A few years back, I (Zack) was working as a Sr. Website Administrator for Amazon.com. It was one of those exciting yet disruptive jobs, where as a group of elite Unix gurus we handled the troubleshooting and resolution of large scale outages of the primary website. The team was very solid and I was happy to be in such good company, but the job came with quite a downside…pager duty.

Not just any pager duty, but $20,000/minute pager duty. That was how much money Amazon was losing per minute of outage back then, so the conference calls were particularly emotionally charged. Good times.

I can remember one evening rather vividly. It was 3am and I had just fallen asleep after resolving a few other pages, when off goes the pager again. Buzzzzz…if you’ve ever been responsible for a pager before, you know what I mean. Even for several months after I transitioned off that job, I still had phantom pager buzzes waking me up in the middle of the night. But, this was a real page, 3am, and I got out of bed without destroying the pager, so I was off to a good start.

I called in to the number on the pager and joined the conference call already in progress. Guess what? The whole site was down, the main database was about to wander off into the weeds, and the ringing of the cash register had come completely to a halt. Amazon.com was down.

Believe it or not, this happened alot back in those days, so my blood pressure and adrenaline were at normal levels and with the excellent co-workers on the line, we managed to track down the root cause of the crash. Complex multi-threading issue in the database server? Nope. Super high-tech part get interference from cosmic rays? Nope.

In fact, it was all because of a typo in a Excel document.

You see, the Technology supporting the setting of a price was so difficult to use that no one bothered with it anymore and had instead built a workaround where they would create a list of prices in Excel and then just upload it into the annoying Pricing program. Excel munged the price, it went to the site incorrectly, and hordes of people tried to buy the drastically reduced but very popular item at it’s pennies on the dollar price. Everything crashed under the load.

This leads us to the second corollary of Principle 1: Ministry will be more effective when there are fewer problems to work around.

Anytime the weird and obscure ways of Technology force ministry to travel the side streets to get to their intended destination, the less ministry will get done. Just like the coffers at Amazon slammed shut with a website malfunction, so too can the reach of the Gospel be cut short when our systems go offline.

Reliability, redundancy, fault-tolerance, three-nines (a reference to the 99.9% of the time we want our websites to be up)…these are all words in the Christian Technologist’s repertoire. If the light in the lighthouse is off, ships will wreck on the shores.

In Part 1 of the Technology Manifesto, we talked about how Technology Exists to Solve Problems, which seems pretty stunningly obvious right? Well let’s turn our attention to some of the corollaries of this principle and how it directly relates to Mars Hill.

First corollary: You have to solve the right problems, which in turn implies that you know what the right problems are and then work on those first. This is commentary on both discernment and prioritization.

In many ways, Technology is plagued by an over-abundance of possibilities. Every time I sit down to write a line of code or to examine the structure of the organization, there are a multitude of possible outcomes. Do we outsource, or support in-house? Do we buy a vendor’s solution, or let God’s people at Mars Hill worship with their technical skills? What are the problems we have to solve, and what are the problems that would just be cool to solve? I can’t tell you how many emails I get that ask me whether it’s possible to build this neat gadget for ministry X, or a tracking tool for ministry Y. In all cases the answer is that it is possible, but that we can’t pursue that opportunity at this time. It’s obvious then that we have to define the problem, before we can talk about the solution, otherwise the possibilities will dilute the necessary.

At Mars Hill I see that our primary problem, and therefore the first place we have to focus our efforts, is to leverage Technology to extend the reach of the Gospel (that’s the Air War), and secondly to encourage community and the visible demonstration of our Christian love for one another (that’s the Ground War).

Do our websites fit in with these priorities? No, I don’t think they do. That doesn’t mean that our sites aren’t good (in fact, they are very good), but to go the next stage of where God is calling us, we need to take each of them in very different directions. Much more on this topic soon.

Does our infrastructure enable mass dissemination of the Gospel? Again, I don’t think so. What are the primary channels of content distribution online today? Social network shared video content and internet TV, like YouTube, Joost, and so on. Thankfully, there are many folks before me that have been thinking about these things and we’ve got some pretty good ideas on how to move forward, but as you can see, there are many fronts to the Technology war.

Two more corollaries to this first principle and then we’ll be on to the next tenet of the Technology ministry. Mixed in with these posts on the DNA of Technology, we will also begin to pull back the curtain and show you what we are doing at Mars Hill to reinforce these two guiding priorities (Air War and Ground War). In the coming weeks, you will also see screen shots of projects in their early stages and some of our thoughts on how these projects will become integral parts of Mars Hill.

We are very excited to show you what we’ve been working on.

In 1981, at the age of 7, I was a pretty normal small town kid. My family was in a little house in Yakima on McLean Drive, just up the street from the creek (pronounced ‘crick’) where my brother and I would fish for perch. I might have grown up like Huck Finn, if not for one day.

You see, on that day, my dad brought home a Timex Sinclair ZX81, a weird little device with a membrane touchpad glued on the top. We took it out of its box, attached its tape drive, the sort that took a normal cassette by the way, and hooked it up to this weird little monitor that was made for “computers.” Not that I knew what a computer was, but I was ready for a new challenge and since it came with a book on “programming the Timex Sinclair” it sounded like it might be fun. I don’t think I caught a perch ever again, I was hooked.

What was it that so captured me? The endless possibility of what a computer could do. It might not be something you stop to think about in your daily life but consider: what would the business world be like if the computer never caught on? I actually had a COO (that’s Chief Operating Officer to those not TLA savvy) during my nearly eight years at Amazon.com that wanted to turn off the email system in favor of unlimited voicemail. Think about that one for a second, Amazon.com the tech giant, turning off email for voicemail…needless to say, that COO didn’t last long. But that is the nature of things with technology; there is a relentless march forward and to stand still is to really fall into irrelevance.

So again I ask, why has the computer (speaking generally) become the largest change agent in the world in the last 30 years aside from Jesus? I would argue that it has become so integral into the life of any worker because it solves problems. Seems pretty obvious, right? You had read this far and were hoping for a little more, well, sometimes you get what you pay for and this is free.

1. Technology Exists to Solve Problems

This principle, that technology exists to solve problems is the first tenet of Mars Hill Technology.

Of course, one of our more common experiences in daily life is that Technology causes problems. Whether its a cryptic error message on a printer ‘PC LOAD LETTER’, or the Blue Screen of Death when your Windows machine crashes (they do that alot by the way), either way, technology is preventing you from getting your work done.

There are alot of corollaries to Principle #1, but we’ll save that for future episodes, so stay tuned, subscribe to this RSS, and tell your friends.