Just this morning I was talking with a friend who is incredibly busy with end of the school year activities for his kids.  It's a great time of the year to celebrate, but it's also a season for church staff and families to start planning for summer activities. 

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to use All Check to capture worship attendance.  Having everyone in the family check in to everything at once including worship is really helpful.  That article answers the questions: why take individual attendance, how to do it, and how to motivate people to respond.  Check it out if you're interested.

Another one of our creative churches uses their digital connection card to take individual worship attendance for their multiple services.  On their connection card they have a "Service I'm attending" dropdown question with all their services listed including online.

Now that Easter is over, pastors and church staff are turning their attention to planning and preparing for summer events.  In fact, a good friend, an elder at his church, recently asked me about using Churchteams for managing their church's mission trips. 

There are software solutions built specifically to solve this problem for churches.  But, he has been around the software world for decades and knew it would be better to use Churchteams if possible than to purchase another software.  The cost of another software is a factor, but the bigger issues are staff and data alignment.

There are many things that make Churchteams unique in the church management software space.  One is our choice to build out all the data related parts of our communication tools.  Text-to-Church and NED (email editor) are best-in-class level texting and email solutions that work hand-in-glove with our form, registration, notes, workflow, and process tracking features.

The HUGE advantage of building out all the features ourselves is that when a customer has a problem, or an idea; we have the ability to fix or upgrade it.  This agility helps us improve the customer experience as we improve the software.

Here are the release notes for four recent examples of how we've done exactly that.  

Let's welcome our new friends from Exponential last week.  Some of you joined James and me Wednesday for our lunch discussion on the topic of "How to measure the immeasurable parts of discipleship." 

I love this topic and it was amazing do it with James.  We not only shared, but also asked questions and listened to the experience of others.  I have reflected on all of it quite a bit since then, and thought it might be worth it to capture and share some of those thoughts.  So, here are five ideas on how to improve what you know about discipleship progress in your church.

There's a chapter in the book, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement entitled, "The Two Structures of God's Redemptive Mission."  In it Ralph Winter makes the Biblical and historical case for the importance of fraternal church associations.  He refers to the church as the modality structure and these associations as the sodality structures God uses to accomplish His redemptive purposes. 

There's no doubt that what we call network and missional non-profits have been part of God's plan since the book of Acts.  This doesn't take away from the church.  It actually adds to it.  It extends and empowers it.  That's why I love that our software is being used by so many of these organizations.

Churchteams has so many solutions for common church problems that it's hard for us to keep them in front of people.  We've recently done some upgrades to nine of these, so I'll use the opportunity to give you some extra insight into two of them.  Below that is a list and then an explanation of each upgrade.

Problem:  Registration and check-in don't work together.  We solved this by building best-in-class level features for both.  They are not modular in design, so there is no exchange of information between the systems.  They are completely integrated.  However, check-in for events is different than weekly check-in.  Churches requested the ability to pre-print name tags to help with relationship building and minimize check-in.  We released that feature in 2022.  Upgrade #1 takes that functionality to an even more convenient level!  

Problem:  We want to use check-in for our school or pre-school.  From the very beginning our check-in system had the ability to do daily check-ins including capturing attendance.  The tricky part a couple of years after the launch was creating new options to report attendance daily rather than weekly.  We added that a few years ago.  Upgrade #7 below adds the weekday name to the report. Pretty nice!

A long time ago, there was a buzz in church leadership, administration, and discipleship circles about becoming a CHURCH OF GROUPS not just a church with groups.  As a church administrator and discipleship pastor I read, went to conferences, and asked questions to figure out what this conversation meant practically for our church and my responsibility to help manage it.

My take-away was that everything we did in church life should be organized as if it were a small group.  So, groups included not only what we generally thought of as small groups; but also children's classes,  volunteer teams, all events, discipleship classes, assimilation steps, registration forms, and anything else that involved more than one person. 

This might sound like a crazy question, but it is a real one for pretty much every church, "which option for calendar software is best for our church?" 

The reason it can be confusing is that there are so many voices and solutions out there. 

Most websites offer calendar features options.  Many Church Management Systems have a calendar option or even are built around a calendar.  Event management softwares offer calendars.  Facility management softwares offer calendars.  And, of course your office management software like Outlook and Google integrate their calendars into everything.