Ezra Does It - Helping Make Church Check Out Easy as Pie

1/4/2012
by Vance Morton* and United Methodist Communications
 
Many United Methodists know one of the church’s seven apportioned funds – the General Administration Fund – pays for the basic costs of General Conference as well as other administrative activities. What they probably don’t know is it also covers a new interactive database that will save annual conferences, like the Central Texas Conference, from some administrative headaches and make everyone’s job a bit easier.
 
Ezra, which happens to be a Hebrew name that appropriately means “help,” is a web-based interactive database that provides each conference or United Methodist agency the ability to enter data and have real-time access to information. Calvin Scott, Central Texas Conference IT Coordinator, has put together a very easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide on how to enter your checkout information via Ezra.You can download the guide here.
 
“This is a huge improvement versus the old method,” said Scott Brewer, who oversees connectional relations for the General Council on Finance and Administration. “Currently,” he said, “annual conferences report their official data … including information about people, churches and statistics.” The finance agency then compiles and publishes the data in bound journals, which is a long and arduous process.
 
“Information takes a great deal of time for pastors, church volunteers and district staffs to compile and report to their conferences (edited/entered by hand and sometimes through paper forms), who then … report the information to GCFA,” Brewer said. “Many conferences use their own database software, which can be costly, or use freeware that is lacking in abilities to synchronize among their users.”
 
Ezra, on the other hand, is easy to use, customizable and designed specifically for The United Methodist Church. As conferences compile and send their data to the General Council on Finance and Administration, those files are plugged into the system and stored on a database accessible by all users.
 
Asked about Ezra’s customizability, Brewer offered an example. “Should conferences find that they would like to add data such as the shoe size and hair color of its ministers, all they have to do is request that it be added.” If you happen to have such requests, please send them to Calvin Scott (calvin@ctcumc.org) and he’ll help you turns those dreams into realities.
 
By using a web-based system synchronized across the denomination conferences will see enhancement in efficiency, save time and money and experience enhanced accuracy as data will only be entered once and can be double-checked immediately.
 
More than 35 conferences – including Central Texas – are currently using the statistics portion of Ezra. The newly launched all-encompassing Ezra database is now being made available to conferences. To learn more about how to use this tool, contact Calvin Scott.
 
 
*Vance is the director of communications for the Central Texas Conference. vance@ctcumc.org