Several months ago, the XP of a large church in Florida mentioned to me that they no longer think of first time worship attenders as first time guests. They had discovered, even before the Coronavirus Pandemic, that all their first time attenders had watched the service online at least once before attending.  That conversation grabbed my imagination and has been a frequent conversation topic since.  How can we use today's technology to move church engagement from virtual to reality?

Another Covid 19 Pandemic audible.  Last week an Executive Pastor friend, David Jordan, called to talk through including a medical form in the check-in process.  They had decided to continue to meet live even with much lower numbers - around 20% of old normal.  Like most XP's, he's a planner anticipating when they start back with children's ministry and check-in.

Churchteams was built around the idea of growing a church using groups as the common building material for every ministry. This means that everything that involves more than one person is managed as a group. 

Every worship service, small group, class, committee, ministry team, leadership team, service team, mission team, event, and even assimilation step is managed as a group. 

This is one of the design constructs that makes our software unique, powerful and user-friendly.  Once understood, ministry rocks of all sizes are formed together to become a solidly built organization.

One of our advantages in the church management market is our agile culture.  There is just one degree of separation between clients and our development team.  As soon as a need or even a suggestion is vetted by a support team member, it is shared with development. 

Development keeps a running evaluation of these suggestions.  Some are as simple as a software edit and are immediately addressed.  They don't even make it to the list.  Others need affirmation, thought and evaluation.  As they come up again and are mulled over, they make their way to the investment of a few hours or days.  Others are much more involved and may take months or years to rise to the level of investment of weeks or even months of coding.  This set of releases fit into the first two categories.

Many ministry events and mission trips have been cancelled this summer due to Covid 19 and social distancing.  But as churches begin to re-open for worship, they are doing so with a renewed passion for their calling to make disciples of all nations.  

We have an incredible team.  For a number of months now, in addition to all the Covid 19 upgrades we've done, we've been working on upgrading our Navigation Bar buttons to make them more user-friendly.

If you are a long-time Churchteams user, you know what the software does, so you will be able to very quickly re-route from older paths to these new ones that we hope are more direct and more intuitive especially for new users.

If it weren't for Covid 19, our staff and many of you would be looking forward to being together in North Fort Worth next week.  Barbecue and Tex-Mex were on the menu along with 2 days of fellowship and learning.  

Author Note: (September, 2023)  Since this was originally written  in May, 2020 we continued to monitor how churches and people actually use both Texting and Apps. 

We became convinced that it really isn't one or the other.  It's about providing options for people to use based on their preferences. 

In August, 2023 we released our Member App (click here) after much research and deliberation.  It is state of the art and pairs very nicely with Text-to-Church.  The combined power of both of these tools to serve church members has became an important Churchteams distinctive.  

Apps are an important part of product offerings for some Church Management  Systems. They are the primary delivery system for other church related online services like payment processing, content delivery, and communication. 

1. Check Scanning & Image Archive.
2. Automated Check-in Printer Start Schedule.  
3. Office number for Text-to-Church.
4. Email lists upgrade.  Last week's blog.