One thing my training never equipped me for…

… is IT troubleshooting.

For a small, ageing congregation, we’re very wired up. We digitally record our services, network with one another through email and a few are even braving Facebook and Twitter. This week I ventured into Android tablet territory and began teaching myself its various idiosyncracies and exploring the wonders of syncing it with my phone and desktop. Until a couple of years ago, I was the church’s “go-to” guy for computer difficulties. Pastoral visits invariably included fixing something that had gone awry on someone’s PC. Thankfully we have some IT savvy folk in the congregation now, but we still occasionally get our heads together and scratch them to sort out a solution to one pressing tech  problem or another.

When I did my basic ministry training in the ’70s, this practical area was not even dreamed of, let alone covered in our administrative subjects. Like most of my generation, we just learned it (or not) as we went along. I was fortunate in being on the ground floor in a congregation containing several computer engineers when IT began to make inroads on the SOHO market, so could begin to learn in an amateurishly, largely intuitive way from first base. Who would have thought how ubiquitous and accessible it would all become?

It’s still a delight, however, to receive a “first email” from an 87 year old who has just gone online for the first time!