Many churches that receive hundreds of checks every week use check readers and scanners to help with data entry. We recently did some research on these systems and built then released what we believe is a much more streamlined approach. Here is what we learned and our application.

When Mark and I started, the motivation was to build software to help churches make disciples and build teams.  For us, people are intrinsically the focus of this.  Resources like space and money, though important, have not been the problems that we've built software to solve.  There are other software products focused on just these issues.  I was explaining to our marketing partner a couple of months ago that our focus is on everything related to "People Data."  In my webinars I often talk about the 5 Software sets that from my perspective every church needs, and Churchteams is just one of them.   The one place where all your people data can live.  Here they are:

If I were a pastor writing to my congregation about texting to give.  Here's the blog post, email and/or newsletter article I would write.  Maybe it will give you some ideas or use it as it is, just change the phone number.

A few years ago, we heard about and met a company that had introduced giving by text overseas and were bringing it to the United States.  At first, I was skeptical.  We've been doing this long enough to know that not every new thing is an improvement.  Adoption is more important in the long run than innovation.   We decided to watch, listen and learn.  We became convinced in late 2015 and began building our own, integrated, version of text-to-give in mid and late 2016.  Last week we rolled it out.  Here is how we became convinced.

The past several weeks our pastors have emphasized end of year giving.  20% of the annual giving for our church every year comes in December.  As I reflect on end of year giving, here are four different scenarios that might be helpful to consider in planning your end of year giving campaign.  I think you'll realize, like I did, that online giving is not just important, but essential.   

Tomorrow I'm heading to the Church Leader Insights training on Assimilation.  I thought it might be interesting to write something ahead of time about my thoughts about the topic and then follow it up with thoughts on what I learned about assimilation from this excellent training by Nelson Searcy.

Is it Biblical to make donations to your church via the Internet?  Yes! 

Editor's Note:  This entire article is satire.   The views here are not really the views of the author, nor are the the views of Churchteams.   This article is intended to educate by using irony and sarcasm in exposing and promoting the advantages of online giving in conjunction with traditional giving.  Please enjoy this fun article as no offense is intended.