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."

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. 

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.  

For Church Geeks like us, January means it's time to send out giving statements.  You could send out the familiar "thank you and here's what happened last year" cover letter that you  print, stuff in an envelope, seal, stamp and mail.  But, it's 2020 and there are some creative things you can do to spice it up this year.  Here are some thoughts on how to salt your giving statement content and  pepper your process.

A church executes its vision by developing a strategy. But, whether or not that strategy succeeds is determined by how well a church uses its software. 

This is my last blog post for the year and may be a little geeky, but I'm going to share it with you anyway. I've always loved this poem and have customized it before for Christmases past. But, this one is for Christmas present. Receive it not just from me, but from our team as well. This is why we do what we do.  

Most churches measure worship attendance.  They also have some sort of metric for small group attendance.  Comparing one to the other demonstrates how effective they are at moving people from being anonymous to being known - from rows to circles. 

It is no secret that the best way to collect data on Sunday morning is through children's check-in.  The reasons are obvious:

In the past several weeks I’ve been working with an Executive Admin of a large church to reorganize their data structure for effective assimilation.  You could tell by the different fragments of data that several different approaches to assimilation had been implemented through the years. Usually this happens when different church staff use different fields to track the same information.  Or sometimes there are different perceptions of what the assimilation process actually is.