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As many of you heard on Sunday, we are in the midst of a transition for the church staff emails and other Google operations. We apologize for the inconvenience of having to resend any emails sent between Thursday (1/29) at about noon, until Tuesday (2/3) morning. We had hoped that the transition would be completed on Friday (1/30) when there were minimal staff in the office who needed access to church email. However, several factors made that transition take longer than expected and therefore made us miss some important messages. Please do resend those or contact us on our cell phones, which are listed in the church directory.

Several of you have asked about this transition so I’m hoping to provide more information here. If you aren’t interested in the details, the short story is that emails should be working again by the time you receive this and, while it may take several weeks to fully make use of the new system, it is going to provide for much needed services at lower prices.

There are several reasons for making this transition. The first is that we were running up against storage limits in several accounts and were faced with increasing bills for adding more storage in the old system. In addition, we were limited to five email accounts in the old system and there was no way to increase that. With more than five staff members, several didn’t have church email addresses or were sharing emails, which was less than ideal. Rather than continue to pay more and more for storage and not have adequate email addresses, we applied for and were approved to access non-profit rates through Google, which reduced the fees, increased the storage, and made available additional email addresses. However, to take advantage of the Google for non-profit services, we had to discontinue the email addresses and then reinstate them under the non-profit account.

The other factor in all this is that there is an organization through the United Methodist Church that helped to set up the previous emails through Google for us. Therefore, part of discontinuing of the old system involved having the old email addresses released by them. That organization recently discontinued hosting websites for churches, which is why ours was overhauled last summer. Our staff believed that they may continue to downsize their operations. Rather than wait for them to end our email addresses on their schedule, we decided it was best to transition now. The process of releasing those emails took longer than expected, which was the first domino in the delays for the transition.

I want to express my thanks to Doug Manis who researched all the options to the issues we’ve been experiencing and who came up with this new solution. I believe it is the best solution for us and that the timing, while inconvenient, did not cause crisis for anyone. Doug has worked many hours since last fall finding ways to back everything up, make sure that there is minimal loss of information, and keep staff working as long as possible, in as many ways as possible, with the resources at our disposal. He continues to oversee the transition, and he deserves a huge thank you. Similarly, I want to thank all the church staff who have remained flexible and found ways to work around not having access to email over the weekend. Finally, I want to thank all of you, who didn’t get any warning this was happening and have had to accommodate it anyway. Your grace through it all is much appreciated.

A choir director I knew many years ago had a poster on the choir room wall that said, “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.” It’s my hope that we are blessed with the opportunity to learn lessons that will help us live aligned with God’s hopes for us, including flexibility.