Bud Brown, connections minister at Heights Church, Prescott, AZ, requires that volunteer ministry leaders have and use email to allow for the best coordination of ministries at their church. He wrote this at his blog, Altitude:
I have made it a policy that those key volunteers who help me run the volunteer staff in the various departments I manage will all communicate via email. They don’t know that this is my policy, but if a person doesn’t have or doesn’t use email, I can’t use them on my team.
Sound harsh? Maybe, but it mostly comes across to me as practical and honest. I’m with Bud. I thrive on email. My primary means of communication with my church leaders is by email. I meet in person with our team of elders once or twice a month, but our work leading up to and following those meetings is by email. If a church leader tells me he or she doesn’t use email, I don’t know how to respond expect to be embarrassed for them and wonder what we need to do to solve the problem.
I can barely remember or imagine my pre-email life. If you send me an email, I can read it, reread it, and refer back to it later. When I write you an email, I can think twice about what I’m saying (and what I shouldn’t say) before I hit the send button. If it is convenient for me to talk to you at 1 a.m., I can do so via email. If it is convenient for you to respond to me the following evening, then that’s when you respond. And if a message is for several people, it is certainly easier and ensures more accurate communication to send one email than to make several telephone calls.
I will confess, my love for email is paralleled by my disdain for the telephone. I hate talking on the phone, and I let the majority of my incoming calls go to voicemail. I carry a cell phone, but I regard it mainly as a pocket answering machine. It has nothing to do with discomfort regarding human interaction. I love people and intelligent conversation. I enjoy one-on-one meetings, often over breakfast or lunch, and I am the only person I know who doesn’t mind admitting that I enjoy church committee meetings. I like the fellowship and the brainstorming. But please don’t call me on the phone.
The phone always seems to ring at the most inconvenient time. Phone communication is usually preceded by a volley of messages back and forth, just trying to connect with each other. What a time-waster and stress-builder. When two people do finally manage to get each other on the phone, invariably one of them is soon interrupted by another call.
Email is infinitely better. If God hadn’t intended for us to communicate by email, he wouldn’t have given us PCs and broadband.
Well, I better go. Writing this post has made me realize: it’s been a while since I emailed my wife that I love her.
