweenies in the church are often seen more as a pair of shades or a pocketprotector than a part of the body. This verse is given a great deal of lip-service, but often people confuse it with being a social worker – helping those ‘truly in need’, the poor, sick, and redundant etc., and not being edifying in one’s day-to-day contacts with other people. Or else in being a spiritual worker – always having a little bit of spiritual wisdom you need to hear that should really help you if only you would listen. And not in dealing with you as someone who is doing a portion of God’s work, and work which is unique and can’t just be done by everyone.

Finally, pastors are often overworked and under-appreciated – pretty emotionally challenged. If a pastor does do something unseemly to you well, maybe he’s kicking the dog after having a hard day at work. Never fun, but you at least learn how it feels to be a kicked dog, and are confronted with the challenge of dealing wisely in such a situation. Try to do better than your pastor.