All of us miss being together on Sundays but we're finding new paths to stay connected.  Like the creative ways many of you are using Text-to-Church to help.

One recent idea was to use All Check to have people text to let us know they were watching the live-stream or video.  It also gives them an opportunity to respond, give and stay informed.  Like a church bulletin, but on steroids.

But there was a problem.  The system required starting up a label printer in order to use Check-in.  So, we changed development priorities last week and are excited to release an upgrade to Check-in that allows you to create an automatic check-in start up schedule without having to start a label printer.   

I was so encouraged by this email from Kelly, a church admin assistant, in response to How we help the church be the church.

"Thanks for all of your help during this time. We have had two families already connect using the set-up in Churchteams. One from our church and the other is un-churched. They happen to live right across the street from one another and hooked up after seeing the link on FB. Thank you for all of your help in getting our church ready for serving our community during these difficult times."

Covid 19 has made social distancing a new part of our everyday vocabulary and it's impacting our church.   Last Sunday our pastor preached to a camera in an empty auditorium.  It looks like there will be a lot more of that.

He reminds us regularly that the building isn't the church, we are.  The building is just the place the church meets.  Now that we are social distancing and cannot meet in the building, how's the church supposed to meet?  Like everything else, we wonder, what will technology do?  If online applications were different parts of a church facility, what function would each application provide?  It's a good question.  Here's my take:

All across the country today, churches are empty because of the Coronavirus pandemic. 

I've loved reading  notes from pastors encouraging their people to trust God and then love and care for one another.  

This is a time for the church to shine!  And we built Churchteams to be the light on the hill for decentralized ministry.  Our team started talking about that and we came up with some ways beyond the Sunday experience that Churchteams can help your church be the Church (not a cap typo) during this crisis. 

Last night the President  banned at-risk travel and made available loans to help businesses through the Cornovirus Pandemic.  The NBA season is over.  And the NCAA tournament won't have spectators.  What!  March madness without the crowd?

Last week we were at the Exponential Conference in Orlando.  It is an exciting gathering of thousands of people devoted to multiplying leaders and planting churches. Our many conversations with men and women enthusiastically pursuing a life of significance through mentoring and multiplication reminded me again of why we started Churchteams. 

We recently released an upgrade to our contributions system that includes the ability to archive the image of a check that is scanned into Churchteams.  We now offer this service to our clients for an additional $15 / month for up to 7 years of check storage.  The video below shows you how this service works.  But, let's start with some context.

NOTE:  As of 3/18/20, because of Covid 19, we are delaying a final decision on whether to continue with the User's Gathering until April 15th.  

Join our staff and so far over 40 other Churchteams clients for a couple days of focused training to improve your Churchteams skills at our User's Gathering this Spring.  Our goal is to provide not just a fun time together with CT staff you've interacted with, but also with other people doing exactly what you do.  

The Dashboard release last fall brings all kinds of efficiencies to accessing what you need as soon as you login.  The most visual of the these is the Metric Card.  In this post, I'm going to take you step by step adding two of the most common reports used by pastors and staff to the Metrics Card. You'll see how to do this so that even pastors and staff that don't need access to giving can have the giving summary on their dashboard as soon as they login.

It has been a busy last few months listening to clients, working on upgrades, making Churchteams continually better.