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Stewardship can be defined as "maximizing the impact of every dollar." This definition becomes more significant when finances are tight. For many churches, the current economic climate has created shallower pockets and increased pressure to spend wisely.

As the pastor of a small rural church, I have experienced this firsthand. Yet, even with added financial difficulties, I cannot forget that the above definition of stewardship still includes the word "impact." Our spending must make a difference.

One area often caught between stewardship and impact has been technology. In my church, I have found that a little bit of technology goes a long way. Yet, the cost presents a formidable challenge to our budget. Unwilling to forgo the impact, I have tried to find creative ways to add technology without adding the typical high costs. Though not profound, the result has been five effective ideas for becoming high-tech on a low budget.

As I began taking inventory, I wanted to explore areas for technological improvement. With the need to be cost-conscious, I thoroughly reviewed our current stock. This "taking inventory" revealed several instances where we were not utilizing things we already owned. Let me offer two examples. First, our children's ministry needed a system for notifying parents during the service. Years ago we had bought a set of pagers, but they had deteriorated. After considering comparable systems, I found that everything was priced well beyond our means. However, upon examining the features of our projection software, SongShow Plus, I discovered a text messaging toolbar. We could easily display a child's assigned number on the worship screen. Our church had a no-cost solution available to us for years, yet we had never known it.

Secondly, as most churches do, we often use performance tracks during the service. Cueing the track with a CD player worked, but sometimes errors occurred. Volunteers would occasionally have trouble switching their focus from the projection software to the CD player. But during my exploration of SongShow I found that it could import and use audio files. All we had to do was burn the performance tracks from the CD and move them into SongShow Plus. Using Music Match Jukebox, which came free with our computer, we could easily record the tracks to the hard drive and then copy them into SongShow's audio database. Now a single mouse click begins the track. No more transitioning from the computer to the CD player and back to the computer. Once more taking inventory led to a no-cost technological improvement.  

Following my inventory, I began to consider various technology upgrades supported by our presentation software. For instance, I saw that with the right Bible software we could import scripture directly into our slides without retyping or cutting and pasting. This would have advantages in other areas as well, particularly in sermon preparation and the creation of our sermon outlines. To make this upgrade we could choose several big name Bible programs, yet each was quite expensive. There was, however, one lesser known option, The Online Bible. For less than forty dollars The Online Bible (www.onlinebible.net) has numerous translations. This meant a full feature upgrade at a fraction of the cost.

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