About a year ago I met Sam Rainer at a Discipleship Pastors retreat.  He is a pastor, author, and President / Sr. Consultant with Church Answers.  His books include "Obstacles in the Established Church" and "Church Revitalization Checklist."

"When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."  Matthew 9:36

Data is important not only for tracking the crowds, but also for seeing their needs.  One of the most powerful ways to use ChMS reporting is to identify and flag significant pastoral care and discipleship needs.  

Two of the most common reports for pastoral care are the lapsed givers and missing persons reports.  Here is what these look like and how to build them.

Churches used to see each other as competitors.  It may still be like that in some communities, but during my tenure as a pastor I saw this change dramatically.  Now many, maybe most, pastors see themselves as colaborers with each other to reach and serve their communities for Christ.

I don't know the executive leadership of all the church software companies by any means, but I've met and known some of them.  Many of us look at our relationships with each other in the same way, as colaborers not competitors.

In my last blog post I looked at highlights from 2022 for Churchteams and what they indicate about next year for us.  Now, it's your turn.  As you prepare for 2023 have you thought about setting goals to improve your use of church software?

I started thinking about this a couple of weeks ago during a customer care call in which the Executive Pastor shared with me his major goal for using Churchteams in the new year.  I thought it was a great idea worth sharing.

This is the time of the year most of us like to look back and  review what the Lord has done in our lives and work.  I know this exercise helps me put things in perspective and realize again that everything we do comes from Him.  I'd like to invite you to join me in a time of gratitude and praise for what He has done in 2022 at Churchteams.

Here's a top ten highlight list of new features pretty much in order of their release.  Keep reading for my 30,000 foot view of where we're headed and how this year prepared us for 2023 and beyond. 

1. Text-to-Chat - Two way texting.
2. Ten digit mass texting, scheduling, history
3. Pledge campaign management and self-registration
4. Pre-print name tags and security labels
5. Automate deceased actions
6. Guardrails for data - registrations, merges, deleting an attribute, changes to pledges
7. Content Pages - Links, Emojis, Tags
8. Landing pages
9. Reports - performance, tags, saved areas
10. Text-to-Chat notifications

Reid Hopkins is the Executive Pastor at The Brook in Madison, AL.  He also is the founder of XPMinistry.com, a website dedicated to encouraging Executive Pastors and helping the church be excellent with the administrative side of ministry.  We encourage you to check it out.

Next to our church is a busy Chick-fil-A.  At lunchtime, it’s hard to get in the parking
lot. Even though it has two lanes, the drive-thru line is so long people have to wait 30 minutes or more to place their order.  One of my best friends works with the team that built the Chick-fil-A app.  My favorite feature is the ability to place my order ahead of time for curbside pickup.  I order from the office, then go over and pick up my meal skipping the line completely.

The Churchteams Check-in system does for your church what the App does for Chick-fil-A. Our church is experiencing growth right now. We just completed a big construction project (a new worship center), and our church campus is located in a rapidly growing area of our city.

Apple co-founder and visionary leader Steve Jobs made a bold statement in 1985 about the culture of Apple. He said: 

 "We attract a different type of person…Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant…Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future."

 That make a "dent in the universe" mission shaped the influence and impact of Apple for years to come. 

Last week I shared how church is critical to understanding the self-evident truth that all people are created.  This week I want to look at how a teams world-view is developed and how it gives people the best chance to realize the second self-evident truth - that all people are equal. 

Together I hope this two-week, Fourth of July inspired series of blogs gives a little perspective on what we are seeking to do as a company.

The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Over time data has a tendency to drift off the road and even crash.  The application itself might be fine, but the data is a wreck. When this happens, those depending on it no longer trust it, and start looking for something new.  

One popular solution is to put a sentry at the gate of the database.  This person is responsible for all data entry, reports, and maintenance.  This solution helps keep data safe, but it also creates a bottleneck on use of the data.  Like an accident on a 4 lane highway narrowing traffic down to one lane, church staff end up looking for detours to get their work done.  Pretty soon the staff has data in so many locations they find themselves once again lacking trust in the core data.

We've felt for a long time that the database itself could become a decentralized sentry.  We built reminder emails (groups, volunteers, payments) to make sure data is consistently collected.  We built scheduled reports to automate communication of information.  

We've also started building guardrails designed to keep data from getting wrecked.  In fact, we've released seven of these in the past couple of months.  Here they are along with a few other new releases.

Note: Churchteams partners with CLI to help church leaders develop effective systems for ministry.   

It is clear that something is different about church since 2019.  I mentioned this related to our voice of the customer research in my last blog.  But is this difference good or bad?  And, how can technology help?