Just this week I received texts from my dentist, doctor, city utilities, a political survey, Verizon, Chase Bank, Honda, and Eddie Bauer.  I can even text my dentist back if I have a question or need to change my appointment and they respond personally!  I bet you've had the same experience. 

You've cast the vision for a new year, a new building, or a new missions opportunity.  You've asked people to pray to determine the part God would have them play in investing in this vision over the next months or years.  Now, it's time to let them respond.

The cardstock pledge cards have been handed out.  With them you gave out some really cool, branded pens as swag. The cards are collected and expectantly prayed over.  

Have you ever been a part of or had to interact with a team that hated what they do?  All of us have and it's no fun.  In fact, relational issues are the #1 reason people leave a job.

Not so with Churchteams.  We have an incredible team that loves Jesus, each other, what they do and serving you!  I offer this blog post on recent upgrades as evidence.

If you follow this blog, you know that last week we released an important change to our look and feel.  The post focused on the ability to quickly look at a series of pinned attributes to have a sense of where someone is on your discipleship profile spectrum.

As you can see it gives a picture of their involvement with just a glance.  And it's fully customizable to accommodate the attributes you define as discipleship measures.  (Check out the Discipleship Signs series for more on that.)

Six years ago we released an initial version of our volunteer scheduling feature.  It has been updated many times since then, but nothing like we are rolling out tonight.  Tonight's release of SERVICE VOLUNTEERS fills in the gaps to elevate this feature to the very top tier in the industry.

Our Volunteers feature lets you create a group and then schedule that team to serve.  With SERVICE VOLUNTEERS you create Templates made up of all the groups serving during a given service. 

Using the template you can schedule volunteers across all teams, see blocked out dates, potential conflicts, email or text everyone, and choose from 3 options for volunteers to get their own substitutes.

We got some great ideas from the Roundtable we did for 3 months earlier this year.  Many of these upgrades came from that as well as great ideas from our clients.  

Our relationship with you guys is the secret sauce to Churchteams truly being a software that we are building together!  Here are 10 upgrades in the past 2 months.  

In discipleship discussions, we often quote 2 Timothy 2:2 as a pillar text for understanding discipleship that multiplies disciples.  The idea, of course, is that Paul invested in training Timothy and was encouraging him to invest in other people who would invest in others.  

Notice the adjective that Paul uses to describe the people in whom Timothy was to invest his time.  Depending on your translation, the word is generally reliable (NIV, NLT), or faithful (ESV, NASB, KJV).  It is someone in whom you trust.

Another huge benefit of the Roundtables that we've been doing the past couple of months has been the amazing ideas for upgrades and tweaks we've gotten as we interact with our most engaged users.

Many of the upgrades in this post came from that environment.  Some came directly through support.  All of them are a picture of our commitment to build the best software for churches in the context of community.

The story of 2020 will always be the global pandemic of Covid-19.  All of us are different.  It's worth the time to log what we've lost and grieve it well.  It's also worth the time to examine what we've gained and how to build on it. I hope you're doing that personally and as a church. 

The upgrades we've released the past few months reflect insights gained from working closely with clients in 2020.  Some of these are really minute, but the first one in particular positions us well for the post-Covid expectations of performance at the peak time of Sunday mornings.