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.
Last week in part one, we saw how it is being used:
- To organize and easily access information about people.
- To create and manage organizational structure.
- To track conversations and follow-up tasks.
This week we conclude with how we help meet three more very real needs.
4. To send and receive communication. (Registrations, email, text, and automation.)
Communication has to start by capturing people's information. Our registration tool empowers leaders to create events and forms to collect whatever information you want or need. Just link or embed the form anywhere you want it, your website, social, etc..
We didn't want people to have to buy another software to create beautiful emails, save them as templates, manage lists, and track response rates. We built this functionality in. Not only does it save the cost, it also saves the headache of trying to get data silos to work together.
Text-to-Church is our world class tool to send, register, donate, check-in, redirect, notify, and chat by everyone's favorite App. Because, like email, our texting is part of the native database, you can segment and target communication based on anything you want.
Both systems allow you to create templates for future reference and use. Workflows allow you to sequence the sending of email and text templates as well a task assignments over time. Here is a hand drawn story board of a three week follow up or training process that culminates with a content page (CT hosted web page built by email editor) that has an embedded completion form. All done natively in Churchteams.
5. To recruit, train, schedule and care for volunteers.
Many of our missional non-profits are heavily volunteer driven. The communication storyboard above is easily modified to be an automated training and placement process. The front-end registration can be placed anywhere for constant recruitment.
We've streamlined getting and maintaining background checks for security purposes. We have several different ways to schedule volunteers depending on the ministry's preference.
Check out our Vimeo Showcase on Volunteers to learn more.
6. To receive and manage donations with ease and integrity.
There are several advantages to Churchteams online giving. Like everything else, it is built in, so there's no tricky API links or data-sharing. It's just one thing. Secondly, donations are automatically posted to the donor's account. This saves all that data entry time and potential for errors. Thirdly, it makes receiving payments for registrations completely seamless. Finally, we save churches and non-profits a lot of money on fees. There are several ways we do that including allowing people to choose to cover the fees themselves.
We also have a Vimeo Showcase on Giving. It's a great place to see all the details.
We love the church as modality and have given these decades to create technology to serve her. But, we also love serving her fraternal sodalities. In fact, as I think about it, that's what we are!
Finally, don't forget to join our Zoom discussion on the topic of "How church network and mission non-profits use us to manage ministry," on Thursday, March 14 at 3:00 Eastern / 2:00 Central.
