Saddleback's CTO to present at TechEd this year!

What timing ... Tony Dye had a recent post on Church IT Visionaries and I mentioned Saddleback's Eric Busby.  However, I went on to demote Eric for not blogging great stuff for us to learn from...doh!

Our uber volunteer Dustin sent me this the other day as he was looking through his Microsoft Tech-Ed materials...

Do you have what it takes? Come join the head of technology for

Saddleback

Church

, Eric Busby, as he outlines how you can help build .NET software solutions for the biggest global effort in Christian history. Eric will be sharing a huge vision outlined by his boss, Rick Warren, author of Purpose Driven Life and influential global leader. This is an opportunity to use your skills to help solve the five most significant problems facing the world today: spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic disease, and crippling illiteracy. YOU can make a difference. If you want to do something for God with your technology skills, you need to check this out. This group is moderated by ericbusby

Obviously, Eric is doing huge things!  Tech-Ed is only Microsoft's biggest technical conference of the year ... all the big dawgs go there.  I'd love to go, but it's very expensive ($2000+ per person!) and typically sold out.

So kudos to Eric and I hope he gets a ton of people involved. 

Comments

[Clif Guy]

I've had the opportunity to spend time with Eric on three occaisions. Every time it was a mind-blowing experience. He thinks about church IT on a completely different level.

The last time I was with Eric was with a group of around ten other mega-church IT guys a couple of years ago at North Point in Atlanta. This time Eric blew our minds when he told us he was moving out of day-to-day IT management to work directly with Rick Warren on these five big problems.

He had been doing a lot of reading on "polycentric networks" (one example being the Internet). His thinking at that time was to use technology to link the independent activities of churches and denominations in a way that enhances everyone's missions/outreach activities without requiring centralized control. He gave an example: "Saddleback sends a missions team to Honduras. The people there tell the Saddleback team that they need an electric generator. The following week a small group from Granger makes a long-planned trip to the same village in Honduras, bringing with them the requested generator. When the Granger group arrives with the generator, the Hondurans ask, 'Do you know the people from Saddleback who were here last week?' And the Granger group answers, 'No, we've never met them, but we heard you needed a generator so we brought one with us.'" :-)

This story was Eric's way of illustrating how technology could be used to link the independent missions activities of two churches across the country in different denominations without any central organization controlling it. Pretty cool, huh?

That meeting was the last time I talked with Eric. Sounds like he is trying to recruit some smart people to help him apply this polycentric network concept to the five big problems. Nice. I'd love to join him if I weren't so busy serving Christ in my own corner of the Kingdom.