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. 

Watch this NEW, very creative video to see how church management software is being used to help pastors and staff mobilize their church for ministry.  

The last two weeks of every year I review and summarize sermon and Quiet Time insights I journaled that year.  These influence goal-setting for the following year. 

Relationships are a big deal for us.  That's obviously true since we build software around relationship management.  But, it's also true in how we meet, train and support churches.  We love hanging out with you guys!

A number of years ago we started getting questions about User's Gatherings.  We decided to try one in April, 2018 and had about 25 friends join us for a really encouraging half day together.  Everyone wanted to do it again, but longer.  The Facebook Churchteams closed group was birthed from this event.

You are likely familiar with form building tools like Wufoo, Formstack, Google Forms, Jotforms and many others.  Or maybe even dedicated event registration applications like Eventbrite, Cvent, EventU or others.  They are great at what they do.

20 years ago I was at a place in ministry where I wanted out.  It was not what I expected it to be when I started working for a church full time 9 years earlier.  Maybe you've been there.  If so you likely know that hardship like this is often the path God uses to mature us and refine our calling.  

Eight weeks ago, I did a blog post on using Workflows to help you with volunteer recruitment.  This is the time of the year that most church staff are stressed out to make sure all the volunteers needed are in place.  But, once you get them recruited and trained, there is still the challenge of getting everyone scheduled.