One of the toughest things I've had to do is drop some of the things I do in support of our church. The most recent thing is the church's website. I've served as the "webmaster" of our website for about 4 years, trying hard to scoop up and post information whenever I get it and try to improve the communication in our church using web-based tools whenever possible. I've used free tools like FreeFind, iTunes, FeedBurner, and Google to bring some of the latest technology to bear on the lack of communication in our church. I even utilized Dadamail in an effort to do masss emails and allow the user to manage their own subscriptions to the info being sent out by the church.
Well, with no discussion or communicatio.n with me our church decided to use another web-based tool to do mass emails. This decision was communicated to me in an off-handed way as I left the church service on 1/4/09; I reacted to this at the door of the church, and was told I was wrong for reacting the way I did. The only option I had to the situation was to eliminate what I had put in place, something that automatically posted whatever was sent out to the website and made it instantly available to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and others. So I eliminated it and implemented this new thing, and was made to feel like a slave in the galley of the ship. After some prayer I communicated that I would no longer be able to support the website; after this point the lack of communication became much worse, and I felt like a pariah.
I'm hoping that they give me a chance to hand off the current site to someone, but if nothing is said I'll just let it drop. The lack of order at our church is distressing, but it is something that I can no longer put up with in my personal life. We'll see how it goes in the next couple of weeks...