Local Church Leadership,
Greetings in Christ!
Thank you for your ministry and service to Christ’s Church. We have an important update about the submission of annual year-end statistics.
First, some context: early in 2021, GCFA announced they would be eliminating their in-house statistical platform named EZRA. We have used this platform since 2014 for local churches in the Arkansas Conference to input their year-end statistics. At this same time GCFA assured us they would transition to a new software company called Brick River. This new data entry site was unveiled in late November and was full of errors and bugs that made it unusable for the current year.
Our only realistic fallback option was to revert to the “Mission Connect” system we used prior to 2014. The Conference and District staff has worked diligently to get this system ready to collect data from churches. However, the programmers with Mission Connect have not been able to import statistical data from 2014-2020 into their database. We have been assured this will happen on or before Monday January 10th.
In light of this situation, we are asking you to wait to input your year-end statistics into the system until the Mission Connect programmers have completed their import on Monday. That way, you will be able to see the previous year’s numbers as you enter the statistics for 2021. To adjust for this delay, we are also moving the deadline from January 14th to January 21st to give churches more time to complete this important task.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and we thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter.
As always, if you have questions about the completion of year-end statistics, please contact your district administrator so they can assist you in this important task.
Todd Burris, Director, Center for Administrative Services
Dr. Blake Bradford, Dean of the Appointive Cabinet