As technology progresses and life cycles of technological products decrease, the need to plan for these changes is a must for the media minded church.

What is a technology plan?

A technology plan is a process toward ministry excellence. It defines the purpose of your media ministry and the role it plays in the overall organization. It is a tool to define the resources required for the ministry, both human and non.

A technology plan is divided into two parts.
- Technology path
- Technology Management

Creating a technology path:

Step One - Sit with leaders of various church ministries. Ask each group what their vision and needs are for media from their ministry's viewpoint. A key to these meetings is not to focus on equipment but ideas, concepts, and functions. It is best to get the vision of each group without the influence technical staff, at least during the first meeting.

Step Two - Set up a meeting with each of these groups again, but this time, invite the leaders of media staff. This meeting should start with a presentation created by the meeting organizer to recap the vision of the group(s) from the first meeting. This should include the current state of the media and then the vision of the future. Next, a brainstorm session is in order to share the comments from the other ministries, and how you can meet the goals of their vision. If your church has a purpose statement, it is a good idea to test the vision against the mission statement, and goals to the overall ministry of the church. Does it support it?

Step Three - Now the media team meets to determine the current and short-term needs of the media ministry today. Again, focus on defining the conceptual/functional needs and goals—not equipment.

Step Four - Create a map or visual representation about your plan.

Step Five - Make a detailed assessment of the current status of your current equipment.

Step Six - Define the gap between where you are and where you want to be. After completing the steps above, you now have enough information to start to create a technology path. The technology path should be documented in the form of a written plan as well as a visual technology map. After the technology plan is created it is time for the media team to implement it. The next step of a technology plan is the management of technology.

Technology management defines the methods and resources required to carry out the day to day operation of the media ministry. This will include a group of people that encompasses the church staff and lay ministers.

There are several ministries that fall under the technology management and technology plan as a whole. Besides managing the technology itself, such as providing maintenance, upgrades as required, and operation of the equipment, content creators are also vital to a technology plan, because technology without content is nothing. Content is the message.

Too often when we think about our media ministry, we think about the technology and the operators and technicians, or our technical talent. We fail to consider the creative talent, such as musicians, graphic artist, vocal talent for the spoken word, writers (copyrighting, scripts etc), and drama folks, as content creators and part of the technology plan.

Many times the technical people are used where more creative people should have been used, and many people who are very technical do not participate in ministries where they have a gift because we tend to blur these gifts. A technology plan should provide a map to clearly define the talent resourses and gifts required to meet the overall goal.

The technology plan defines the resourses and management fulfills the requirements. Leadership is a must. You need someone that has the ability to provide technical and creative leadership. These individuals require abilities for mentoring new people in a given area(s). These leaders are self-starters and continue to learn in their area(s) of ministry.

The leaders continue to train in technical/creative areas and mentor and train those coming up to be mentors. These individuals should lead in spiritual development as well, directly or indirectly. These leaders, coupled with a clear technology plan, will be able to make your ministry grow internally.

Then as leaders lead and mentors begin the mentoring process to create leaders, it will begin to reach outward.