CTS Blog | Technology & Your Ministry

Healthy Habits for Technology

Trevor Sutton — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:39:07 GMT

God makes boundaries for our good. In the beginning, “the earth was without form and void” (Genesis 1:2). God gave order and boundaries to creation, and it was good. In the same way, our interactions with technology need order and boundaries. A chaotic and boundaryless relationship with technology is anything but good.

Benefits of Boundaries

In Job 38, we hear about God making boundaries within His creation: “Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?” (Job 38:8–11). God established order within creation, giving the sea and clouds and all things their proper boundaries. God’s will for what is good and orderly puts things in their proper place.

What might we learn from God’s good order and boundaries as it relates to our use of technology? What sort of boundaries do we need for technology in our daily life, our homes, our relationships, and our congregations?

Practical Suggestions

As people set free from sin in Christ, we are not chained to technology. When technology has order and boundaries, then it can flourish and be used well. Here are three practical suggestions from my book Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits for establishing boundaries for technology—especially when it comes to our smartphones.

Can you disconnect? Turn off your smartphone and put it away for an extended period of time. As they say when something is easy to do, “No problem.” But if the answer is no—if you weren’t able to put it away or cannot imagine stepping away from your smartphone—then there may be a problem. Feeling the need to have something ever present in your life implies dependence on that object. Sometimes, we are truly dependent on something; it’s essential for life, such as the oxygen we breathe. However, smartphones are not essential for life. If you can’t be away from your smartphone, then that dependence is a problem.

Try fasting. You can’t fast from something if it is always part of you. Put some distance between yourself and your electronic devices. Fasting from your smartphone should be an ongoing practice. Physically put away the smartphone—not in your pocket, but in a drawer somewhere—and put Holy Scripture in its place. Without the constant mental white noise from the smartphone, less distraction interferes between you and God. Fast from your smartphone periodically throughout your day. Turn it off when not in use. If necessary, check it periodically throughout the day at regularly spaced-out intervals. When on your phone, limit your use to five minutes or less at a time.

Time your fasts purposefully. For example, you may be able to engage in a prolonged fast from your smartphone while on vacation. On a beach vacation with your family, you may have the luxury of turning it off, putting it in a drawer, and taking it out one week later. The first few days are the hardest (as with any withdrawal), and then you may remember or get a taste of what life is like without smartphones. If you are not on vacation, try establishing a time when you regularly put your phone away or on airplane mode.

Interact thoughtfully. Fasting will help you develop self-control to interact more thoughtfully when you do use your smartphone. Do not respond to electronic communications when emotionally upset. Impulsive actions are done without first thinking about how to respond, but fasting will help you get in the practice of waiting to respond.

Do not feel pressured to be always available and to respond immediately to electronic messages in an effort to reassure others or avoid conflict; this type of behavioral pattern is not helpful or healthy. If others become upset about not immediately receiving responses from you, this reaction may be about them and their issues with digital technology. It’s alright if an hour or day goes by before responding to a text message or email.

Proceed with Intention

These practical suggestions can easily be adapted to other sorts of technologies beyond our smartphones. You can make minor changes to these suggestions so that they apply to computers and digital devices, social media, and email.

Rather than just taking new technology out of the box and putting it to use without any thought or reflection, it’s good to take time to establish some boundaries. Like we hear God saying in Job 38, we should say to our technology, “thus far shall you come, and no farther.” When technology has boundaries, it can thrive and flourish in its proper place.

Scripture: ESV^®.

Explore practical ways to set healthy digital boundaries—read more in Redeeming Technology and start reshaping your relationship with screens today.

What Small Churches Really Need in a Church Management System

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:04:32 GMT

When looking for a church management system, small churches have unique needs that are markedly different from churches with more staff and more budget. What’s right for one church might not be a good fit for another! That’s why it’s critically important for smaller churches to recognize what’s most important in their search for a new membership software.

To aid you in your search, we’ve compiled a list of what small churches really need in a church management system, so you can determine what’s best for your church!

Affordability

One of the primary concerns small churches have when looking for a church management software is affordability. While the most budget-friendly option might not be the best fit for your ministry needs, it’s important to figure out what features are most important to your staff so you can align your needs with your budget.

Scalability in pricing and use is important; many church membership softwares offer different pricing tiers depending on how many members your church has. This is great for small churches because you can pay less per month or per year!

Simplicity

Another popular feature that small churches look for in a church management software is simplicity—simplicity in both the back-end for your staff or volunteers and the front-end for your members.

Especially if your software will primarily be used by volunteers or a few staff members, you need your software to be simple and easy to figure out. Oftentimes, fewer features mean fewer things to figure out, meaning your team can work more efficiently and be trained quicker.

Smaller churches might not need as many robust features as larger churches. For example, you might not need a mobile app, which can drive up the monthly cost of your church membership software. As you’re researching the right software for your church, you’ll likely come across features that seem exciting and shiny, but aren’t necessary.

As we mentioned before, make a list of the features your church absolutely needs in a church management system. You can also create a list of nice-to-have features that aren’t necessary, but would be great if it fits in the budget.

Support

One often overlooked aspect of church management systems is both the onboarding and ongoing support you receive from your software’s support team.

Onboarding support is critically important to the successful adoption of your new church membership software. Especially if you have a small but mighty team (or maybe you’re a team of one!), you need to be able to have others support your onboarding process. This will not only save you precious time but also ensure you fully understand all the features of your new software and how to properly use them!

Additionally, ongoing support is equally as important. Some softwares place caps on how much you can reach out to their support team, or require you to pay for support past a certain point. This isn’t a great option for smaller churches who don’t have dedicated staff to solve issues with the software; you’ll often rely more on outside experts to help ensure your software is running smoothly. As you’re in the deliberation and research process of figuring out the best church management software for your small church, be sure to ask about the level of ongoing support you’ll receive.

At Concordia Technology Solutions, we offer our users as much support as they need via phone, email, in-app chat, and even through live video calls. This ongoing support is key to being successful in using the software to its fullest potential, and we want to support you as much as possible, whether you’ve been using the software for five days or five years!

Web-Based

One lesser-thought-of feature that greatly benefits small churches is using a web-based software. A web-based software is, as the name suggests, located on the internet rather than loaded onto your computer. For example, a web-based software would be Google Docs, while a computer-based software would be Microsoft Word.

Web-based softwares are great for volunteer-led admin teams. Because your team is not located all in one office using a single computer, you need everyone to be able to see the most up-to-date information.

Additionally, see if your software has platform-to-platform integration. This means all information is synced across all platforms in the software ecosystem (like the Church360° Suite), so every one of your volunteers knows that they’re seeing the most up-to-date information, whether they’re entering offerings, recording attendance, or updating member information.

All-In-One

Lastly, small churches really need an all-in-one option in a church management system. This means that you’re not subscribing to multiple softwares just to cover all your bases. Rather than subscribing to different softwares for membership information, accounting, eGiving, email management, and your website, you should look for an option that incorporates as many of these into one as possible!

The first benefit of this is that all information is synced across all platforms, so your volunteers know they have the most up-to-date information. As mentioned before, this is especially valuable for volunteer-based teams who aren’t working together directly in an office setting.

The next obvious benefit to this is that it will save your church money! Software subscriptions can be expensive, so if you can consolidate as many as you can into one platform, you can significantly reduce costs while still meeting all of your church’s needs.

The Church360° Suite combines Church360° Members, Church360° Ledger, and Church360° Unite (website builder), so all of your most important needs are in one convenient software solution.

Start your free Church360° Members trial today and simplify your ministry with one powerful, all‑in‑one solution.

How to Simplify Church Attendance Tracking

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:00:04 GMT

If you work in church administration, you know that tracking attendance can be a time-consuming effort that takes up hours of your week. It’s an important task that can give you insights into the growth of your church, so it’s a necessary addition to your weekly to-do list.

However, that doesn’t mean you need to spend hours dedicated to this task each week to get the same data. If you make strategic optimizations to your processes and utilize the right church-attendance-tracking software, you can easily cut down the amount of time you spend tracking attendance—so you can do high-touch ministry work.

Here are some simple ways to simplify church-attendance tracking in your church office!

Make Optimizations

The first step in simplifying your church-attendance tracking is to make optimizations to your attendance-tracking processes. These optimizations can be made without costing your church anything, so they're more than worthwhile!

Reduce Duplicate Work

It might seem simple, but one of the biggest opportunities your church has to simplify its attendance tracking is to reduce the amount of duplicate work your staff and volunteers are doing. Maybe you’ve been doing things this way for so long that you don’t even realize you’re doing double the work!

For example, maybe you have a volunteer on Sunday mornings manually marking who attends your services every week on a piece of paper. Then, your administrative assistant takes that sheet of paper and enters the attendance into an Excel spreadsheet or church attendance tracking software.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity for your Sunday morning volunteer to enter the attendance data directly into your software or spreadsheet, avoiding this unnecessary double work. The most important part is that you understand what will actually increase efficiencies without causing errors in data entry.

Determine What Needs to Be Tracked

Again, you might have not even considered this because it seems so obvious, but take a look at the attendance data you’re collecting and determine what actually needs to be tracked.

Maybe you’re tracking attendance for all of your church events, both big and small. But perhaps you’re tracking attendance for a group that doesn’t need to be tracked because you’re not interested in calculating success by numbers.

Or perhaps you have been tracking how many people take Communion during your Sunday service but realize that you’ve never once used that data to track, monitor, or analyze your ministry. Evaluate the information you are gathering but not using to determine what information can prove important to monitor the congregation’s spiritual health and what information is simply taking your team’s time.

Utilize Technology

Whether your church uses a church-membership software or a Google sheet to track attendance, you’re likely utilizing some form of technology to help track your church attendance. However, by using a software that can specifically track church attendance, you can utilize technology to your benefit to streamline your process and decrease the opportunity for errors in entry.

Use a Church Membership Software

First and most obviously, using a dedicated church membership software that can specifically track attendance will make a huge difference in your church office! These specific types of software are equipped to handle the needs of your church, offering you the ability to track attendance with ease.

If you’ve been using a spreadsheet or other technology that is not specific to church management, you’ve likely experienced some roadblocks because these technologies were not built specifically for churches. One of the primary benefits of a dedicated church-attendance-tracking software is that it automatically gives you all the features you need!

Sync Data Across Giving and Profiles

Another benefit of using technology is that your attendance data is automatically synced with your giving data—no more double entries or misaligned information! Now, you can easily connect all of the dots of your data to compare attendance and giving.

Additionally, your attendance information will be attached to the profile of each member, so your pastor and elders can easily see at a glance the whole picture of each of your members. Rather than having to look in multiple areas for all data points, you can see everything all in one place!

View Trends

When you utilize a church-attendance-tracking software, you can easily view and export data and trends. This is not only helpful for general information for your pastor and staff, but it’s also imperative when presenting information to your congregation, especially when it comes to decision-making.

Data and numbers are not the only indicators of success in ministry; however, they can speak to the success of a specific ministry or the need to revisit a tactic.

Set Up Customizations

Lastly, within your church-attendance-tracking software, you should be able to set up customizations that will allow you to track whatever metrics you need to. Whether you want to add additional options to track multiple events on a single day (e.g., worship and Sunday-morning Bible class) or track who communes in addition to attendance, you can make your software work for your specific needs.

Streamline attendance tracking with Church360° Members—record participation, sync member data, and uncover meaningful trends, all in one place so you can spend less time on administrative work and more on ministry.

How to Use Christian Discernment in Technology Decisions

Trevor Sutton — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:00:04 GMT

Technology is everywhere. We constantly hear about new technology in the news. It’s a topic of conversation among parents on the sidelines of their children’s sporting events. Pastors and ministry leaders regularly face decisions about how and when new technologies are appropriate for their church. It seems like not a day goes by without us hearing something about tech, devices, or AI.

Even though technology is everywhere and we hear so much about it, do we really know all that much about it? For example, if someone asked you to give a definition of technology, how would you respond? While we talk a lot about technology, do we even know what we are talking about when we talk about technology?

What Do We Mean by Technology?

Some people define technology as neat and new gadgets or devices—smartphones, robotic vacuums, AI, and so forth. Many people assume that technology is anything invented after they were born. If you were born in the 1980s, then landline telephones are not technology, but smartphones are. If you were born in the 2000s, then the internet is not technology, but AI is technology . This is a pretty narrow and subjective definition of technology.

We can do better than this. In my book Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits, my co-author, Brian Smith, and I write this about defining technology:

Technology can be very difficult to reduce to a single definition. Various thinkers have defined and discussed technology in radically different ways. Some scholars define technology in fairly narrow ways, limiting it to physical objects such as machines, computers, and gadgets. Others have argued that technology also includes the nonphysical, such as knowledge. Some thinkers have said that technology can only be held in your hand, while others have said that technology can also be held in your head. …

Ultimately, technology is all of the above. It is physical and nonphysical, new creations and ancient artifacts. Technology is a prototype autonomous vehicle or a smartphone. And technology is also the ancient techniques used to combine ingredients in order to make a loaf of bread.

Seeing Technology Through God’s Word

While it is helpful to understand scholarly definitions of technology, we, God’s people, comprehend the world around us on the basis of God’s Word. Rather than leaning on worldly understandings of technology, we allow God’s Word to be the norm and rule for all things. If we want to know what technology is, we turn to the Word of God to shape our understanding and definitions.

Read the Scripture passages below and look for references to technology. Then reflect on how these passages might relate to the use of technology in this world or your own use of technology.

God’s Word is the measure and basis of reality. The definition, value, and purpose of created things—what the world calls technology—is not determined by Apple, Google, or Wikipedia. Rather, God sets the parameters for creation and creatures in the Word. Through the Word of God, the Holy Spirit opens our eyes so that we can truly see and opens our ears so that we can truly hear.

With Eyes to See and Ears to Hear

In Matthew 13:10–16, Jesus says His followers have eyes and ears that are capable of seeing and hearing. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can perceive what is really being communicated through the teachings of Jesus. While some people hear the teachings of Jesus as foolishness or pointless parables, His followers are empowered by the Holy Spirit to see and hear and perceive all that Jesus is conveying.

Similarly, technology can be like the parables of Jesus: Technology involves much more than people may immediately notice. Like a parable, technology can be both simple and complex, clear and hidden. It is important for us to have eyes that can see and ears that can hear when it comes to our interactions with technology. Exploring what God’s Word says about technology is a powerful way to have our eyes and ears opened to the possibilities and pitfalls of technology.

The next time you hear about some new technology on the news, consider opening up the Word of God to help guide your understanding. When you are sitting on the sidelines of a youth soccer game, and parents are talking about a new social media trend, bring the Word of God into the conversation to shine some light on the confusion. As your congregation and ministry wrestle with decisions about how and where to engage technology, use the Word of God as a guide, knowing that God’s Word “is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).

Scripture: ESV^®.

The questions raised here are just the beginning of the conversation on technology. In Redeeming Technology, you’ll find practical, Christ-centered guidance for evaluating your technology use and forming healthier digital habits.

Creating a Unified Communication Strategy for Your Church

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:00:01 GMT

Church announcements are one of the primary ways your church office communicates to its members—whether you’re making an announcement in-person during a worship service or via email. But it can sometimes be difficult to get your message out from your office to your congregation.

Church management software can prevent fragmentation in your communications, from the first announcement to the event day. Read on to discover ways to solidify your church communication strategy and some specific use cases!

Church Communication Strategy

You don’t need a dedicated communications staff member to have a solid church communication strategy. All you need is a few solid guidelines to help you stay on track and ensure all of your communications are read by the right people at the right time!

Segmented Communications

The first way to improve your communications flow at your church is to set up email list segmentations. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds, especially if you use a church management software to send your emails.

Email segmentations are categories of people you want to send dedicated emails to, such as parents of high school youth, members of a specific small group, or official members of your church.

This allows you to send emails only to the people who really need to read them, which can increase your email open rate and prevent people from deleting your emails without reading them.

Consider the Format

Another way to streamline your church communication strategy is to consider the format of your communications. There are so many ways to communicate with your members. You need to be strategic when choosing the correct format for a specific purpose.

Whether you choose to communicate via email, SMS, or in-person announcements, you should have a strategy in place to ensure you’re neither overcommunicating nor undercommunicating information about your events.

Consider the Frequency

Lastly, you’ll want to consider the frequency at which you send all of your communications. This may differ between different types of announcements! You may want to announce a new sermon series only twice before it happens, but you may want to announce a volunteer opportunity four times before the event.

You want to ensure that you communicate enough that your message stays top of mind with your members, but you also do not want to send so many communications and cause members to begin to tune out all of your announcements.

Use Cases

A church management software can help you create a unified communication flow in many ways, regardless of how many members you have or the number of events you host! Here are some of the ways you can utilize software to streamline your church communications.

New Member Onboarding

As you welcome new members into your congregation, it’s important to consider how you want to integrate them into the life of your church. Maybe you haven’t considered this before outside of your membership class. That’s okay!

Your new member onboarding email workflow will look different compared to other churches because it’s specific to your church! We recommend sending one email every five or so days to space them out. Be sure to skip over days when you’re sending emails to everyone in your congregation so that they don’t receive two emails in one day!

Once someone officially becomes a member, you can enroll him or her in a specific email workflow that lets him or her know more about your church. You might let him or her know about the next steps to take, such as signing up for a small group or scheduling a meeting with your pastor. You can also send out an email in this workflow, letting him or her know all about what your congregation has going on regularly, such as weekly Bible studies, youth group activities, and service opportunities.

Announcements

You likely already use an email management software to share announcements with your members, but you need to ensure that you have a solid strategy in place to avoid overcommunicating or undercommunicating information about events.

Your strategy will be unique to your church, but many churches only start advertising events four weeks out from the event date. If you send information about the event before that, people will forget about the event before it happens!

Part of your church communication strategy should include an announcement plan, which outlines everything you need to market an event, such as the following:

Event title
Event date
Event description (who it’s for, why they should come, etc.)
Word count for event description
Announcement start date
Creative assets (announcement slides, email headers, social media posts, etc.)
Registration sign-ups

Event Reminders

One of the primary benefits of a streamlined communications strategy is that you can schedule certain tasks in advance to relieve administrative burden on your team. One of the primary ways churches use software to do this is by scheduling event reminders to those who have registered.

If you use a church management software or event registration platform, you can set up custom workflows to send reminders of upcoming events at a certain cadence. For example, you can send out a reminder one week before the event, and then again 24 hours before the event.

Pastoral Updates

Your pastor will likely want to send out a special update to the congregation. This might happen on a regular basis (such as a monthly pastoral report via email), or on an ad hoc basis (such as an important, timely update via voice message).

Whatever workflow your church decides on for updates like this, it’s important to go about it strategically. To avoid sending too many emails, consider consolidating your pastoral update into your weekly email newsletter. Or only send it out as needed to make sure it’s actually read by your members.

A unified communication flow starts with unified member data. With Church360° Members, you can organize member profiles, target the right audiences, and send timely updates with confidence.

Church Attendance Tracking: Looking Beyond Worship Service Headcounts

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Most churches track their weekly attendance—whether by noting an overall headcount or observing patterns among regular worshipers. While numbers are never a measure of a congregation’s faithfulness or reliance on Christ, attendance trends can offer helpful insight into the life of the community over time.

But there’s also a more holistic way to think about attendance. Rather than treating a single weekly service as the sole sign of how ministry is going, this approach pays attention to the many places where people are gathering, learning, serving, and being cared for. By noticing these patterns, churches can better understand how their ministry is touching lives across the week and respond more faithfully to the needs God places before them.

Multi-Gathering Tracking

The first step in this new view of modern attendance tracking for churches is to track more than just your weekly worship attendance. You should absolutely still track how many people attend worship, but tracking these additional gatherings can give you a better sense of the holistic life of your church.

Bible Studies

First, you should be tracking attendance at any and all Bible studies your church offers! You might be surprised at how many Bible studies your church offers but you haven’t been tracking:

Sunday school classes (for all ages)
Men’s and women’s weekday studies
Bible studies for seniors
Moms/dads/parent studies
Small groups

When you track how many people are attending Bible studies, you’re tracking how many people are consistently engaging in the Word of God outside of Sunday morning worship! This can be a great indicator of how many people are taking a next step to get involved at your church outside of attending a church service.

Midweek Programs

If your church offers any sort of midweek program, you should absolutely be tracking the attendance of that! Maybe your church offers a weekly get together for moms and their young children, or maybe you offer midweek support groups.

You don’t need to track who individually comes to these events if the nature of the event is personal, intimate, or private. But even regularly tracking simply the number of people who attend these events can give you further insights.

Youth Groups

Many churches have youth groups that have Sunday evening or midweek meetings, and if you’re not tracking how many youth attend these events you’re missing out on critical data! As baptized children of God, your youth are the church of today and tomorrow, so their attendance to any event is important and worth noting.

You can also make a distinction here about how many attendees were members of your congregation versus visitors or guests of someone. Many middle- and high-schoolers are more inclined to invite their friends to youth group versus a Sunday morning worship service, so recording how many guests attended your church at these events is paramount!

Communion

You might remember the old-school way of indicating you were taking communion at church—by filling out an attendance sheet in your pew and marking the checkbox for “communing.” Nowadays, however, many churches don’t track how many people commune during worship services.

We recommend tracking how many people communed at your service so that you can see trends over time compared to attendance. If your number of communing members increases but your attendance stays the same, that could be an indicator that people are more informed about communion or have been through your membership class! On the flip side, if the number of people communing drastically decreases, you might need to address that.

Pastoral Care Visits

Lastly, you’ll want to track your pastoral care visits in your church attendance tracking software. This information should remain as private and confidential as possible, so ensure that access is limited only to those who absolutely need it.

This is a great way for pastors to solidly quantify the work that they do. Much of a pastors’ job is hard to track, but this is one of the few tangible ways a pastor can log what they’re doing. As your pastor gives his yearly report, he can share how many pastoral care visits he made, and anecdotally share the spiritual impact it has made on the people of your church.

Operational Benefits

There are many reasons to track more than just church attendance, and many of these provide your church and office staff with operational benefits! Whether you’re using this data to share the life of your church, determine if you need to hire additional staff, or add additional opportunities for connection.

Data Integrity

The first benefit of tracking more than just worship service headcounts is that you maintain a detailed level of data integrity. Rather than relying on a single metric to gauge health, you can view your ministry through a lens of multiple accurate data sets.

This level of data integrity allows your boards, elders, and staff to make informed decisions about new hires, budget allocations, and other critical choices.

Discipleship Insights

Another more intangible reason to track a variety of events is to gain discipleship insights across your entire church body. While worship attendance can be a good indicator of the spiritual health of your members, you can further gauge the engagement of your people by looking at the events they attend outside of Sunday morning.

This can also give you valuable insights into whether people who are new to your church are being introduced to the Gospel through avenues outside of worship first. Perhaps they’re first attending a weekly women’s Bible study before attending worship for the first time.

Engagement Modeling

Lastly, this level of data allows you to effectively set up engagement models to see how your church is interacting with its members and visitors. It allows you to more effectively track the journey of first-time visitors, giving you opportunities to improve how you interact with them from the very first touchpoint.

This deep understanding allows you to put your people and your relationship with them first—not relying on data as an end to itself, but using it to further engage with your people.

Church360° Members gives you practical tools to care for your congregation—tracking attendance, coordinating sign-ups, organizing groups, and staying in touch along the way. Begin your free trial today!

5 Reports Church Leaders Should Review Monthly (And Why)

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:15:47 GMT

As a church leader, you’re likely looking into reports on a yearly, monthly, and weekly basis. These reports can provide you with insight into growth your congregation has experienced, giving you tangible numbers you can report to your various boards and teams.

There are certain reports that you should be reviewing monthly. By looking at these statistics every month, you’ll be able to see granular insights into important aspects of ministry. These evergreen reports can be pulled no matter the church season, and they will give you valuable insight into the day-to-day of your ministry!

Worship Attendance

The first report you should be reviewing monthly is one you likely already keep a close eye on—attendance. Tracking attendance of your weekly worship services gives insight into what is occurring in the life of the congregation.

We recommend breaking down your attendance by both week and by month. This allows you to see at a glance what your attendance looks like on a monthly basis, and compare it to the previous month. Keeping track of your worship attendance monthly can give you insight over the course of the year to see trends.

But it can also be helpful to break down your attendance by week, which allows you to notice any abnormalities, whether positive or negative! For example, maybe you had low attendance one week because of an unexpected snowstorm, or maybe you had extra high attendance because it was Easter Sunday!

Reminder: To make things easy for you, just track the numbers for this report, not the name or individual attendees! This will allow you to objectively look at the data without getting distracted by ancillary information.

Giving Trends

Another report that church leaders often pay close attention to is giving trends. This data is important for the day-to-day operations of your church and your overall financial status. Similar to your worship attendance, we recommend pulling just the total amounts by both week and by month, so you can spot any abnormalities but also get the full picture of your month compared to the previous month.

We also recommend separating out giving during your worship service versus giving at other events or to other funds. This allows you to see what money is being allocated to your general fund, versus clogging up your data with donations to special funds like youth fundraisers, special giving projects, or capital campaigns.

Follow Up

Whenever you have a guest visit your church for the first time, you should have a follow-up system ready to engage them and drive them to take a next step in your church! For some churches, this will be able to be done manually, but with church management software like Church360° Members, you can easily add some automation. One feature is you can create Smart Groups—lists of people who meet specific criteria—and then message that group. For example, you might create a group of nonmembers who visited in the last month and follow up with them by email.

However you choose to follow up, we recommend looking into this data as much as you can. Pull this report by month to see your open and click rates on or how many responses your pastor got to his emails to visitors.

Lastly, you’ll want to look at your success rate for whatever metric you choose to gauge success. That might be your visitor attending again after that email was sent, signing up for a small group, or scheduling a meeting with your pastor. Having a metric of success goes a long way in church reporting.

Member Engagement

You might be wondering how you can track your member engagement. It seems like an intangible church report that wouldn’t be able to be tracked. But there’s actually more to this report than meets the eye!

You can track member engagement by looking at worship attendance, of course, but oftentimes a more impactful statistic to gauge this category is to look at events outside of worship. For example, you might look at how many people attend your Sunday morning Bible class, your weekly Bible study small groups, or your weekly youth group meetings.

Look at the attendance of these events by week and by month, so you can gain insights into your statistics month over month but still have insights into what could have contributed to anomalies week to week.

Volunteer Strength

Lastly, an underutilized church report is looking at your volunteer strength. This also might seem like an intangible statistic, but it’s one that can give you valuable insight into your volunteers—before they experience burnout.

There’s a common saying in church work that 90 percent of the work is done by 10 percent of the volunteers, and that often holds true in many congregations. Part of looking at reports surrounding your volunteers is to see if this is true for yours. If you have a small number of individual volunteers filling a large number of positions, it could be a sign that you need to recruit new volunteers so that you can reduce the workload of current volunteers.

Of course, you can also look at the total number of volunteers over the course of a month. This statistic is best looked at on a monthly basis, not weekly, since you’ll likely have a rotating crew of volunteers week to week. Looking at your overall total number of individual volunteers from the month will give you better insights than week to week differences.

Create custom reports in Church360° Members, Concordia Technology Solutions’ member-focused church management software. Begin your free trial today!

How Online Giving Strengthens Stewardship and Congregational Engagement

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:19:53 GMT

Online giving software for churches has many benefits—it allows your members to easily tithe, set up recurring giving, and make special donations with just a few clicks. Whether your members choose to give via text or online through the giving portal, the whole giving process becomes seamless!

But outside of the ease it provides, there are some real, more intangible, benefits that come when you utilize an eGiving software in your church. Online giving can strengthen the stewardship of your members, but it can also increase your congregational engagement across the board.
Encouraging your members to set up recurring giving in your online-giving tool can strengthen both your members’ stewardship and their engagement with your congregation. Read on to discover exactly how.

Strengthen Stewardship

Stewardship is an important spiritual discipline to instill in your congregation, and there are many good reasons to meaningfully teach about stewardship! Use online giving as an opportunity to provide education and resources on stewardship.

Education

When you first begin encouraging your members to participate in online giving, it’s important to provide a lot of education about the benefits of online giving in relation to stewardship. Setting up recurring giving in your eGiving platform can be a great opportunity to educate on the importance of stewardship in your members’ personal lives.

But, this is also an opportunity to talk about how online giving can strengthen the stewardship of your congregation! Your pastors, elders, and boards all seek to use your church’s funds to support your ministries in the best way possible, stewarding your members’ tithes well. The more your leadership can reliably predict giving, the better they can steward!

Spiritual Discipline

Tithing is a spiritual discipline that many Christians do in order to support the ministry of their church, increase their reliance on God, and grow in their faith. Placing your offering envelope in the plate each week can be a tangible reminder of this spiritual discipline.

With online-giving software for churches, your members gain the benefit of flexing that giving muscle automatically each week—you can’t forget to bring your offering when it’s recurring! Encourage your members that by utilizing online giving, they can still prayerfully and sacrificially give.

Investment in Ministry

Lastly, online giving can strengthen stewardship by increasing your members’ personal investment in the ministry of your church.

Of course, financial giving is not the only way to be invested in ministry, but as many people choose to tithe a portion of their income, it’s certainly a popular way to support your church outside of using your time and talents to serve.

When you regularly give, whether online or in-person, you can see how your giving is impacting the mission and ministry of your church. Understanding where your money is going and how it’s being stewarded by leadership is invaluable to many people!

Strengthen Congregational Engagement

Online-giving software for churches can also help strengthen your congregational engagement—meaning that there is a deeper understanding from everyone in your church on the financial impact giving has on ministry. Whether you’re in a position of leadership or a faithful member, you can become more engaged with this aspect of ministry.

Pastoral Communication

First, online giving tools can improve pastoral communication surrounding giving in your church. Tithing and finances are topics that many pastors dread, as it can be a sensitive topic. However, online giving can actually help in this regard.

With online giving, your pastor can confidently and transparently share about the impact it has on your church’s mission and ministry, giving detailed reports about how recurring giving has allowed your church to increase outreach efforts, make necessary building repairs, or help a family in need.

Transparent Reporting

When your church utilizes an online-giving software, your financial team can easily export and report on not only the giving in your church, but how that giving is being stewarded by leadership.
This transparency also provides a layer of accountability in your church leadership, which is incredibly important. Your members can see the full picture of your church’s financial health, ask questions, and understand how ministry functions—all thanks to online-giving software for churches!

More Accurate Budgeting

Lastly, one of the primary benefits of having your members set up recurring online giving is that your church finance team can more accurately budget and forecast for the year ahead. Knowing that you’ll have a specific amount of money guaranteed to come in each month is huge for churches, and can allow you to financially plan for the future of your ministry.

As mentioned previously, this clarity can also aid in transparent reporting from your leadership team during congregational meetings. With more accurate budgeting and transparency, your members can feel confident in their giving.

With Vanco—our online-giving platform—you can securely accept donations from anywhere and sync them seamlessly with your church management software. Get started today!

How Pastors and Church Leaders Can Champion Healthy Technology Adoption

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:24:07 GMT

One of the biggest challenges church leadership faces when adopting new software is getting people on board with the decision—and doing it in a healthy way. Adopting new technology can be exciting, but it can also lead to a lot of questions and concerns among members, staff, and volunteers.

So how can pastors and church leaders champion healthy technology adoption? Here are a few key ways you can make that happen in your congregation.

Guide Change

Pastors and church leaders are responsible for guiding change at an organizational level for staff, volunteers, and members. When adopting new technology, this is doubly important, as it can be a difficult transition for many people.

Learning a new software, navigating a new website, or downloading a new app can be intimidating for some, so it’s important for church leadership to explain the reasoning behind these changes. Transparency and patience go a long way!

Manage Expectations

Whenever shiny new technology is adopted, people may have unrealistic expectations about what will happen after it’s implemented. They might expect that you’ll suddenly have a huge influx of new members, a perfect rollout, or that it will epically fail.

Whether the expectations are positive or negative, it’s your job as a pastor or church leader to manage expectations from the beginning. Remind everyone that the rollout of your new technology won’t be perfect; there will be glitches, errors, and bugs to work through. It takes time for everyone to adopt and get used to using new software.

On the flip side, you also need to manage the expectations that this new technology will solve all of your ministry problems and result in thousands of people walking through your doors. The truth is that new technology can certainly bring many benefits to your ministry, but it won’t change things overnight. Managing that expectation is important.

Choose Champions

As you prepare to champion healthy technology adoption, it can be beneficial to have a team of people who are championing alongside you, whether staff or volunteers. You shouldn’t view this as sneakily trying to convince people this technology is needed; rather, it’s an opportunity for people who are invested in this project to share their view on why it’s needed, how it will help, and to answer questions people may have.

Reinforce Positive Culture

It’s up to the pastors and leaders to set an example and reinforce positive culture surrounding technology. Technology is not the end all be all of your ministry, and it shouldn’t be something you prioritize over Word and Sacrament ministry. So while you might be prioritizing adopting a new software in this season, it’s important to remind your people that technology is a means to an end in ministry.

It’s also up to you as a leader to set healthy boundaries with technology, especially amongst your staff. Leadership sets the tone for boundaries—through both your words and actions. For example, if you adopt a new instant messaging software, encourage your staff to turn off notifications after work hours. But you as the leader should respect those boundaries you recommend and avoid messaging staff after hours. Instead, if you choose to work late at night, schedule your messages or emails to be sent the next morning at 8:00 a.m. so that your staff isn’t tempted to respond just because you’re online.

Creating a positive culture around technology certainly isn’t easy, but it’s worth it to prevent staff and volunteer burnout. Don’t neglect this when it comes to adopting technology in a healthy manner.

Offer Training

One of the best things you can do when you adopt a new technology in a healthy way is offer extensive training for both your staff and your members. Offering multiple opportunities for people to learn about the technology, why you’re adopting it, and how they can use it effectively for their own purpose helps alleviate any worries they might have and prepares them to incorporate it into their own routines.

If you forgo training and leave people to their own devices, it will likely result in confusion, potential misuse of the software, and hesitancy from members to fully adopt the software.

As a leader, you should also be open to individual chats to answer questions and share insights. Doing this in a one-on-one manner can be more comfortable for some people. It can also give you space to explain your decision-making in a closer manner.

Leading the Way

When it comes to championing healthy technology adoption in the church, it really is up to pastors and leaders to lead the way. But worry not; this is not an impossible task! It just takes intentionality, patience, and transparency.

Concordia Technology Solutions is with you on your technology journey. Try a free month of Church360° Members to get a feel for how it can benefit your team!

How Churches of Any Size Can Choose a Church Management System

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:13:45 GMT

Choosing a church management system is no easy feat; there’s lots to consider, from which features you need to what your budget is, to who will use the software on your team. But the decision-making process begins long before you start sourcing software options. You need to work through a framework that will help guide this process from start to finish.We’ve created an evaluative model to help your church choose a church management system—no matter your size. This decision framework will help you feel prepared to make this big decision.

Needs Assessment

First, you need to identify your church’s needs with a formal needs assessment. This isn’t as simple as making a list of things you want or need in a church management software; it requires an in-depth analysis of your church’s operations, staff, and opportunities. You can start by asking some general clarifying questions, but it’s important to not dwell on the intangible too much here. Send out a survey to your staff to specifically ask about their pain points and what would make their job easier. Alternatively, you can also conduct interviews with your staff to better understand their needs.

You can find specific examples of needs assessments online, but we encourage you to create your own based on your church’s unique needs, size, and staff members.

Staff Readiness

Another important aspect of choosing a church management software is determining the readiness of your staff. You’ve likely identified this in the needs assessment portion of the decision framework, but it’s important to formally recognize this step.

Hopefully your staff has shared their pain points, but they should also share their personal opinions about switching or implementing this new church management system—especially if it directly impacts their job.

While you, as the key decision-maker, might clearly see this is the right decision for your church at this time, your team will have different insights that are just as valuable. Maybe they’ll remind you that this upcoming season of ministry is their busiest time of year, and it would be unwise to implement a new software that quarter. Or maybe they were there the last time your church switched softwares, and they have some hesitations about doing the whole process over again. You’ll also want to consider how you’ll train your staff on this new church management system once it’s implemented. Being up front about how you’ll prepare them to succeed can go a long way in easing hesitations.

Congregation Workflows

While your staff will be the people most impacted by this new church management software, the members of your church will also be affected. Whether you’re implementing a new website or system, things will change for your members—including how they give their offerings online, how they submit prayer requests, how they can securely view other members’ information, and so on.

Transitioning your congregation to a new software can be more challenging than transitioning your staff, especially if your members aren’t used to using technology in their daily lives. Consider hosting an information session where they can ask questions and raise concerns. Then, once you’ve implemented the software, host training sessions to get everyone on the same page and using the software correctly for their needs.

Integration Expectations

Along those same lines, you’ll need to set integration expectations for your staff and your congregation. One of the most important things you can remind your people of is that things will go wrong during this process—your giving software will glitch, your website will be down, or your information won’t transfer correctly. Of course, good preparation can help avoid these errors, but some are unavoidable, and it’s important to be prepared!

Clearly outline a timeline for your staff—including when the implementation process will start, when it will conclude, and when you’ll begin integrating the congregation into the software. The more you can do to prepare the better.

Denominational Considerations

While many churches can use church management software that’s not specific to any one denomination, some denominations might have special considerations that they need to take into account. Perhaps you need to be able to track who takes communion, alongside attendance. Or maybe you need to be able to add special anniversaries like Confirmation and Baptism dates.

Identify these special denominational considerations before you start the process of choosing a church management system; the last thing you want is to have to apply piecemeal the software you chose to meet your church’s needs.

Scalability

Lastly, you’ll want to consider the scalability of your new church management system. If your church membership increases past a certain number, are you able to easily upgrade your software to accommodate these additional members? And if so, what is the fee increase?

Additionally, will you have the ability to add or upgrade to features as you need them? You might not need a plethora of features at this moment, but if you decide to upgrade down the line, is the process easy and seamless? Reaching out to your contact at the church management software provider is the best way to get this information directly.

Final Thoughts

When choosing a church management system, it’s important to work through a decision-making framework to guide your decision. No matter how many members your church has, you need to follow the same general model to ensure you’re making the best, most financially sound decision for your church.

Try Concordia Technology Solutions’ membership-based software,
Church360° Members, risk-free for 30 days!

Is Church Software Worth It? Evaluating Finance and Ministry Impact

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:06:34 GMT

When making the decision to implement a new church software, the first question likely raised is “What’s the return on investment (ROI)?” That question is sometimes easier to answer than others—there are certainly tangible financial ROIs to implementing a church management software, but there are also less tangible ministry ROIs that are equally valuable. When calculating ROI, you need to take into account both ministry impact and dollars saved to get the full picture of the benefits of the software. We’re breaking down some of the most common returns your church office will see when implementing a church software and why it might be a worthwhile change for you.

Financial ROI

When considering whether church software is worth it, many pastors and church leaders want to know the financial ROI of investing in it—a tangible way to know that money is being stewarded well. Some of these financial savings are easy to track, while others are more intangible, but both are equally important to calculating the overall ROI of a new software.

Saved Staff Time

Burnout among church staff and volunteers is incredibly common, so it’s important to steward your employees’ time well. Church software can reduce administrative burden, streamline processes, and automate tasks so your team can save time.

If your staff is paid hourly, you might see some negligible savings in payment for hours worked, but the true ROI here is that your staff’s time is freed up to do the things that technology can’t do—building connections with members, coming up with creative new ideas, and implementing new ministries.

Reduced Errors

Another somewhat intangible financial ROI to church software is reduced errors across the board. Any time you involve a human in a process, there’s the potential for mistakes—from a finger that slipped on the keyboard to misreading a number to mixing up a name. These errors are to be expected, but they are certainly reduced when you automate some processes with your church management software. Errors can, of course, still occur, but they are greatly reduced!

Reduced errors mean less time spent double-checking work, fixing errors, and double-checking again. This means your staff’s time is freed up to do more important tasks, like analyzing data to apply it to ministry.

More Predictable Giving

Another very visible way your church software provides a massive ROI is when you implement and encourage online giving—specifically, recurring online giving.

When your members sign up to have their giving automatically taken out each week or month, your church accounting and finance team will be able to more reliably predict giving, allowing you to better budget for the future.

To get the full picture of the ROI, track your regular giving for the year before you encouraged recurring online giving and compare that to afterward. You’ll likely see a huge jump in regular giving, which means more financial stability for your church!

Fewer Software Costs

One of the most tangible ways to calculate the ROI of your church management software is to look at all of the different software it combines into one. Rather than requiring you to subscribe to tons of software separately, they’re now combined into one single subscription, likely at a large savings to your church!

Many software solutions, like the Church360° Suite, combine the following into one end-to-end solution:

Email marketing

SMS marketing

Database

Online giving

Accounting software

Website builder

Online community engagement

Event calendar

Ministry ROI

While most of us might think of church technology ROI in terms of cost savings, it’s important to remember that there are intangible ministry returns that church software can bring. So while these ministry returns might not show up as a number, they are equally as important when it comes to reducing staff burnout, stress, and overwork. Additionally, these ministry returns can further engage your members and visitors!

Stronger Member Engagement

When you have a church management software that’s running smoothly, you’ll have stronger member engagement. From event calendars to community pages to prayer groups to online directories, you’ll give your members opportunities to engage and connect in the digital space—which will translate to real-life engagement!

And with your improved automated processes, you can also improve your visitor experience and engagement. By sending out automated emails after their first, second, and third visits, you can increase guest engagement and get them involved and informed about your ministry.

Cleaner Data

This could fall under financial ROI as well, but cleaner data is a huge ministry return when you implement church software. When your data is accurate and easy to analyze, you’re better able to understand the success of your ministries, events, and outreach.

We all know that numbers aren’t everything in the church, but sometimes data can be a clear indicator of success, especially when comparing events year over year. When you better understand what is happening as a result of your campaigns or events, you can get a clear picture of the ministry ROI.

Better Communication

Lastly, when looking at the ROI of your church technology, you’ll see better communication across the board for both your staff and members.

For your staff, church management software consolidates data—no more navigating multiple, separate Excel spreadsheets, asking if this information is up-to-date. Now, everyone has access to the same data, saving you from sending emails and scheduling meetings to figure out a simple question. You’ll more clearly be able to communicate about what’s important.

For your members, a church software improves communication between them and your church office. Implementing SMS and email marketing plans can keep members abreast of last-minute event changes, upcoming events, and ministry updates to be aware of. With the right strategy, you’ll keep everyone on the same page—and reduce the number of calls and emails your office has to answer.

Get a taste of the benefits of church management software without the investment with a free 30-day trial of our membership-based software, Church360° Members.

5 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for Churches

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:28:17 GMT

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is how your website appears on the search results when someone is looking for a specific keyword. If you implement SEO best practices across your site, your church website will appear on Google when people are looking for a church near them.

Here are some church SEO tips you can easily implement across your site, even if you’re not a web designer or developer!

1. Identify and Use Keywords

The first and most important step in optimizing your church website for SEO is to identify and use relevant keywords across all pages of your site.

There are many keyword research tools available, but you likely already know or can guess relevant keywords for your church. Keywords such as “Lutheran church in [Your City Name]” or “LCMS church near [Your City Name]” are good starting points!

I recommend focusing on one keyword per page—so your homepage’s keyword would be similar to the above, while other secondary pages would have their own keyword.

2. Write Like a Human, Not a Robot

If you were creating websites fifteen to twenty years ago, in the early days of SEO, many websites were stuffed with keywords—so many that they were unreadable. The sites sounded forced, stilted, and unnatural, but they ranked incredibly high.

Since then, Google and other search engines have gotten smarter, and they’re able to recognize intended keywords without them being present in every single sentence on your page. They can even recognize slight variations, so you don’t have to repeat your keyword verbatim throughout the page.
For example, you could say “LCMS church located in Oceanside, California” and “Lutheran church in Oceanside, CA,” and Google would recognize that these keywords have the same search intent and serve the same purpose.

3. Format Your Site

One aspect of SEO that many churches overlook is the formatting or tagging of their site. You likely already have headers, subheaders, and paragraph text on your site—but it might not be labeled correctly!

Whether you’re using a drag-and-drop church website editor like Church360° Unite or you have a custom-coded site in Wordpress, it’s easy to make sure your text is tagged correctly. Each page on your site should follow a basic structure: Heading 1 (H1) first as the most important header on the page, followed by any H2s or H3s. Paragraph text should be tagged as such.

All that to say, if you want to create a subheader on your page, don’t just reduce the text size—make sure it’s tagged as an H2 or H3. When your information is structured correctly, it signals to Google what’s most important.

Try to distribute your keywords evenly throughout all of your headings and paragraph tags, but remember not to overuse them!

4. Update Metadata

If the word metadata is intimidating, don’t worry—it’s actually very simple! Think of metadata as the back-end information on your website pages that gives Google or other search engines signals as to what the page is about.

Alt Text

Alt text is an abbreviation for “alternative text,” which is essentially a label for all of the images on your site. These descriptions not only help Google understand what kind of information is on the page but they also assist vision-impaired users who are using screen readers to navigate websites.
When you upload an image to your website, oftentimes the alt text will automatically be what your uploaded file is called. Think of it like this: If you have an image of your Sunday morning service on your site, but it’s labeled “IMG-234.jpg,” that gives no indication what the image actually is.
Instead, choose a few words to describe your image, including keywords when relevant. In the above example of a worship service image, you might change it to “Church service in [City Name]” or “Sanctuary of [Church Name].”

Meta Description

When you see a link to a webpage on Facebook or Google, you’ll often see a few lines of text that tell you what the page is about; this is your page’s meta description! It’s not seen often, but it gives important signals to search engines of the content of your page.

It’s imperative to include your targeted keyword for that page in the meta description. Other than that, the content should simply describe what sort of information is on the page. Think of it as a short summary of the content of your page!

Meta descriptions should be around 150 words—any more than that and they’ll get cut off in search results.

Page Title

The final piece of the metadata puzzle is your page title. When you see a search result on Google, the page title is the main bit of text you’ll see in the search results. Your page title should describe your page in a few words; you should also include your chosen keyword!

Consider structuring your page title like this: [Page Title] | [Keyword]. For example, for your homepage, your page title might be something like “St. John Lutheran Church | LCMS Church in Springfield, Missouri.”

5. Look at Google Analytics

If you really want to rank your church on Google with SEO, you’ll need to take a look at Google Analytics. This might seem overwhelming at first, but Google provides comprehensive trainings for beginners to understand how to use the site.

Google Analytics will help you understand what keywords are performing well for your site and where you have opportunities for improvement.

Another key aspect of Google Analytics is being able to submit your pages for crawling on Google. This essentially signals to Google that you want them to look at the content of your page and start having it appear in search results. If you don’t do this, Google might never look at your website.

Building and managing your church website is easy with our website builder software, Church360° Unite. Start a free 30-day trial today!

A Practical Guide to Church Data Security

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 13:18:28 GMT

It seems like every day there’s a news story about data leakage, phishing attempts, and online security. It can be hard to decipher what your responsibility is as a church to protect your members’ data, and what steps you can take to ensure your members’ information is safeguarded.
We’ve created a comprehensive guide to help you protect sensitive information yet still maintain your confidence in ministry!

Permissions

One of the easiest ways to enhance your church data security is to restrict who has access to specific information. You might be tempted to make every staff member an administrator or give everyone full access to data in your church management software, but this is a security nightmare!

Instead, give staff and volunteers access to only the information that directly impacts their duties. Your music director doesn’t need access to all the members’ phone numbers, but your administrative assistant will definitely need access to that information. Your accountant or financial secretary should have access to giving information, but your communications director should not.

This way, if there is some sort of a security concern, you can know exactly who has access to what information, which will help you get to the bottom of the issue.

Pastor Confidentiality

Your pastor should be concerned about safeguarding member information—and he likely already is! Pastors have always maintained confidentiality with members, but in the digital age, that confidentiality is especially important.

During visits or meetings, pastors often take notes to be able to pray for members, to update situations, and to serve as reminders for future meetings. However, these notes should remain extremely confidential.

If your pastor is logging these visitation notes in your church management software, you should ensure that only the pastor has access to those notes. No one else needs access. If your pastor is using the notes app on his phone, consider asking him to set up a special password or facial recognition for that app specifically. This extra layer of security can give members peace of mind during vulnerable times.

Cloud Security Basics

When it comes to cloud security, the responsibility is split between two parties: you and your cloud provider. Your provider maintains the responsibility to have systems and securities in place to protect your data with their infrastructure. You, as the user, have the responsibility to protect who accesses the data and how it is distributed and used.

A common phrase in cloud security is “Never Trust; Always Verify,” which essentially means that you should never immediately assume that an email or file is trustworthy. Phishing attempts have gotten extremely convincing; your volunteers or staff might receive emails that seem to be from your pastor, asking for sensitive member information. Remind your team that if something seems suspicious to them, they should always go straight to the source and ask the individual requesting the information. They can stop by the person’s office or call the person to verify the request.

Encryption

Encryption might sound intimidating, like it’s from a movie about computer hackers, but it’s really incredibly easy—once you have the right church management software.

Your church management system should feature an SSL or TLS encryption; this is essentially a layer of protection on the website where your software is hosted that protects sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers.

If you’re not sure if your church management software is encrypted, check the URL. A good rule of thumb is that if it has https:// before the website name, it’s encrypted—but it’s always good to check with your contact at the website host to verify what security measures they have in place.

Staff Training

Your entire church staff—whether paid or volunteer—need to be trained on how to safeguard member information. People don’t know what they don’t know, and giving them proper processes and information can save you from big headaches later on.

Your church management software might offer video trainings to educate your staff on the proper means of church data security. Or you can find some generic videos on YouTube to more generally teach data security at work. You might even be able to find someone locally who can come in and lead an in-person session for your team!

Volunteer Misuse Prevention

Churches rely on faithful volunteers to help carry out the mission, and that includes giving relevant volunteers access to information in your church database. However, just like you would with employees, it’s important to prevent misuse of this data.

As stated earlier, offering staff training and restricting sensitive information can go a long way in preventing volunteer misuse of information. When a volunteer steps into a new role, make it clear what the expectations are for church data security—especially if the role deals with sensitive information.

It might seem over the top, but consider having volunteers sign a covenant that outlines not only what their duties are but also what the expectations are surrounding church data security. This covenant will hold them accountable and remind them of the importance their job holds in safeguarding member information!

Data Security as Stewardship

As Christians, we know that we are called by God to be good stewards of what He has given us. And while we mostly think of stewardship in terms of money or time, we should also be good stewards of everything God has entrusted to us—including sensitive member information.

When we do our best to protect what belongs to others, including their data in our church management system, we are honoring God by being good stewards. Of course, this stewardship has no bearing on our salvation—that’s by faith alone!—but we should still seek to honor God and be mindful of what He has entrusted to us.

Start a free trial of Church360° Members and enjoy peace of mind knowing your church’s information is in good hands with unique role permissions, event logs, and more security features.

Streamline Youth Ministry with Church Management Software

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:30:00 GMT

Any director of Christian education, youth pastor, or volunteer will tell you that leading a youth ministry requires a high level of organization—from planning events to coordinating volunteers, it takes a village to raise up middle and high schoolers in the faith. As the lives of parents and youth get busier and busier, you need to find ways to effectively communicate with them, streamline your processes, and more effectively engage with these families.

Utilizing your church management system as a youth ministry management software is not only cost effective but also can help you stay organized and sane. Here are our team’s favorite ways a church management software can streamline your youth ministry.

Communications

Email Parents

When sharing important information with the parents of your youth, you’ll likely opt for email communications. Whether you’re sharing your upcoming monthly schedule, reminding them of an upcoming event, or sending out surveys for feedback, email is the best option.

Many church management softwares, like the Church360° Suite, allow you to send emails to specific groups of people, so you can easily communicate with only those you need to. Create custom groups for parents of kids in middle or high school, and you’ll never manually add email addresses again!

Text Students

It’s also not uncommon for DCEs and youth leaders to have text group chats with students to remind them of upcoming events or directly communicate with them about last-minute updates. Utilize your church management system to send bulk texts in just a few clicks!

Of course, you can also use this feature to communicate last-minute updates with parents, like event cancellations due to inclement weather, location changes, or timely reminders. But be careful not to overuse this feature; if you send texts for every small update, announcement, or reminder, your members will start to ignore them. Reserve texts for truly of-the-moment updates!

Event Scheduling

Keep your parents, staff, and youth on the same page with event scheduling within your church management system. Ensure that rooms in your building aren’t double-booked, events don’t overlap, and your staff is aware of who will be on campus.

If your church management software allows you to tag events, you can label them as middle- or high-school events, so your members are clear who exactly the event is for. This also gives your youth parents the opportunity to filter all calendar events to see all upcoming youth ministry events. With the busy schedules high schoolers have these days, it’s important to give families plenty of notice to get events on their family calendar.

Volunteer Coordination

Whether your youth ministry is completely run by volunteers or you only need them occasionally, you need to ensure you keep everyone organized and on schedule! Utilize your youth ministry management software to coordinate all of your volunteers—from who’s leading the devotion to who’s bringing snacks and soda.

You can also utilize these features within your chosen church management system to send mass communications to your volunteers for specific events. Let them know when they should arrive, what they should bring, and how long the event will last. You’ll keep everyone on the same page, allowing your events to run more smoothly.

Registrations and Signups

When planning any youth event, you need to know how many people are attending—especially if you’re providing pizza and snacks! Keep everything organized by encouraging your youth (or their parents) to register if they plan on attending, and to also register any friends they might be bringing. Once it becomes a habit of your members, you’ll see greater consistency! Don’t be afraid to send out email or text reminders to register in the week leading up to the event.

You can also coordinate parent signups, such as who’s bringing snacks or who’s driving students to an off-campus event.

Consent Forms

One of the most important parts of youth ministry is ensuring parents and staff are on the same page about events—especially ones that involve travel or any sort of special consent by the parents.

If you’ve been using paper forms to track these signatures and forms, it might be time for a digital upgrade. Utilize your church management software to streamline this process! Within a software like Church360° Members, you can create forms that are tied to specific events. With some creative thinking, you can repurpose a traditional form to allow parents to provide consent for their children to be driven by another parent or for similar situations.

You can also use these forms as covenants before a big event like a conference, where you want youth to agree to certain terms about their behavior and your expectations for them. You can include everything you’d usually include on a form like this—outlined expectations, with places for their digital signature and the date. Afterward, you can have an email copy sent to them and their parents.

Effortlessly implement these tips for your youth ministry with our member-focused church management software, Church360° Members. The first month is free!

How to Train Staff on New Church Management Software

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:50:01 GMT

When you’re considering a new church management software, a big consideration is how this transition will affect your staff. Where do you begin when it comes to training?

Any time you begin using a new software, program, or process in your church office, you’ll need to train your team to follow the new procedures so everyone is on the same page. But with a transition as big as a new church management software, you can feel overwhelmed and not know where to begin or what to do.

Here are some tangible steps you can take to train your staff on church management software—without anyone breaking down!

Before You Train

Be Transparent About Goals

The first step in training your staff on church management software is to be transparent about why you’re making this transition. Here are some questions for you to answer that can help guide conversations with your team:

How will this software lessen the administrative burden?

What benefits does this software have over our current software/process?

Why are we switching now?

What are the specific goals of this transition?

How long will the training take?

Set a Clear Timeline

Building out a specific timeline of when trainings will take place, when tasks will transition, and when old software will be sunsetted can bring a lot of clarity and peace to the church management software transition process. Being transparent on timelines can go a long way in helping your staff feel prepared to tackle this big transition!

You should also schedule specific training days or times, and be clear about what your goals are for each session. For example, you might have one training day dedicated to all things membership (attendance, communications, etc.), and another day for everything related to financial tracking.

Slowly Transition

Another way to ensure that your staff feels comfortable on the new church management software is to transition slowly. Obviously, at some point, you’ll need to move all of your data and processes over to the new software, but taking it one step at a time can help it feel manageable for your staff.

For example, you might migrate your member information over to your new software, while still tracking everything how you were doing it before, so your staff can ensure accurate data is portrayed while you’re all still getting used to a new software.

Training Tips

Look into Trainings from Software Company

Sometimes, the church management software company you’re transitioning to will offer training sessions for your employees to give a technical overview and walkthrough of the platform. It’s an opportunity for your team to get answers to questions you yourself might not know the answer to! For example, Concordia Technology Solutions provides complimentary training with all of their software to help users be as confident as possible in the software.

Break Up Trainings

It can be helpful to break up trainings across a few days or weeks. As mentioned previously, you can dedicate one training to a specific topic, like tracking attendance or entering offerings. Try to make the trainings as relevant as possible for the position you’re training! Your communications team will definitely need to understand how the new email communications work, but they might not need to be included on financial trainings.

By breaking up these training sessions to be short and relevant, you can help reduce the chance of overwhelming your team. You can also answer any specific questions during that time, which can be less overwhelming for you!

Set Aside a Day to Transition

While you can slowly transition, you will need to have a final day where everything is officially migrated and your staff is fully using the new software. Try to choose a day that will have the least impact on your team—a day where nothing urgent needs to happen, tasks can be delayed until the next day, and your team’s entire focus can be dedicated to the migration.

Some organizations opt to do big transitions like this on weekends to avoid any downtime in service, but that comes with its own set of challenges, such as paying hourly employees overtime. You can easily tackle this on a work day—just make sure to not assign them an urgent task due that day!

Answer Questions

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is to be available to answer questions over the next few months. You might assume that after all of your training sessions, your big transition day, and a few days to adjust, your team will have all of their questions answered.

But the truth is, questions will arise consistently over the next few months—maybe even the next year! As your team tackles tasks that only come up every so often, they’ll need to relearn how to integrate each task into this new church management software, and you’ll be the point person to direct them.

Try to be as patient as possible, and remember that many of your team’s daily tasks have dramatically shifted. And also remember that questions are just a sign of their attention to detail and care about their work!

Access a dedicated, US-based support team, free training, and other customer-focused perks with Concordia Technology Solutions’ software options—like Church360° Members.

How Church Management Software Reduces Daily Tasks

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 13:43:53 GMT

One of the many pain points of church office staff is an excess of administrative tasks—getting caught up in spreadsheets and repetitive daily duties. From pastors to office administrators, communications managers to accountants, every member of your church staff is likely looking to reduce their daily workload.

But how can you actually reduce church administrative tasks? There are many solutions to this problem; you might have tried changing your processes, hiring new employees, or eliminating certain tasks. But if nothing has worked yet, don’t fret.

Utilizing a church management software is one great way to reduce church workload burden across your staff, whether you’re a staff of two or twenty. We’re breaking down many of the ways in which a church-specific software can help your office run more smoothly and be more efficient, therefore reducing your workload.

Automating Repetitive or Duplicate Tasks

Perhaps the biggest way a church management software can reduce church administrative burden is by eliminating the need for repetitive or duplicate tasks. By automating these tasks or reducing the need to do them twice, you can save your office staff hours each week.

For example, Church360° Members integrates with Church360° Ledger so that you don’t have to add offering entries into both your financial software and your membership software. The information syncs effortlessly between the two softwares, saving you time!

Organizing Tasks

Many church management softwares allow you to organize tasks and assign them to specific people in your organization. So, rather than emailing your coworker to say, “This is ready for your review,” your software could do it for you once you complete your part of the task!

For example, let’s say a visitor fills out a connect card and your church office coordinator enters the information into your church management software. When he or she tags the person as a first-time visitor, the software could automatically assign a task to your pastor to call or email the visitor.

Reducing Communication Volume

The saying “This meeting could have been an email” is funny until your inbox is full of emails that could have been meetings. One of the biggest pain points any office worker has is unnecessary, redundant, or irrelevant email communications. Emails asking where a file is or if some information is up to date seem small, until you’re getting ten of those emails a day.

When you use a church management software, you are naturally reducing the communication volume regarding certain topics. You can rest assured that all information is synced and up to date, and that everyone on your staff is seeing the same things—no duplicate or conflicting information.

All members can also see when information was last updated, so it’s easy to determine if information is up to date. For example, your pastor can see that offering information was updated on Monday, so he can know that Sunday’s offerings were inputted.

Streamlining Tasks

Another benefit of church management software that reduces administrative burden is streamlining tasks that add up throughout the week. Coordinating volunteers, updating your membership database, entering offerings, and communicating with groups are some of the many tasks that happen throughout the week—but they often become time consuming.

By utilizing a church management software, you can streamline these tasks and reduce the amount of time you spend on them per week. Softwares such as Church360° allow you to create tailored filters, so you can easily communicate with specific groups of people—without manually entering in all of their email addresses.

Automatic Communications

If you are in church communications or church administration, much of your job is sending emails—to your pastor, to your volunteers, and to your members. While a church management software can’t reduce the impact of all of these communications, it can help ease the burden of some emails.

As mentioned previously, you can easily send emails to specific groups of people, such as a volunteer team, a small group Bible study, or your church council. However, you can also utilize the email and SMS messaging feature in your church management software to communicate with your entire church body.

Mass emails are great for communicating announcements, event reminders, and pastoral updates quickly and directly to your congregation. SMS messaging is best for communication that needs to be immediate, such as a canceled service due to inclement weather, an alert to a location change for an event, or an emergency prayer request.

Events

Event management is a complex process, and it often is a job in and of itself! Because these tasks are usually done by employees who have many other duties, reducing the administrative burden of these tasks is huge.

In most church management softwares, you will be able to create custom forms and link them to specific events in your church calendar. You can utilize these forms for volunteer signups and event registrations, allowing you to communicate with specific groups of people and track attendance.

In Summary

Church management software is the best and most cost effective way to reduce administrative burden in your office. By eliminating the need for redundant tasks, improving communication efforts, and expertly managing events, a software like Church360° Members is irreplaceable in your church office.

Take some pressure off your hardworking team by utilizing easy-to-use church management software from Concordia Technology Solutions.

AI Prompt Generation Tips for Churches

wscjohnson@gmail.com (Rev. Bill Johnson) — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 11:00:00 GMT

Depending on who you ask, AI is either in the process of revolutionizing life as we know it or fading quickly and quietly into obscurity. The truth, as with most things, is somewhere in the middle. There are definitely ways that today’s AI agents can be used to make people, even pastors, more productive, or give them a starting point. But they’re not foolproof, and they simply aren’t at a point (nor, I would argue, will they ever be) where they can replace the human element that’s essential to pastoral ministry.

Looking at Effective Use of AI in Ministry

Over the next several months, we’ll look at ways AI can be used effectively to aid pastors in their work. To be clear, this is not intended as a shortcut or to give rise to mediocre ministry where the robots do all the work. These are suggestions for how to use the tools available to augment, not replace, the essentially human work of caring for God’s people. As I often frame it at CTSFW, let the robots do what they’re good at so the humans can do what only they can do.

To that end, this month we’ll look at how to write a good prompt for today’s AI models. If you’ve tried today’s LLMs (ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, etc.), you know by now they’re incredibly easy to use. But sometimes it can be quite difficult to get good information from them. Because these models do not rely directly on a fixed algorithm or process, the results may vary even when running the same prompt at different times. No prompt is perfect, and there’s no way to guarantee a useful result, but there are some things you can do to maximize your chances of getting the feedback you’re looking for.

Let’s work with the idea that we’re trying to come up with a game to play for tonight’s youth group meeting. I know we’re studying the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), but I have no idea what sort of game we might play to open up the night. I could ask, “Give me ideas for a youth group game,” and I’d get some okay results, but there are some simple best practices we can follow that will focus the model and ensure the results are what we’re after.

Define Roles

Start by defining the role you want the AI model to emulate. This helps focus the model on a particular area of expertise and narrows its vast content to a scope of responses based on that expertise. So, for example, if I were seeking to plan a youth Bible study around a particular text, I might begin the prompt with “You are an expert in youth ministry for current teenagers” before continuing with what I need the AI to do. By giving the model a set role, we eliminate much of the noise from additional content in its knowledge base. In fact, for this particular example, I might even narrow this further and focus it denominationally as well.

You are an expert in youth ministry in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and are well-versed in current teenage culture.

Include Specific Details

The more contextual information the model has available, the better the result will generally be. By providing detailed information on the request, you can help the model tailor the results to your specific needs. For our example, assume we’re at a small congregation in rural Iowa. Let’s continue our prompt to include some of that contextual information.

You are an expert in youth ministry in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and are well-versed in current teenage culture in the context of Shepherd of the Cornfield Lutheran Church in central Iowa. Your youth group consists of six youths, with an even mix of boys and girls. Most are from farming families, but two of the participants have parents who work for the local window manufacturing company in the engineering department. Tonight, the youth group will be studying the parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25–37 (ESV).

Request Clear Deliverables

But we need to let the model know what success looks like. To do this, we provide a very clear description of the thing(s) we want it to create. In general, the more specific you can be about what you’d like the model to produce, the better the end result will be. If you need an outline, ask specifically for an outline. If you want a more in-depth treatment, ask for a specific word count. Define the result, and the models will do their best to accommodate your requests.

You are an expert in youth ministry in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and are well-versed in current teenage culture in the context of Shepherd of the Cornfield Lutheran Church in central Iowa. Your youth group consists of six youths, with an even mix of boys and girls. Most are from farming families, but two of the participants have parents who work for the local window manufacturing company in the engineering department. Tonight, the youth group will be studying the parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:25–37 (ESV).

Prepare three suggestions for opening games you might play with the youth to begin the night. Games should relate to the Luke text without being artificially forced into context and should involve relatively little setup and no mess whatsoever. Provide a brief description of each game, a list of supplies, rules for play, and any tips or tricks for running the game effectively. The games should take no longer than 20 minutes from start to finish, including any explanation of rules.

Enforce Guardrails

In addition to letting the model know what to do, it’s often helpful to give it a few examples of ways you don’t want it to answer. Most models have built-in toxicity detection that prevents the most offensive content, but it’s still good to give clear guidance, especially in areas where it’s free to be creative or where it needs to stick to the plan. I added the following paragraph for this purpose.

Do not depart from the scriptural text as found in the ESV. While the games do not have to be based on the texts, there should be a clear connection between the theme of the game and the theme of the text as understood by LCMS theology. All games must be appropriate for the youth group context and playable in a youth group made up equally of males and females.

Refine Results

The last phase of any engineering or design process is to test the product and see if it’s producing what we’re after or if we need to refine the design further to achieve it. It might be that what we have is good for now, and we want to use it as a template for a while and see how it goes. For now, we’ll run with the prompt as is. Let’s see what sort of difference expanding the prompt has made.

Here's the result from our initial prompt, "Give me ideas for a youth group game," (ChatGPT), put into a table for the sake of this blog:

Game	Setup	Goal	Good for
Human Knot	Everyone stands in a circle, grabs the hands of two different people across from them.	Work together to untangle into a circle without letting go of hands.	Teamwork, laughter, and ice-breaking.
Four Corners (Bible Edition)	Number the room’s corners 1–4. A leader calls out a trivia question with four possible answers, each corresponding to a corner.	Players move to the corner they think is correct. Wrong corners are “out” until the next round.	Mixing fun with faith-based learning.
Sardines	Like reverse hide-and-seek. One person hides, and everyone else searches.	When someone finds the hider, they hide with them until everyone is packed in.	Builds camaraderie, lots of laughs.
Marshmallow Tower	Small groups get marshmallows and toothpicks.	Build the tallest free-standing tower in a set time.	Creativity, problem-solving, and friendly competition.
Scripture Scavenger Hunt	Provide Bible verses that hint at objects or places in/around your church building.	Teams race to find and bring back items.	Active learning, movement, and teamwork.
Ultimate Rock Paper Scissors	Everyone starts in pairs playing RPS. Losers cheer for the person who beat them.	Continue until two finalists face off with the whole group cheering.	Energy, quick fun, and group unity.

ChatGPT then asked me, “Would you like me to suggest low-prep games (easy to run with minimal supplies) or bigger activity-style games that take more setup and time?”, to which I said yes with the refined prompt from above for this result.

Here are three opening game ideas that connect naturally with the themes of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37, ESV). Each game highlights mercy, awareness of others, and acting to help—without being contrived.

Game Neighbor Relay Who’s My Neighbor? Mercy Match

Theme Connection The Samaritan acted quickly to help his neighbor, while others passed by. This game emphasizes noticing and acting. The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” This game highlights recognizing people and paying attention. The Samaritan showed mercy, not just words. This game emphasizes quick recognition of merciful actions.

Supplies
None One blindfold Prepared slips of paper with simple “helpful” or “ignoring” scenarios (e.g., “You see someone drop books—do you help?” vs. “You walk past someone crying in the lunchroom.”).

Rules Divide youth into two teams of three.

Arrange them in relay formation across the room.

At the leader’s signal, the first person runs to the other side, taps the next person, then stays there.

Here’s the twist: the person running must also “notice” a teammate who pretends to stumble (at random, a leader can call out someone’s name to “fall”). The runner must pause, help the “fallen” person up (quick hand-up), and then continue.

First team with all members across wins. Form a circle with one blindfolded youth in the center.

Silently, the leader taps one youth in the circle. That person says, “Hello, neighbor” in a disguised voice (funny accent, whisper, etc.).

The blindfolded player must guess who spoke.

If correct, they switch places. If not, another round continues. Scatter the slips face down in the middle of the group.

Youth take turns grabbing one slip, reading it aloud, and deciding aloud whether it reflects showing mercy or ignoring a neighbor.

If they get it right, they keep the slip; if not, it returns to the pile.

Play until all slips are taken.

Tips Rotate who gets called to “fall” so everyone plays both roles. Encourage creativity in voices but keep it respectful. Keep scenarios relevant to their lives (school, sports, farm chores, etc.).

Debrief Who noticed? Who rushed? How easy was it to ignore someone? Tie in afterward: It’s not always obvious who our neighbor is—but they are still there. Which actions looked most like the Samaritan’s mercy?

Each of these games can be explained, played, and wrapped up in under 20 minutes. They require no setup beyond simple supplies, engage both boys and girls equally, and tie smoothly into your study of Luke 10:25–37.

While I’m not sure I’d use any of these games exactly as is, I could certainly take several of them and refine them quickly into a usable game for tonight’s meeting. Next time, we’ll look at taking these prompt generation principles and applying them to exegetical study of the biblical text!

Don’t miss Rev. Johnson‘s next blog on using AI for exegetical study! Subscribe to the CTS blog and get articles sent directly to your inbox.

Top Data Management Practices for Churches

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:18:23 GMT

We hear a lot about data in the news—whether that’s major data breaches or ways to protect your personal information stored on your phone or computer. But when it comes to your church data, it’s equally important to abide by some church data management practices to ensure that your members’ information is secure, accurate, and usable.

Let’s dive into some of our top data management practices for churches. All these best practices can be done for free, so you don’t have to invest in new software or protections, saving your church money!

Prioritize Security

Your top priority when collecting, storing, and processing data—especially when it pertains to your members, their giving, and any other sensitive data—should be to protect that important information. Cybersecurity is important when you are processing any sort of data.

There are many ways to keep your church data more secure, but you should always ensure your passwords are secure. This simple step can help prevent hackers from accessing private information in your account. Many data management systems have two-factor authentication, which requires you to log in to your account with a code that is sent to your phone or email (in addition to your user ID and password), to further deter hackers trying to access your account.

Additionally, always get permission from your members to process their data; you can even let your members choose what information they would like to be processed. You can also allow them to choose whom information is shared with—for example, some members might not want their personal phone number made public in the church directory where others can see it.

Keep It Clean

No, this doesn’t involve soap and water! Keeping your data clean means ensuring that there are no errors, duplicate entries, or incorrect formatting. These types of mistakes (that can easily happen in data entry) can lead to skewed data or even mess up your entire data set.

To keep your data clean, you should have processes in place to double-check all data entries after they’re entered—ideally by someone different from who entered the data in the first place.

Church management softwares often have checks in place to let you know if data is duplicated or formatted incorrectly. This can help you and your staff ensure that data issues are addressed promptly and easily!

Ensure It’s Usable

If your data is clean and secure but no one can understand or use it, then it’s not good data! There’s little point in having abundant data if no one is ever using it. To make your data easier to digest, you could display it as a chart or graph, or simply outline the overall picture (average weekly attendance, etc.).

If you use a church management system, it will likely be equipped with features to show you your data in a way that’s easy to understand—like charts, graphs, or summaries. If you use something like Microsoft Excel to organize and house your data, you can easily turn rows of data into charts or graphs. Either way, you should be able to easily understand your databases in a church management software or spreadsheet!

Collect Only What’s Necessary

If you’ve recently invested in a new church management software, you might be tempted to collect every piece of information possible about your people—you might as well get your money’s worth! But part of managing your data correctly is ensuring that the information you’re collecting is relevant to what you need.

So collecting your members’ baptismal date, attendance information, and giving history are necessary points of data that will help you connect with your members and understand the life of your church. However, you might decide that your specific church doesn’t need to collect your members’ home phone numbers, because everyone has a cell phone. Or perhaps you don’t need email addresses for every member of the household—you just need one primary email.

Limit User Access

Finally, you should limit who has access to data within your organization. If you have a small staff, with just your pastor and an administrative assistant, you’ll probably give both staff members complete access! If you have a larger staff, you should limit access to only those who actually need to access or process data in their duties.

In addition, you should explicitly state who actually has ownership over the data. This means that you should clearly outline who is responsible for managing and processing your data, which can help you figure out the root of any challenges you might have with your data management or errors.

The Bottom Line

Data management is crucial for any organization, but especially for churches. By implementing these top data management best practices, you can easily ensure that your church protects your members’ data, understands the life of your church through that data, and prioritizes what’s most important for your office staff.

These data management practices fit seamlessly into Church360° Members. Start a trial today and see how easy church management software can be!

Continuing the Conversation on Using AI in Ministry Wisely

wscjohnson@gmail.com (Rev. Bill Johnson) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 11:00:00 GMT

As a continuation of Rev. Bill Johnson’s previous blog post, “Answering Common Questions About Using AI in Ministry,” this article takes a deeper look at certain cautions to be taken when using AI for ministry-related tasks.

Jump to the following questions:

Are there theological or ethical concerns?
What risks or limitations should I know about before trusting AI?
How do I make sure I’m not replacing thoughtful, Spirit-led work?
How has AI already helped church workers?
What’s a task you’ve seen AI handle surprisingly well—and one it really doesn’t?
If I want to start using AI but don’t have time to learn a new tool, where should I begin?
How do I stay informed without getting overwhelmed?

Caution & Discernment

Are there theological or ethical concerns I should be aware of when using AI tools in ministry?

You should certainly be aware of the privacy concerns we talked about earlier, but the more significant long-term concern is the danger of humanizing these AI agents. They respond in very humanlike ways, so it can be very easy to talk about them as though they are human or possess human thoughts and feelings. Remember that while these can be incredibly useful tools, they’re only computers in the end and cannot have a relationship or genuine human interaction.

Relatedly, be aware that just like every other technology mankind has ever created, the potential for abuse and misuse is incredibly high. As an example, because AI image generation was created, it was and is inevitable that this technology will be used inappropriately. Entire specialized models have been created to generate explicit material, and the resulting images (often based on real people) are violations of God’s Word, interpersonal trust, and, in some cases, civil laws.

While I find it distasteful to consider, schools should be aware that these tools exist and should have plans in place for handling students circulating AI-generated images of their classmates. As the tools become more accessible, they become easier to use and to abuse, so have plans in place now for how to handle what seems like an inevitable problem.

Finally, be aware that companies are already springing up, particularly in China, claiming to use AI to preserve loved ones who have died. Pastors should prepare to deal with members a decade from now who have problematic emotional connections to AI agents trained on the digital footprint of a lost loved one. The time to drill our theology of both anthropology—what makes something a human being—and death is now, in order to prepare God’s people for the moral and spiritual storms ahead.

What risks or limitations should I know about before trusting AI to help with sensitive or spiritual tasks?

To be honest, I’m not sure I would trust AI with a sensitive or spiritual task. Privacy is a major concern, but beyond that, AI doesn’t have the capacity to deal with a circumstance that involves spiritual care or even significant emotional reactions. There are some conversations that are best left for humans to have with humans.

How do I make sure I’m not replacing thoughtful, Spirit-led work with something artificial or hollow?

See the earlier discussion about having a human in the loop, but let’s be clear on this one: The Holy Spirit does what it does independent of us, and often in spite of us. Wherever the Word is proclaimed and the Sacraments rightly administered, you’ll find the Holy Spirit at the heart of that work. The Word of God present in the response of AI does not cease to be the Word of God simply because it’s quoted by AI, so we need to maintain some perspective here. We should never (and can’t) remove the human element from ministry, but neither should we avoid tools that could give us more time for caring for God’s people. Let the machines do the things machines excel at so the humans can be fully human with one another.

Real Examples from Ministry

How has AI already helped church workers, either here at the seminary or in congregations?

There are lots of examples out there of folks blazing this trail. One pastor I know has trained an entire AI agent on his own body of sermons from the last several decades and uses it to both search and index them and also to generate ideas and outlines in his written voice for new texts.

Another pastor I met uses AI to preview sermons from the perspective of his congregation. He’ll write his manuscript normally and then submit it to AI and get feedback based on his particular geographic and social context—super helpful for that outside opinion, and it doesn’t annoy your wife nearly as much as asking her every week!

Finally, there are tons of everyday tasks that AI can simplify. Whether formatting addresses, drafting emails, or picking hymns, AI can provide a solid starting point for humans to review and refine.

What’s a task you’ve seen AI handle surprisingly well—and one it really doesn’t?

To be honest, I’m quite surprised at how adept AI has become at handling the original text of the Scripture. It’s become a helpful research assistant, and I’m curious to see where it will go from here. There’s still a need to be appropriately skeptical to avoid hallucinations (when AI makes things up), but there’s some real value there.

As for what it doesn’t or shouldn’t do, I would say anything that should be a human-to-human interaction. Our society is already woefully depersonalized, and technology makes it easier and easier to avoid interacting with people directly, even on the most superficial level. As we create AI agents that feel human but lack humanity, there’s a real danger of exchanging the community we were created to exist and flourish in for an artificial, AI-generated one. No good comes down that road.

Next Steps

If I want to start using AI but don’t have time to learn a new tool, where should I begin?

Just experiment with the tools available. There’s not much of a learning curve for basic use, so feel free to dive in and ask it a question or three. Once you’re used to the flow of the current models, you might learn some more specific details about things like prompt generation best practices, but for someone completely new to the technology, don’t overcomplicate it.

How do I stay informed about AI developments without getting overwhelmed by all the tech news out there?

It’s definitely not easy. And with new versions coming at a faster and faster pace, it’s only going to get harder. I would suggest there’s great value in following several of the largest models (or their creators) on social media and catching the announcements directly from them. There are tons of people out there right now trying to make a living by posting the “Top Ten Things That Happened in AI Yesterday,” but most of that is just repetition or pure noise. The brands themselves have the biggest incentive to tell you what new abilities are out there, and that’s probably a good starting point for most folks.

I hope this mini blog series on AI has been insightful for you and your team. Just like everything in ministry, technology is something that ought to be prayerfully considered and utilized to benefit God’s kingdom.

Just like navigating AI, choosing church management software can be overwhelming. Find some clarity in this downloadable guide that walks you through Concordia Technology Solutions, our product offerings, and some free resources too!

Optimize Administrative Tasks with Church Management Software

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:20:55 GMT

Church administration is a job that requires a variety of skills, from attention to detail to interpersonal relationships, from organization to flexibility. Church administrators and office managers are valuable servants of the church that keep our churches running behind the scenes.

Nowadays, with church management systems being used by churches around the globe, the role of church administration has changed—but that’s not a bad thing! There are many benefits to digital church administration that don’t eliminate the need for actual humans doing important work.

There are many reasons to implement digital solutions in church administration—all of which can help your church and team run more efficiently, effectively, and effortlessly. Today, we’ll dive into a few digital church administration benefits that can aid your team in running smoothly all year long.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Incorporating digital church administration provides the benefit of automating repetitive tasks—think automated emails to first-time visitors, synced giving and attendance data, and event registrations.

These tasks can effortlessly be done by setting up automations, which eliminates the need for a human to do these tasks manually. This saves your team valuable time and frees them up to do tasks that only humans can do!

Shift Priorities to Human Tasks

Which brings us to our next point: the ability for your team to shift their priorities from these automated tasks to tasks that require a human touch. So, rather than doing tedious admin tasks, your team now has the time to connect with members in person or via phone, brainstorm marketing campaigns, and create financial strategies.

If your team has been doing admin tasks for a while, it might be worth talking with them to figure out their interests, skills, and spiritual gifts. Taking the time to understand which human-needed tasks best fit them will serve them and your team best!

Reduce Human Error

Even the best church administrators, accountants, and pastors make mistakes—yes, it’s true! Oftentimes, these errors are small and identified quickly, but they still happen. By implementing digital solutions in church administration, you can reduce human error through these automations.

Of course, technology is not immune to errors or mistakes; however, especially when you’re automating repetitive tasks as we mentioned above, the frequency of error is much less than a human manually inputting, say, offering entries or attendance.

It’s always a good idea to have a human look over these automations to check for any anomalies or errors. But this should take much less time than the initial task itself!

Provide Consistency Across Teams

One major benefit of implementing digital solutions in church administration is that you have inherent consistency across all of your teams—even if you’re just a team of two! If you’re using shared Excel spreadsheets, there’s always a chance that versions aren’t saved, files get corrupted, or edits are made simultaneously.

But when you use a church management software, you can confidently make updates across teams so you ensure everyone is on the same page, looking at the same data.

Automate what you can so you can focus on what humans do best with Church360° Members, our web-based church management software.

Answering Common Questions About Using AI in Ministry

wscjohnson@gmail.com (Rev. Bill Johnson) — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:00:00 GMT

These days, we hear a lot about artificial intelligence (AI). While it has its pitfalls, it can be helpful in the ministry setting. In this article, Rev. Bill Johnson answers some common questions about AI in ministry and offers advice for getting started.

Getting Started

What exactly is AI, and how is it different from using a search engine?

AI as a concept has been around for years, both in science fiction and, to a certain degree, in the real world. When we talk about AI today, however, most folks mean what are technically called large language models (LLMs). These are machine learning algorithms that have processed massive amounts of content and are capable of generating responses to human questions based on that content.

To be clear, though, there’s not a “brain” somewhere behind this process, understanding and operating in the same way a human would. There’s a statistical model that says things like “In response to a question about Lutheran theology, in 95% of the manuscripts the next words after Law are and Gospel.” Then they use those models to compose a response to the question.

It does end up feeling very human to us, however, and these LLMs are capable of processing a massive amount of data much more quickly than humans could. Just don’t mistake AI responses for actual thought.

Why should church workers care about AI now? Isn’t this just another tech trend?

On the one hand, AI is definitely another tech trend. But over time, some tech trends have a way of becoming part of the mainstream culture. I remember sitting in the computer lab in college with a very early version of Mosaic, browsing some of the early pages in the just-created World Wide Web. I wasn’t impressed, and I figured no one would ever use this thing when TELNET and Gopher (early mainframe connection methods) were so much faster. I am comfortable admitting I may have been mistaken.

AI has all the earmarks of a transformative technology. Change in technology tends to be incremental and then very suddenly transformative. This is one of those transformative seasons, and the technology we’re seeing now will transform human lives in much the same way that the Web did.

What are some safe, entry-level AI tools church workers can start experimenting with today?

First, let’s understand that no AI tool is entirely safe. You're not going to accidentally build a robot army and exterminate humanity, but there are risks. The most valuable commodity in the world today is data, especially unique data that your competition doesn’t have access to. As companies have trained these models, the publicly available datasets are all largely consumed, so companies are hungry for more unique data. One easy fresh data source is the data consumers are feeding into the models to analyze. That’s fine if you’ve consented to that, but once your data becomes a part of the training set, it’s possible for that data to reappear in the response to another query by another user down the road.

Take, for example, the pastor who wants to clean up his mailing list by asking AI to format it for him consistently. To do that, he has to give the AI access to that data, and the AI, in turn, incorporates that into its learning. Some time later, another user inquires about sample data for their new church management software, and the pastor’s data, now part of the model, becomes part of that response, violating members’ privacy.

Most of the AI companies have gotten better about protecting personally identifiable information, but it’s always good for users to be aware of the value of their data and the possible accidental exposure.

Paid plans generally include clauses that allow you to opt out of using your data for training purposes, making it possible to use AI with sensitive data without fear of accidental exposure. The top models as of this writing are ChatGPT5, Grok4, MS Copilot, and Google Gemini. All offer varying degrees of free and paid versions, but be sure to examine their data privacy policy before uploading anything to them!

Productivity & Admin Help

How can AI help me write better bulletins, newsletters, or announcements more quickly?

There are a couple of obvious starting points for using AI for church communication. The first is to eliminate the blank page syndrome. If, for example, I want to write an article familiarizing my members with the various special services we host during Lent and Holy Week, I could have some difficulty figuring out where to start. I could use AI to give me an outline, however, and even specify my audience and context. I probably won’t use exactly what it gives me, but it’ll give me a place to start and to work from.

A second key area is in the editing process. Once we’ve written the article, let’s run it through AI and ask for reactions, questions, and evaluations from our target audience’s perspective. It’s all well and good that we wrote about the Triduum, but if I never define it or let people know what it’s all about, I’ve missed the mark. AI can do a solid job of asking good questions to aid in revisions.

Another key place is in image generation. Most modern AI tools include some kind of image generation and do a reasonably good job at it. (Early versions had some significant issues with things like how many fingers to put on a human hand.) Now, to be clear, you’re not going to get pictures of your church or your members (hire a photographer if you want those!), but you can get some useful stock-photo-style images of whatever you can describe. One excellent power combination is to ask the text-based model to help you craft a prompt for the image generation. I’ve often done this based on a particular passage in Scripture, generally with good results.

What are smart ways to use AI with tools we already use, like Microsoft Word, Excel, or Google Docs?

This is the frontier we’re all in the middle of exploring. Companies are rushing to integrate AI in their products, but the results are pretty mixed right now. Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Office 365, but the results will vary. The same is true for Google’s Gemini and the Google Suite. The best advice I have right now is to try to use AI for very bite-sized, targeted use cases, not for large projects all at once. I’ve had substantially better results asking AI to summarize a document or two than asking for a full project plan. The same is true on the data side—AI is better at making small changes incrementally than seeing (remember, no brain!) the big picture and discerning the steps needed to achieve it.

Communication & Ministry Support

Could AI help improve our communication with members, like writing emails, texts, or social media posts?

Absolutely, but we have to be careful with it. There should always be a human in the loop. By that, I mean that AI should never be directly communicating with members without a human looking over what’s sent. AI can hallucinate (the polite, techy word for make stuff up completely), and it’s sometimes pretty clueless, so it needs a human brain involved.

Some folks feel that it’s a bit like cheating to have AI write the first draft of an email to a member or a social media post. I tend to agree somewhat, but I also recognize that the tools are there to make us more efficient at our work, just like all sorts of other tools. AI is great for first drafts, but remember to invest the time to edit and make it your own.

Are there ways AI can assist with sermon prep, Bible studies, or devotionals—without replacing the human voice (or Spirit)?

I can remember being in seminary and hearing discussions on campus about BibleWorks and Logos, which were just starting to get really good at parsing/translating Greek and Hebrew. The argument against the tool largely went, “But if we use shortcuts like this, then we’ll never learn Greek and Hebrew quite as well as doing it all by hand.” The other side argued, “But if it enables us to engage at a higher level than what we’re naturally able to, doesn’t that help make better sermons?”

Both were right and both were wrong. I’m happy to report that the learning of Greek and Hebrew has not stopped at either of our seminaries, but pastors have learned to integrate the tools into their preparation in much the same way as their fathers used concordances, lexicons, and other tools.

AI faces a similar conversation, and I expect a similar outcome. Just as the student who ONLY relied on Logos cheated his congregation and himself, so the pastor or church worker who over-relies on AI limits their own writing and creativity. For initial brainstorming (“Give me a list of ten ice breakers to use with an adult Bible study in rural Iowa.”) or for supplemental resources (“Give me a map of Judea as known to Herod the Great.”), it can be an incredible time saver.

With that being said, there’s absolutely no replacement for knowing the text and knowing your people. AI can help you get started or provide feedback, but ultimately, pastors do an excellent job of knowing their congregations, and AI is not going to replace that.

How can AI help us reach more people in the community, especially when we have a small team or budget?

Here again, I think it’s about brainstorming first drafts and evaluating. For example, a small communication team (or sole pastor) might benefit tremendously from a prompt like, “Design a six-week email and advertising campaign to promote this summer’s Vacation Bible School.”

In conclusion, just like in any area of life, discretion is necessary. I hope this perspective is helpful for you as you think about potential uses for and cautions of AI in your ministry.

Are time-saving measures on the mind? Check out Church360° Members, our church management software that keeps all of your membership, attendance, communication, and other valuable information organized.

Managing Special Events and Holiday Services with Church Software

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:00:00 GMT

In almost any season of the Church Year, there are special events or holiday services—from summer block parties to midweek Lenten services to children’s Christmas programs. Managing these types of church holiday events can be an overwhelming task for any church staff, especially if you’re responsible for all facets of an event.

But church holiday event management doesn’t have to be a headache. By utilizing a church management system, you can easily keep track of all parts of your special event, from initial planning to post-event debriefing.

Organize Volunteers

Volunteers are a critical part of any church holiday event, but it can be a challenge to keep track of people’s skills, gifts, and talents—in addition to who has confirmed their availability for a specific event. With a church management system such as Church360°, you can easily tag users with specific skills, as well as note what role they’ll serve the day of the event. This ensures that you have all your bases covered and can rest easy the day of the event!

Monitor Budget and Giving

In the preparation stage of your special event, you’ve likely been budget planning to figure out the cost of your event. Whether you have to buy special supplies or allocate money toward food, you’ll need to ensure you set a budget and keep track of spending throughout the whole process.
Additionally, you can track your giving from this special event. Easily keep track of all gifts, whether given to a special fund online or as a freewill donation at the event. By simplifying your offering entry for your church volunteers and staff, you’ll ensure you have an accurate record of giving.

Track Attendance

At the event, you’ll likely want to take note of who attended or, at the very least, how many people attended. If your event is primarily focused on members of your church, you can easily track who attended in your church management system. But you can also simply track numbers of attendees, which is helpful if your event is focused on outreach.

Even though numbers aren’t everything, tracking attendance for events can be a helpful gauge as to whether your event met your goals or was successful. If a special holiday event is poorly attended, you can revisit whether it’s worthwhile to continue, you should rethink the format, or your ministry could sunset the event to save time and money.

Take Notes

Lastly, you can take detailed notes on your event to look back on next year. Many churches focus all their energy on planning the event, and then fail to take a moment afterwards to reflect on the successes and challenges of the day.

But an essential part of any church holiday event management strategy should be to debrief with your team immediately afterward—either after teardown or within the next day or so. Take detailed notes of what challenges your team faced (maybe you need more volunteers), note feedback from attendees (vegetarian food options were highly requested), and gauge the success of your event based on your goals (start promotion earlier in the year).

Make event planning and volunteer coordination a breeze with the new event forms feature in Church360° Members, CTS’s membership software.

How Church Management Software Enhances Volunteer Coordination

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 11:00:00 GMT

Churches rely on volunteers to keep things running—from worship to events to community outreach, the members of your church are an integral part of the life of your church. Using a church volunteer coordination software to enhance your scheduling and communication can streamline your admin team’s efforts.

There are a variety of ways you can use a church management software to strategically schedule volunteers to utilize their skills, avoid burnout, and keep your church running smoothly. Here are some of our favorite ways to enhance your volunteer coordination with software!

Volunteer Groups

In most church volunteer coordination software, you should be able to tag individuals with a specific volunteer role or team. You can also assign individuals to smart groups, which can help you keep track of teams of people, like Sunday School teachers or Sunday morning tech team members.

Rather than relying on your staff to remember who volunteers on what teams, this organizational system makes it easy to know who to assign to what events.

Skill Tagging

You can also utilize the tagging feature to note skills your members have, which can assist in assigning them to a role or team. For example, if you’re looking to bring someone on to your social media team, you can filter your members by which ones are skilled in photography to reach out and see if they’d be interested.

This is an especially helpful volunteer coordination feature as you expand your teams or launch a new volunteer opportunity. If you have a lot of members, you might not know everyone’s exact skill set by heart—but using technology allows you to personally reach out to those who have indicated they have a specific passion or skill set.

Volunteer-Only Communication

Communicating with your team is an important part of volunteer coordination. Whether you choose to communicate by text, call, or email, you can keep your team abreast of any changes, updates, or cancellations.

Being able to easily segment your volunteers by role, assignment date, or team allows you to communicate with only the team members you need to notify—reducing notification burnout from non-essential members of your team.

Efficient Scheduling

Assigning volunteers to roles or events is a time-consuming effort, and it’s also important to keep your team organized and avoid burnout with conscious scheduling.

Whether you’re assigning volunteers to serve a specific role (like an usher) or at an event (like a youth fundraiser), you can easily keep track of who is volunteering when in order to avoid burnout. Additionally, you can send communications to your volunteer team for a specific event or day to remind them of their assignment.

Understanding Gaps

As important as it is to understand how often people volunteer, it’s also important to see when people aren’t volunteering anymore. With a robust church management software, you can have access to data that shows when volunteers haven’t volunteered in a specific amount of time, giving you an opportunity to bring a human touch to your software. By reaching out to check in and see if everything’s okay, you can better understand the situation behind the data.

At Concordia Technology Solutions, that’s exactly what we believe software should do for your church—handle the technical side of ministry, so you can handle the human side. With the right software like Church360° Members, your church staff is better able to streamline their time by offloading certain tasks, so you can spend more time in actual ministry.

Discover volunteer coordinating tools like these—as well as a brand new event forms feature—in our membership software, Church360° Members.

How to Encourage eGiving in Your Congregation

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:00:00 GMT

Electronic giving is an increasingly popular method for giving among church congregations. If you’re looking to encourage church eGiving, you’re not alone.

There are many perks to church eGiving, and most online church-giving platforms, including Church360°, offer some form of eGiving integration to make it easy for your church and its members! Here’s how you can encourage eGiving among your church congregation.

How to Encourage Church eGiving

Encouraging church eGiving doesn’t have to be complicated—in fact, it’s probably much easier than you think! As with any messaging surrounding giving, you’ll want to keep in mind sensitivities people have about finances and giving to the church.

Advertise It

It may seem simple, but the best way to encourage church eGiving is to simply let people know it’s available to them! There are many people who might not know you offer it because they’re in a routine of giving with cash or a check.

Drop a short blurb about electronic giving in your bulletin or your email newsletter, providing a QR code or link for members to sign up. You can also announce it during your service before the offering is collected and direct people to a QR code in their bulletin or on the screen.

Make It Easy and Secure

In order to encourage church eGiving, you need to maximize your tools to ensure eGiving is both easy and secure. To make it easy, you want the sign-up process to be seamless and simple. Any additional click or step serves as a barrier to giving and could deter people from finishing the sign-up process. To make it secure, you need to ensure that your eGiving provider—for example, Vanco— processes payment data securely to protect your members’ sensitive financial information.

Ask Directly

Lastly, you can encourage church eGiving by simply asking individual members directly. If you have members who regularly give online anyway, you can ask them if they’d be interested in switching to eGiving. Be sure to share the benefits for both them and your church congregation!

Why You Should Encourage Church eGiving

Easy for Members

Church eGiving can be much easier than giving cash or a check. For many younger people, giving online is more convenient, as they may not have cash or checks on them at any given time. And, with some education, it can be easy for anyone!

Boosts Recurring Giving

When you encourage church eGiving, you also boost recurring giving among your members. This, of course, can result in increased giving overall for your church. Online giving allows your members to give while they’re on vacation or can’t make it to church.

Accurately Forecasts Budgeting

Electronic giving also more accurately helps you forecast your church budget! Because you’ll have more members setting up recurring giving within your eGiving platform, you’ll be able to estimate exactly how much money will be coming in each month.

If you’re looking to encourage church eGiving in your congregation, consider implementing Church360° and Vanco into your financial back end! It’s secure and easy for both you and your members.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing Church Management Software

ctscommunity@cph.org (Concordia Technology Solutions) — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 17:00:00 GMT

When you’re choosing a church management software, you need to ask yourself (and your team) a series of questions to figure out which option is the best for you. It can be overwhelming to figure out what’s most important, especially when making a big investment like this.

However, once you’ve asked the right questions, you should feel comfortable with your decision, knowing it’s the best fit for your team’s needs! Here are some questions to ask before choosing your church management software.

What Problems Am I Trying to Solve?

If you’re actively searching for a church management software, you’ve likely already answered this question at least in part, because you have a felt need that a software could solve! However, it can be important to go through this exercise to identify exactly what your pain points are.

Church management softwares can solve streamlining processes, organize member information, track financials, and take attendance. You also might just want to consolidate multiple softwares into one.

What Features Do I Need?

The next natural question you should ask is what specific features your church needs. This varies from church to church, but asking this question will help you identify which software is right for you. It will also help you avoid paying for features you’ll never use!

For example, you might know your team needs the ability to tie giving and attendance to a member profile, or that you don’t need the ability to send emails because you use a stand-alone email service.

How Many People Will Use the Software?

Another important question to ask is how many people will be using the software. The number of users you need will impact your budget (more on that later), but you also need to be aware if multiple users can use one login, or if multiple users can log into the software and work simultaneously.

While most church management software options charge by the number of users, some, like Church360° Members, don't. You’ll need to ensure that you can set different levels of access if necessary so that team members can access the software from wherever they are (especially if they’re volunteers).

What’s My Budget?

Lastly, you need to determine your budget. You might be tempted to ask this question first, but we recommend asking this question last because it all depends on your answers to the questions above. For example, if you have a number in mind for your budget but need to give a lot of users access and need a full suite of features, your budget might not be realistic for your needs.

However, consolidating softwares and switching to a church management software suite may be more cost-effective. If you no longer have to pay for multiple products, like a stand-alone email software, an event sign-up software, a texting platform, and a church directory software, and you instead only have one subscription, a church management software could save your church money.

Of course, it’s important to be good stewards of your church finances and to find a solution that’s right for your church’s needs and budget. But by answering all of these questions, you might find that you overestimated your budget because your needs are less than you anticipated!

The Church360° Suite contains everything your church needs in a church management software.

Understanding Databases in Your Church Management Software

ctscommunity@cph.org (Concordia Technology Solutions) — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 11:05:30 GMT

Most church staff and volunteers use their church management software every day without thinking about the technology under the hood. But a little knowledge can go a long way in making these tools easier to use and adapt. Understanding the fundamentals of relational databases—the way data is structured in these systems—can empower church workers to better navigate their software and even customize it to fit their ministry’s needs.

In the conversation below, Rob Davidson of Concordia Technology Solutions sits down with Rev. Bill Johnson, Chief Information Officer at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne. Rev. Johnson discusses relational databases and how concepts like one-to-many relationships and data tables for things such as households, members, donations, and attendance are at the heart of church management software (like Church360° Members). Together, they explore why these technical ideas matter for everyday ministry work and how they can help church staff use their software more effectively.

Households and People

DAVIDSON: Rev. Johnson, most church staff might not spend much time thinking about the database behind their church management software. Why does it matter how information is structured? Could you give us an example of how relational databases handle something basic, like household and member information, and why it’s set up that way?

JOHNSON: Great question. Most church management software really boils down to tracking a number of different objects—households, people, donations, events, even things like trees or church library books, if you wanted. Computers use databases to store information about these different objects in tables. So, as an example, we might have a table of households that looks something like this:

Id	HouseholdName	Number of People	<bunch of other fields/columns>
1	Martin and Katie Luther Household	2	<Address, etc.>

The fields in this table all relate to the Household—like its address and how many people are in it—but this alone doesn’t tell us much about Martin or Katie themselves. Because a Person is a different kind of object than a Household, we create a separate table for people:

Id	HouseholdId	FirstName	LastName	<bunch of other fields/columns>
1	1	Martin	Luther	<Phone, email, etc.>
2	1	Katie	Luther	<Her phone, email, etc.>

Here we keep all the information that relates to a specific person—names, phone, email, Baptism date, and so on—in one spot. But notice, if we wanted to send Katie a letter, there’s no address listed in the Person table. That address is stored with the Household, so we need to connect the two. That’s where the HouseholdId field comes in. By storing the household’s ID on each person who belongs to that household, we create a relationship in our database between these two objects. Every person can be linked to a household, and every household can have many people. In technical terms, this is a one-to-many relationship (one household, many people). The important part is seeing how the back end of the system connects these two objects together.

Now, you might ask: why not just store all this information in one big table? We could add an address column to the Person table and have everything in one place, right? Absolutely—but consider what happens when a family moves to a new address. If the address is listed on each individual person in the household, you would have to update every single person’s record with the new address. That’s a lot of extra work (and an easy way for data to become inconsistent if you miss someone). By keeping address data on the household record and using the relationships to link people to households, you only have to edit the single household entry. The change automatically applies to everyone in that household. In short, the relational design saves time and keeps your data cleaner whenever something like an address needs updating.

Donations

DAVIDSON: Churches also track offerings and donations in their management software. How are donations stored in the database, and why aren’t they just fields on a person’s profile? What’s the benefit of having a separate Donations table when tracking contributions over time?

JOHNSON: When it comes to donations, church software will store each gift as its own record in a Donations table (separate from the People records). For example, a Donations table might look like this:

Id	DonorId	Amount	<bunch of other fields/columns>
1	1	100.00	<Payment method, date, etc.>

Here, we’re once again using the relational aspect of the database to tie this donation to a particular donor (DonorId 1, which might correspond to Martin Luther in the People table). Keeping donation data in a separate table from the Person table makes a lot of sense. Remember, Martin can—and hopefully will—make more than one donation in his life. We need a way to record multiple donation entries that all still point back to Martin (and through Martin, connect to the Luther Household). By using a one-donor-to-many-donations structure, the database can store exactly what we need: any given person can have multiple donations associated with them over time.

If we tried to put donations as fields on Martin’s person record (for example, having fields like “Donation1,” “Donation2,” etc.), we’d quickly run out of room or end up with a very messy design, especially for generous members who give often. Instead, the separate Donations table allows the church to keep an ongoing list of contributions, each linked to the donor. This makes it easy to generate giving statements, track total contributions, and see giving history for each member without cluttering the core member profile with countless donation fields.

Attendance

DAVIDSON: Let’s talk about attendance tracking. Say we want to record who attends each worship service. If one service has 200 people in attendance, how does the database manage that without duplicating the service entry 200 times? How does a relational model record which people showed up at which worship service?

JOHNSON: Excellent example. Consider a Worship Services table in your church management system. Each worship service (each instance of a Sunday or special service) would be one record in this table. It might look like this:

Id	Date	Time	<bunch of other fields/columns>
1	2/23/25	10:30 AM	<Other data as appropriate>

Notice that in the Worship Services table, we don’t have a list of people attending or a direct link to a Person record. We wouldn’t want to enter the same service into the database 200 times just to connect 200 attendees to it—that would be a ton of duplicate data for no good reason. Instead, we define the relationships between tables. In this case, each person can attend many services, and each service has many people attending. That’s what we call a many-to-many relationship. Managing a many-to-many relationship requires a third table (often called a Join table) to connect the two sides. Let’s call it ServiceAttendance:

Service Id	Person Id
1	1
1	2

There’s not much to this table because its whole job is simply to sit at the intersection of the other two tables (People and Worship Services) and record the relationship. In our example above, we can clearly see that Service Id 1 (the 2/23/25 10:30 a.m. service) is linked to Person Id 1 (Martin) and Person Id 2 (Katie). This tells us that Martin and Katie were both in worship on that date. We did all of that without needing 200 separate rows for the service or having a gigantic list of attendee names stuck onto the service record.

In some cases, a join table like ServiceAttendance might include additional details—say, a checkbox for whether each person received Communion at that service or other attendance notes. But usually, it’s kept simple: just two columns (or a few) to connect the records. The benefit is huge: by structuring attendance as its own link table, the software can efficiently answer questions like “Who attended the 10:30 a.m. service on 2/23/25?” or “How many services has Martin attended this year?” without any duplication of the service or person data. It’s all about linking existing records together.

So What?

DAVIDSON: This is really insightful on a technical level. So what’s the takeaway for a church staff member? Why should pastors, administrators, or volunteers care about these behind-the-scenes relationships? How does knowing about tables and relationships actually help people use their church management software day to day?

JOHNSON: The big payoff in understanding the data structure is that it can make the software less confusing and more useful for you. In most software, especially church management systems, the user interface is designed after the data structure is figured out. In other words, the way the screens and menus are organized usually reflects how the data is organized under the hood. Knowing a little about those relationships can give you clues about where to find things and why the system works the way it does.

For example, if the software developers (programmers) built addresses into a separate table linked to households (a common design, especially if people might have seasonal addresses or multiple addresses), then chances are the user interface will have a distinct section or screen for managing addresses for a household. If you’re aware of that design, it makes sense why you might have to go to a specific Address area to update a family’s contact info, instead of just editing a person’s profile. Another example: if your system allows you to manage groups or ministries (like a youth group or an LWML circle), and you can add members to those groups, behind the scenes there’s probably a many-to-many relationship at work. The interface might have a multi-select dropdown or a checklist where you connect people to a group. Understanding that there’s a separate linking mechanism for groups and people helps you anticipate that you might need to go to a special Groups screen to manage membership, rather than expecting a simple checkbox on a person’s profile. In short, the interface is often built around these underlying tables and relationships.

By understanding the underlying data structure, the entire system becomes more transparent and easier to use. You won’t be as perplexed when the software makes you enter something a certain way, because you’ll recognize the database relationship guiding that process. Additionally, if your system allows for any customization—say you can add custom fields or even custom types of records—having a grasp of good database structure can help you configure those in a smart way. A well-planned database structure can be the difference between a system that works exactly how your church needs and a system that can’t quite capture the information you want. In ministry, we often say tools should serve the mission; understanding how your data is structured ensures the software is serving your church effectively, not causing frustration.

DAVIDSON: Thank you, Rev. Johnson. This has been a fascinating look under the hood of church management software. Your insights really help demystify those technical concepts and show why they matter for ministry. I’m sure church leaders and staff will find it much easier to work with their software knowing what’s going on behind the scenes.

Work with your membership database with ease with Church360° Members, our people-focused church management software.

Tips for Simplifying Offering Entry for Church Volunteers and Staff

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:00:00 GMT

Offering entry is just one of many administrative tasks that a church requires to run smoothly—and often, churches rely on volunteers to input offering data into a church management software or spreadsheet. And while this task might seem easy, there are certainly some ways you can make it easier on your faithful volunteers, ushers, and elders—to avoid entry errors and also prevent volunteer burnout.

So how can you make offering entry easier for your volunteers or team? What are the best practices for offering entry to reduce errors and time spent?

Here are some practical tips to make offering entry easier for your ushers, elders, and offering volunteers.

Best Practices for Offering Entry

Record Offerings in Batches

Recording your offerings in batches based on the event you’re recording is one easy way to optimize the offering-entry process. Not only does this help you streamline your church’s giving practices, but it also can help you avoid unnecessary entry errors.

Once the offerings have been counted and verified, they can be added to a master tracker, either in a centralized spreadsheet or in church management software like Church360° Members.

Secure Volunteer Access

Keeping your members’ financial information secure is paramount, so your giving software needs to protect their sensitive data. You can give your volunteers access to the offering batches, but keep the centralized spreadsheet secure and private with your treasurer or head administrator.

This process ensures that your volunteers have access only to the information they need to complete their task and that private data is protected and still available to those who might need it.

Utilize Pivot Tables

In your reporting, utilize pivot tables from your centralized tracker so you can create focused reports by giver, type, or date. This allows you to share relevant information in an easy-to-interpret matter, so you can see trends at a glance, rather than combing through thousands of data cells.

Note that as you add more data, you will have to refresh your pivot table. This is the downside to Excel—it’s more manual and doesn’t allow for self-generating reports.

Implement eGiving

eGiving, of course, makes offering entry easier by removing the need for the task altogether! While you should still reconcile your accounts and ensure accuracy week to week, eGiving greatly reduces the margin of error, since it eliminates the manual entry portion of the task.

Partners like Vanco and Concordia Technology Solutions allow you to integrate your eGiving into your church management software, so your members’ information is connected and secure. With eGiving, not only can your members give online but you can also effortlessly export data to understand trends in giving, share summarized reports with your leadership team, and keep your members’ data secure.

Of course, even if you implement eGiving, you’ll likely still have members who give in person—and that’s okay! There will always be a need for some manual offering entry; eGiving just reduces the expansiveness of the task.

Easily enter offerings by person or envelope number, split transactions, and email or print giving statements right from inside Church360º Members, our web-based church management software!

3 Models to Help You Get the Most Out of Your Church Website

wscjohnson@gmail.com (Rev. Bill Johnson) — Tue, 27 May 2025 11:00:00 GMT

Congregations have varying needs, resources, and technical skills, so it’s important to approach a church’s web presence with a clear strategy. In the following blog, read about how Rob Davidson of Concordia Technology Solutions had the pleasure of sitting down with Rev. Bill Johnson, a tech-savvy pastor, to discuss how churches can think more intentionally about their website strategy.

DAVIDSON: Rev. Johnson, why should churches put careful thought into their website strategy? Doesn’t a basic site suffice?

JOHNSON: It really pays for churches to be intentional about what they want their website to do. If you don’t think it through, you might end up with a site that doesn’t actually serve your ministry or your audience well. Different churches have different goals and resources, so their websites should reflect that. In fact, there are a few distinct philosophies or strategies for church websites—each with its own pros and cons—and choosing the right one depends a great deal on your congregation and its needs. By planning thoughtfully, you can decide whether your site will simply provide information, serve as an interactive community, or something in between. That clarity will guide everything from design to how often you update the site.

“Yellow Pages Ad” Style Website

DAVIDSON: One strategy you often talk about is the “Yellow Pages ad” style website, essentially a very simple church site. What do you mean by that, and when might a church choose this approach?

JOHNSON: I use the term “Yellow Pages ad” for the simplest, most basic type of church website. The name comes from the old Yellow Pages phone book. This type of website is like your church’s basic listing on the internet. It’s there so that if people search for a church in your area (say someone googles “Peoria Lutheran Church”), your church comes up and they can get the essential info about you.

In a “Yellow Pages ad” style site, you’ll want to include all the basic information a potential visitor might need. I’m talking about things like your church’s address, phone number, email, service times, and maybe a brief note on what your church believes. It’s also a great idea to have a section for first-time visitors—letting them know what to expect if they come to a service. Remember, some people checking out your site may have never been to a church or have not attended in years, so a little guidance can make them feel more comfortable visiting in person.

What the “Yellow Pages ad” style website doesn’t need is a lot of fancy features or constant updates. This kind of site isn’t meant to be interactive; it’s essentially a digital brochure or business card for your church: just a few pages of static information. And that’s perfectly fine, because the primary audience for this site is outsiders or newcomers looking for basic details, not your regular members. In fact, your members likely won’t visit a static info site very often—and that’s okay. The Yellow Pages approach is a solid option for many congregations, especially those with limited technical expertise or volunteer time to maintain a more complex site.

Social Media Hub

DAVIDSON: Many churches today communicate heavily on Facebook and other platforms. Another website strategy you’ve described is using the church website as a social media hub—basically directing visitors to the church’s social media for updates. How does that work?

JOHNSON: The social media hub–style of website is essentially like a central gateway to all your church’s social media content. I often compare it to a Linktree or aggregator for a church. The idea here is that your congregation might actually have a more robust presence on social media than on your website. It makes sense in a lot of cases: if most of your members and community are already on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and so on, and you find it easier to push out news and announcements on those platforms, then your website can simply point people to those active channels. It’s all about speaking where your audience is listening. If your members are regularly on social media, it’s logical to focus your communication efforts there and use the website as a jumping-off point. In this approach, the website itself might still have some basic info (much like the “Yellow Pages ad” style), but prominently feature links, feeds, or widgets for your church’s social media pages. It encourages visitors to connect with the church on those social platforms for the most up-to-date content.

This strategy shares a lot of similarities with the “Yellow Pages ad” approach in that the site itself remains fairly simple and info focused. The big difference is it pushes your social media presence to the forefront as the way to “find out more” or engage with the church. The advantage is that if you’re already doing a great job posting on social media, you’re leveraging that content instead of trying to re-create it on a separate website blog or news page. However, there are some important cautions with a social media hub site. The first is that a successful social media presence requires … well, presence! You have to be consistently active. Nothing will turn off a potential visitor faster than clicking on your church’s Facebook feed (which you proudly feature on your site) and seeing that the last post was from two years ago.

Another thing to remember is that social media is an interactive medium, not just a broadcast channel. Using your website as a social media hub means you’re inviting two-way communication, not just pushing announcements. If a church only uses its Facebook to post “Here’s what’s happening this week” and never engages with comments or other content, it’s going to be hard to gain and keep followers, let alone build an online community. The heart of social media is being social: listening to what others are saying, commenting, starting conversations, and responding in a timely way.

Online Community

DAVIDSON: The third approach you mentioned is trying to build a full online community on the church’s own website—essentially making the site a central hub for communication and fellowship. This sounds ambitious. What does it entail, and what should a church consider before attempting it? Is it possible to create that kind of online community without a lot of advanced technical skill or a dedicated communications staff?

JOHNSON: The full “online community” model is indeed the most ambitious type of church website, and it’s a tough one for most churches to pull off. In this approach, the church’s website isn’t just an info source or a social media funnel—it is the place where a lot of congregation interaction happens. You’re trying to make your website into the go-to communication hub for your members (and possibly others), with features like event calendars, small group sign-ups, prayer forums, sermon discussions, member directories, and so on. In theory, it’s fantastic: everything is in one place on a platform the church controls. But in practice, it can be a difficult hill to climb, and frankly, most churches aren’t very successful with it long-term. To do it well requires substantial technical know-how, plenty of content creation, and a lot of time investment to keep things running and current. It’s usually only an option for congregations that have very tech-savvy staff or volunteers and the capacity to continuously generate content and interaction.

Think about your own daily internet habits: All of us have a handful of websites or apps we visit regularly (maybe even multiple times a day). These could be social media, news sites, favorite blogs, and so on. Now, there’s only so much time in the day for consuming content, and most people aren’t actively looking to add more websites to their daily rotation. For a church to establish a successful online community on its website, it needs to create content and experiences compelling enough that members will incorporate visiting the church site into their regular routine—potentially even replacing something else they normally check.

What I often see is churches embarking on an online community website with the best of intentions. The problem is sustainability. It’s one thing to set up all those features; it’s another thing entirely to keep them active and current week in and week out.

Now, it’s important to say that none of these ambitious features are bad in and of themselves. Things like blogs, forums, online sign-ups, and interactive calendars can be wonderful tools for ministry—when done well. In fact, much of that same content (events, devotionals, discussions) can thrive on social media or email newsletters, where people are already tuned in. The challenge is that most individual congregations simply don’t have the sheer volume of content (or content creators) to compete with the other online destinations vying for their members’ attention. For the average church, trying to manufacture that level of content and interaction on their own site can lead to burnout and a stagnant website. In most cases, those congregations are better served by leveraging social media and other existing platforms for interaction, and keeping their own website more info focused.

Conclusion

Rev. Johnson’s insights highlight that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for church websites. Each of the three approaches discussed—the “Yellow Pages ad” style site, the social media hub, and the full online community—comes with its own benefits and challenges. The best strategy for a given congregation depends on its audience, resources, and goals. The overarching lesson from this conversation is the importance of being intentional and realistic about your church’s web presence. As Rev. Johnson noted, thoughtful planning and honest self-assessment of your church’s capabilities are crucial. By choosing a website strategy that aligns with your ministry goals and capacity, you ensure that your church’s website truly supports your mission and helps you connect with people in meaningful ways.

Church360° Unite, CTS’s church website builder software, helps you create a church website that fits your unique needs. Start a free trial today!

How to Make Online Giving Easier: User Experience Tips for Churches

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 13 May 2025 14:31:49 GMT

Online giving has many benefits for churches—not only does it increase consistency in giving but it also saves your church office time by eliminating the need to deposit checks and reconcile accounts manually. But the online giving user experience is just as important as simply offering online giving.

The user experience of your online giving should be frictionless. Your members or visitors should have no barriers to giving online. If you’re looking to improve the online giving user experience at your church, look no further! We’re breaking down our best user experience tips to reduce friction in online giving.

Online Giving User Experience Tips

The goal of improving your user experience in your online giving platform means reducing all barriers that might prevent people from being able to give online. Here are some user experiences to keep in mind when using online giving.

Bank or Credit Card Options

It may seem simple, but make sure your church’s online giving platform has multiple ways to pay—namely, by bank transfer or by credit card. Often, bank transfers incur fewer fees than credit card transactions. Bonus points if your platform offers payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay, or the like! Remember, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to give.

Security

Security is of the utmost importance when dealing with sensitive financial data, and your online giving platform is no different. Be diligent in understanding how secure the payments are—you can look for data security standards, such as PCI-DSS, which demonstrate a commitment to maintaining privacy for your members’ data. Confidence in the giving platform itself can improve the user experience.

Mobile-Friendly

Lastly, make sure your online giving user experience is mobile friendly. If you’re using a major giving provider (like Vanco, which partners with Concordia Technology Solutions), the mobile experience will already be optimized for you! But because most people will be giving via their smartphone, whether in-person at your church via a QR code or at home while checking their email, you need to ensure the experience is seamless.

Ways to Promote Online Giving

Another way to create a better user experience of eGiving is to make the process of accessing the online giving platform easier! Here are some different ways you can direct people to give online.

Link to Church Online Giving Platform

The first and most obvious way is to just link your church’s online giving platform on your website! In your navigation, you could just link the Give button to go directly to your church’s online giving platform. Or you could place the link onto a dedicated giving page on your website, where you explain why we give as Christians. Either way, you’re guiding your members to give online!

QR Code

If you’re looking to encourage online giving during your worship service, consider placing a QR code that links to your church’s online giving platform in your bulletin, on your pew cards, or on your offering slide. Giving people an easy way to give if they feel called is the goal!

Text-to-Give

Lastly, you can implement text-to-give, which allows your members to simply text your church’s online giving platform and give that way. This is especially helpful if you don’t use slides during your service or many of your members don’t have smartphones.

Maximize your eGiving potential with Vanco, Concordia Technology Solutions’ preferred eGiving solution. Request a demo today!

3 Practical Tools for Decluttering Your Church Email Inbox

Stephen Bornheimer — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 12:43:18 GMT

Email is an indispensable communication tool in churches and schools, enabling ministry leaders, staff, volunteers, parents, and parishioners to stay connected. However, managing today’s email inboxes can feel overwhelming and stressful. I recently conducted a poll of church workers from all over the United States, asking how many unread emails were in their inboxes. The responses ranged from zero to 106,000! While some are successful at managing their inboxes, others, for various reasons, find the “unread” count creeping up day by day, week by week.

How do email inboxes get so cluttered? Every email address is a digital fingerprint tied to your identity—tracked, analyzed, and often exploited. Necessary messages compete for attention with promotional emails, spam, and unwanted solicitations, hindering mission-critical communication.

How can we reclaim the inbox as a resource for effective ministry and education? How can we make email work for us rather than against us? In the following paragraphs, we will explore practical tools, such as aliases, email groups, and plus addressing, to transform your email ecosystem into an efficient, manageable system that supports your mission.

Aliases: Simplifying Address Management

An alias is a secondary email address that directs messages to the same inbox as the primary address. Think of it as a nickname for your email account, offering flexibility without changing your primary address.

Practical Example: Handling Name Changes

Imagine a staff member named Sarah Williams gets married and changes her last name to Johnson. Instead of disrupting communication, the organization can create an alias (Sarah.Johnson@domain.com) that points to her original inbox (Sarah.Williams@domain.com). This allows her to seamlessly receive emails addressed to either name while updating her contacts.

This flexibility is particularly useful for organizations with high staff turnover or those dealing with volunteers. By maintaining continuity with aliases, you avoid disruptions in communication while keeping your email management system simple.

Practical Example: Handling Key Positions

Within our churches, schools, and organizations, we have many overlapping titles or similar positions. Take, for example, a sole pastor at a small congregation, a principal, or an office assistant. In my line of work I communicate with thousands of churches and many—more than half—have email addresses for these positions as the staff member’s name. They are often firstname.lastname@church.com or something similar. However, when a pastor is called to a different congregation, the office assistant moves on to another job, or a principal retires, we find that it can be hard to go through all websites, databases, contacts, nooks, and crannies to change the contact information. Aliases can help with this.

One ideal setup is to have each key position in your organization have two email addresses. One primary and one public facing alias. For example, using our example from above, let’s say that Sarah Johnson is the principal of a school associated with our congregation. Sarah.Johnson@domain.com could be the email that Sarah uses for personal things, like signing up for a professional organization subscription, trying a new tech resource before showing it to teachers, or accessing an educator discount card at the local bookstore. However, for all professional matters that are tied to the role of principal, Sarah could use the alias Principal@domain.com. This simple alias can be used on state forms, school publications, in congregation publications, and other school-related matters. If Sarah takes a position at a different school, the alias Principal@domain.com just gets assigned to the new principal and Sarah’s email gets shutdown. The communication for the school keeps flowing without disruption, making the transition much smoother.

How to Set Up an Alias

1. Log in to your email platform’s admin console (e.g., Google Workspace or Microsoft 365).
2. Go to the user’s account settings.
3. Add the alias under the “Email aliases” or “Additional addresses” section.

This setup takes just a few minutes and requires no changes to the user’s workflow. If you use a personal Gmail or iCloud account, research your options. For example, iCloud allows three email aliases that can be set up in the Mail app at iCloud.com. If you are interested in looking at how to implement aliases as part of a Google Workspace environment check out this help article from Google or from Microsoft.

Caveats of the Alias

While aliases are convenient, senders may mistakenly assume an alias is the primary address. Include your primary email in your signature prevents confusion and ensures others know how to reach you.

I remember when I first started using an email signature. I thought, “Why would I put my email in my signature? Can’t people see who sent them the message?” Over time, I realized that as email systems became more complex, including my primary email address in my signature helped me to set the email at which I wanted people to contact me.

Email Groups: Centralizing Communication

Email groups are addresses (e.g., group@domain.com) that distribute messages to multiple recipients. They simplify team collaboration and ensure no one is left out of key communication.

Practical Example: Volunteer Coordination

Imagine your church runs a community meal program with ten volunteers. Instead of emailing each volunteer individually or copying and pasting a list of addresses into the BCC field (please don’t do this), you can create a group email like MealsTeam@domain.com. Messages sent to this group automatically reach all members, keeping everyone informed.

In my years of working with professionals and consulting for organizations, I’ve encountered skepticism about group emails—especially from smaller teams. “Why is this better than pasting emails into the BCC field?” they often ask. While using BCC might seem sufficient, group emails offer distinct advantages:

Why Group Emails Are Superior

Centrally Managed: Admins can easily update group membership without needing to inform others of changes. For example, if a new volunteer joins your program, the admin can add their email to the group, and they’ll instantly receive future communications without further action from the team.
Controlled Access: Group emails can restrict who is allowed to send messages, ensuring only authorized users or organizational members can contact the group.
Privacy Protection: Group emails automatically hide recipient addresses, maintaining confidentiality without relying on the BCC field. This is crucial when emailing sensitive groups, such as minors or those receiving pastoral care.

Did you know you can send quick group emails directly from your church management software at no additional cost with Church360° Members? Start free trial »

How to Set Up an Email Group

1. Open your email platform’s admin console.
2. Select “Groups” or “Distribution lists.”
3. Create a new group and assign it a name (e.g., MealsTeam@domain.com).
4. Add members’ email addresses.

Note: Specific platforms often change their user interface so the provided instructions are general in nature. A quick internet search can help you find the most current up-to-date instructions.

Caveats and Best Practices

While group emails streamline communication, fragmented conversations can occur if recipients reply to individuals rather than the group. Encourage members to use “Reply All” to maintain transparency and keep everyone informed.

For advanced use cases, explore collaborative inboxes available in platforms like Google Workspace. Collaborative inboxes allow teams to manage incoming emails together, assign tasks, and track progress—all from a shared space.

Plus Addressing: Organizing with Sub-Addresses

Plus addressing (or sub-addressing) allows users to customize their email address by adding a “+” followed by a keyword. Messages sent to the modified address still arrive in the main inbox, enabling automatic sorting or filtering.

Practical Example: Event Registrations

For a Vacation Bible School (VBS) event, you could use ChurchAdmin+VBS@domain.com. Filters can sort all messages sent to this address into a dedicated “VBS” folder, keeping your inbox organized and making it easy to find relevant information.

This tool is especially helpful for segmenting communications from different sources. For example, you might use Sarah.Johnson+CONF2025@domain.com when registering for an event. Later, you can filter or search for all emails sent to this address, streamlining inbox management.

How to Use Plus Addressing

When signing up for a service, append a relevant tag to your email address (e.g., Pastor.John+Newsletter@domain.com).
Create a filter in your email client to sort messages with that address into a specific folder or label.

Caveats

Some platforms may not support addresses with a “+” symbol. Test compatibility before relying on this method for essential communication. If you encounter compatibility issues, consider using aliases or email groups instead.

A Layered Approach to Email Management

Each of these tools addresses specific challenges, but they are most effective when used together:

A pastor uses aliases to consolidate name variations into one inbox.
The church office creates email groups for teams, like the building committee, to streamline updates.
Administrators use plus addressing to organize donor correspondence.
Teachers use plus addressing when signing up for a teacher’s conference everyone is required to attend.

Implementation Tips for Beginners

Not sure where to start? Follow these steps to ease into email management:

Start Small: Test with one alias or email group to evaluate functionality. For example, set up an email group for your worship team or committee to coordinate team communication.
Leverage Resources: Many email platforms provide tutorials and guides. Search for platform-specific “how-to” articles, such as those for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Set aside a dedicated afternoon each month to start to learn how to implement some of these strategies.
Engage Tech-Savvy Volunteers: Recruit a volunteer who is comfortable with email administration to help implement these tools. This can lighten the load on staff and ensure proper setup.

Conclusion

Email doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By adopting aliases, email groups, and plus addressing, churches and schools can transform their inboxes into tools for effective ministry and education.

With these strategies, you can streamline communication, reduce clutter, and ensure that vital messages reach the right people. Whether you’re coordinating volunteers, managing events, or leading a ministry, these tools can help you focus on what matters most—your mission.

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An Interview on Potential Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Ministry

wscjohnson@gmail.com (Rev. Bill Johnson) — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:08:25 GMT

Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace. New tools are emerging faster than most of us can learn to use them, and it can feel overwhelming—even for those who love tech. In the last year alone, we’ve seen incredible leaps in artificial intelligence (AI), especially with the rise of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. These tools offer powerful new capabilities, but as with any new technology, they come with challenges and warnings to consider.

In the conversation below, Rob Davidson of Concordia Technology Solutions sits down with Rev. Bill Johnson to discuss how AI might impact church ministry. Rev. Johnson, a tech-savvy pastor, is optimistic about the good AI can do in the coming years. However, he urges churches to approach AI with wisdom and caution. Together, Rob and Rev. Johnson explore three key areas of concern—reliability, privacy/security, and anthropomorphism—and how church leaders can navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of AI in ministry.

Reliability

DAVIDSON: Rev. Johnson, let’s start with reliability. These AI tools can do some amazing things, but I recall you mentioning that it doesn’t take long for an AI like ChatGPT to be “just plain wrong.” Why do these AI models often get things wrong, and what does that mean for church staff who might want to use them?

JOHNSON: That’s a great question. One thing to understand is that large language models don’t actually “know” facts in the way we do. At their core, they’re statistical models predicting probable word patterns. So sometimes an AI will produce an answer that sounds confident and very plausible, but it can be completely incorrect—what we call a “hallucination.” And it happens regularly. You can try to minimize it by crafting your prompt carefully (for example, explicitly telling the AI to stick to known facts and not make assumptions), but even then, you have to double-check everything it outputs. In short, if a pastor or church staff member uses an AI-generated answer for something important, they absolutely need to fact-check it against reliable sources before trusting it.

DAVIDSON: Given those limitations, have you found any ways that tools like ChatGPT can still be helpful in a church or ministry context? In other words, where do these AI tools excel despite not always being reliable with facts?

JOHNSON: Yes, there are a few areas where AI can shine. Brainstorming is a big one. For example, I once asked ChatGPT to suggest some icebreaker games for a youth group, and it came up with a bunch of fun ideas. That kind of creative idea generation can save time when you’re planning events or looking for fresh approaches. Another area is handling technical or routine tasks. I’ve used an AI to help write bits of computer code, which not every church needs, but it shows the range of what it can do. More commonly, I’ve found it useful for drafting things like emails or letters. You can have the AI produce a first draft of a routine announcement or a thank-you note, and then you, as the human, edit and personalize it. The key is treating AI as a starting point, not a finished product. It can do the rough work, but you still refine the final output. And I’ll be honest, sometimes getting a really good result from an AI means you spend a lot of effort wording your prompt just right. At times, that effort can equal or exceed the time it would’ve taken to just write the message yourself! So it’s a bit of a trade-off. Use AI for a creative boost or quick draft but always review and correct it with your own wisdom and factual checks.

Privacy and Security

DAVIDSON: A lot of these AI tools are free and easy to access, which is great for churches on a budget. But you’ve raised a red flag about privacy. What do church leaders need to be aware of regarding data security when using AI services?

JOHNSON: It’s true—“free” tools often come with hidden costs. There’s an old saying in tech: If you’re not paying for a product, then you (or your data) are the product. This absolutely applies to many free AI services. Any text, file, or information you enter into a free AI tool can be stored and used to improve the AI model. In other words, your input isn’t private. It might even resurface in some form for another user later. For example, if a pastor were to copy-paste portions of a confidential email or counseling conversation into a free AI to get suggestions, there’s a risk that sensitive information could leak out or appear in someone else’s AI results down the line. That’s a scary thought in a ministry setting, where trust and confidentiality are vital.

Now, some paid AI plans do offer better privacy—often they promise not to use your data for training their models. But even then, it’s important to read the fine print. Not all “paid” plans are equal in this regard. The bottom line for churches is caution: Never share sensitive personal or church data with an AI tool unless you’re certain about how that data will be used and protected. It might be better to err on the side of privacy and keep confidential information out of these systems altogether or use self-hosted AI tools that keep your data in-house. In any case, church leaders should treat AI like any other online service—be wise about what you input and assume that anything you share could potentially become public.

Anthropomorphism

DAVIDSON: The last major concern you highlight is anthropomorphism—basically, treating these AI systems as if they were human. That’s a big word but an important idea. Could you unpack what you mean by that, and why it could be dangerous or misleading in a ministry setting?

JOHNSON: Anthropomorphism in the context of AI means projecting human attributes onto a machine. And honestly, it’s surprisingly easy to do. I’ve even caught myself interacting with an AI chatbot like it’s a person—getting frustrated and arguing with it when it doesn’t “understand” me or asking it to brainstorm and then wondering what it “thinks” about my question. Of course, the AI isn’t thinking or feeling at all; it’s just generating responses based on algorithms. But because the conversation feels so natural, we can get a bit too comfortable, almost as if there’s a little person inside the computer.

For the church, this is a huge issue on the horizon. If people start treating AI programs as if they have thoughts, feelings, or even spiritual significance, we could get really confused about what it means to be human. As Christians, we believe humans are uniquely created by God, made in His image, with souls and real lives that no machine can replicate. An AI might imitate conversation or even emotion, but it’s not a person. Keeping that distinction clear is going to be one of the great challenges for the church in the next few years. We’ll need to consistently teach and remind our communities about the God-given value of human life and how that differs from even the smartest machine.

Informed, Cautious, and Hopeful

DAVIDSON: Rev. Johnson, with all these potential pitfalls—reliability issues, privacy risks, and even questions about humanity—what encouragement or advice would you give to church leaders who are trying to navigate the rise of AI? How should they approach these tools in the coming years?

JOHNSON: My advice would be to stay informed, stay cautious, but also stay hopeful. Churches have navigated big technological shifts before by grounding themselves in Scripture and the unchanging truth of the Gospel. I believe we need to do the same with AI. Catechize your people—teach the foundational truths about God’s creation, human identity, community, privacy, and our ultimate hope in Christ. In short, approach AI with a spirit of discernment: Embrace the beneficial uses that can help your ministry but keep a watchful eye on the challenges and always lead your people back to the hope and truth we have in Jesus.

DAVIDSON: Thank you, Rev. Johnson. This has been a fascinating discussion. Your insights give us both practical tips and a spiritual perspective, which is exactly what church leaders need as we navigate these new technologies.

For more informative and fascinating posts like these, delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to the CTS blog!

Can Church Accounting Software Help with Budget Planning?

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:00:00 GMT

Budget planning in churches is a much different beast than budget planning in the business world—there’s more to account for, and oftentimes a much leaner team to get it all done. Investing in a quality church management system tool that has a robust budget feature will allow you to simplify your budget process and alleviate pain points.

But can a church accounting software actually help with budget planning? And what church budget planning tools should you look for when investing in a software? We’ve outlined all of that below, so you can be informed on which accounting software is best for your church—whether you’re a staff of one, you rely on volunteers, or you have an in-house financial team.

Can Church Accounting Software Help with Budget Planning?

Yes, church accounting software can help with budget planning! Whether you’re planning out your church finances for the upcoming year or only for a month, accounting software can streamline your budget process. And, because these softwares are specifically made for churches, they often contain features that are particularly useful!

No church accounting software can take out the human aspect of budgeting and forecasting, but the right tool should make it easier to make these decisions.

Church Budget Planning Tools

Simple Transaction Paths

Your church accounting software should be equipped with simple transaction paths that allow you to create journal entries for any of your budget planning needs. And ideally, it can sync with your membership software to track which accounts the offering money goes into, based on where your members have categorized their giving. For example, Concordia Technology Solutions’ accounting software, Church360° Ledger, syncs with its partner software, Church360° Members. This allows you to more effectively forecast and budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

Straightforward Reporting

Whether you need to export your income and expense reports, a chart of accounts, or your general ledger, your church budget planning tools should be able to give you straightforward reporting to allow you to more easily share data with your staff and volunteers. If you have a budget planning team, they might not have (or need) access to your church accounting software, so the ability to export your reports is necessary.

Secure Audit Trail

If you ever have a question about a transaction in your church budget planning tools, it will be helpful if your church accounting software features an Event Log that tracks all activities to your church’s accounts. This will let you see which account made the change and when it was made, so you have full transparency into each transaction. This comes in handy during budget planning season, when you might have a specific question from a transaction that took place the previous year.

Roles and Users

If you have a robust budget planning team, it might be beneficial to give some of them access to your church accounting software. Make sure the software you use allows you to create an unlimited number of roles with custom permissions—so everyone has access only to the data they need. Financial security is paramount within your church, so keeping as much data private as possible ensures you retain the trust of your members.

Access all of these essential church accounting software features with Church360° Ledger. Sign up for your free 37-day trial today!

Under the Hood: The Hidden Parts of Your Church Website

wscjohnson@gmail.com (Rev. Bill Johnson) — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 11:00:00 GMT

We’ve heard the story for years now: “Every congregation needs a website”; but the simple reality is that many congregations simply don’t have the knowledge or skills to create and support a site that will be beneficial to the church and its community. I’ll write more on overall strategy in a later post, but for today, I’d like to provide a brief introduction to the various moving parts that make up a website.

The goal here isn’t to make you into an IT genius, but simply to give you the basics so you can understand the various components that go into a site, and what the various parts of the packages website hosting companies offer to congregations actually do.

Server/Hosting Service

The first piece that’s needed to host a website is a web server that’s connected to the internet. Odds are that your congregation doesn’t have the staff to connect, maintain, and secure a server, so you’ll probably end up purchasing space on a server from your hosting company. This will likely be a server that hosts many sites, including yours, and so the performance of your site may vary depending on the activity level of the other sites on your particular hosting server. Web servers commonly run Linux and use a package called Apache for their web hosting. Apache is the old man of web servers. It’s not necessarily going to be the fastest, but it’s stable, extensible, and widely supported. It gets the job done. A slightly newer Linux option is Nginx (pronounced Engine-X). It’s younger and more agile, and it tends to perform faster than Apache, but isn’t as widely supported. Either will do in most cases, and honestly, most church websites aren’t seeing enough traffic for the difference to matter much. On a Windows server, there are options for Microsoft’s Internet Information Service, as well as ports of Apache and Nginx for Windows.

Domain Name/DNS

Now that you have your server sorted out, you need a way for people to find you on the internet. The problem here is that the internet runs on numbers, not names, much like our phone network. Some of us are still old enough to remember having to memorize phone numbers to be able to call people, but today we can just click their name/picture/contact and the technology handles the numbers. The internet works the same way. Every machine on the internet has an IPv4 address (Internet Protocol Version 4) that consists of four numbers, each between 0 and 255. (In reality, this is actually four sets of eight bits, and 2⁸=256.) So your machine’s IP public address might be 192.168.100.2, for example. (It’s not, but we’ll deal with that another day …) You can see yours by going to whatismyip.com. There you’ll see your IPv4 address, as well as IPv6 addressing, which is a wider address space that allows many more devices to connect to the internet and is coming any day now—and has been coming any day now for the past decade or so. You can ignore IPv6 for now. The system that translates site names (like www.whatismyip.com) into number addresses is called DNS (Domain Name System).

A DNS address typically consists of three or more parts. Working backward from the end of the address, we have the Top Level Domain, or TLD for short. When the Internet first came into the public realm, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) kept things pretty tightly controlled, with seven available TLDs: .edu, .net, .com, .mil, .gov, .org and .int (good information to know for trivia night). Since then, things have opened up tremendously, so you’re likely to see TLDs like .church or .website. To my knowledge, the only TLDs that remain tightly controlled are .edu (maintained by Educause), .int, and .mil.

The second piece of a DNS entry belongs to the organization that owns the domain name. You can actually look up who owns a domain name at lookup.icann.org/en, but be aware that many domain owners choose to keep their contact information confidential these days for security reasons.

Any pieces before the domain name itself are specific computer names or site names for that organization. For example, here at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, we use www.ctsfw.edu to point to our main web server, but we’ll use myclasses.ctsfw.edu to point to our learning management server (where students and faculty can find digital resources for classes, etc.).

Code/Content

Once you have a server and a way for people to reach it, you need the actual “meat” of your website. There are a few ways to approach this. The old-school way is to hand-code the site using a text editor or development environment. This is actually what I prefer personally, because it gives me full control over the site and how it displays, but it’s overkill for many church websites and it definitely makes updates more difficult. For most church websites, you’re going to want some kind of Content Management System, or CMS. There are a ton of options out there, including Wordpress, Drupal, and CTS’s Church360° Unite.

Many hosting companies will support one or more CMS systems as a part of their hosting packages, so be sure to check which ones they offer when signing up. Once you have a base CMS up and running, you’ll want to look at the various theming and branding options that are available. Most CMSs have tons of themes, with some free and many being available only through premium licensing. Be sure to look closely at the licensing to see if the theme is a one-time payment or an annual subscription.

From there, you can begin to create content for your site. The methods vary depending on the CMS platform you’re using, but most are pretty straightforward and allow you to edit using a visual WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor.

Database

I debated whether to even mention this piece, because, frankly, you’re not going to deal with it directly most of the time; but if you’re running a CMS, then somewhere back behind that is a database system/server. Chances are it’s on the same machine as the website, and your hosting provider will have selected and set up database modules that work with the CMS platforms they support. It’s there, and you should be aware of it, if for no other reason than ensuring that regular backups are a part of the hosting provider’s standard procedures.

Hopefully this has been a helpful overview of the things to look for and ask about when considering hosting services for a congregational website. In most cases, you’ll find these services bundled together, which is fine, but it’s helpful to know what you’re looking at when considering your options!

All of this information can be overwhelming, but with Church360° Unite’s easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor, creating your website can be a piece of cake!

Church Budgeting Efficiency: How to Do More with Limited Resources

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:48:07 GMT

No matter what time in your church’s fiscal year it is, if you’re a pastor , office manager, or treasurer looking for effective church budgeting tips, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll be outlining some church budgeting tips to help you streamline your accounting process, balance your budgets, and manage your accounts! By making a few small changes to how you approach your church budget, you can more effectively steward the gifts that God has graciously entrusted to your church.

Identify Fixed vs. Variable Expenses

Like any organization, churches will have both fixed and variable expenses. Accounting (no pun intended) for both of these will make the budgeting process easier.

Budget for any fixed expenses that might recur monthly or yearly. Within your church accounting software, you should be able to set up recurring transactions at a specific frequency (such as “the first Friday of every month” or “every year on November 30”).

Examples of fixed expenses:

Mortgage
Software
Salaries

You should also estimate variable expenses as best you can, in order to try to maintain an accurate budget.

Examples of variable expenses:

Hourly labor
Building maintenance
Utilities

Of course, you can only estimate your variable expenses, but even having a ballpark idea from previous years can assist in the accuracy of your church budgeting.

Implement Secure Double-Entry Accounting

Double-entry accounting is the standard for any business, and churches are no different. By using a dual-entry system of debits and credits, you can ensure that you have error-proof transactions within your church accounting software. This budgeting tip can help you stay on top of all your accounts and keep accurate financial records!

Additionally, ensure that your church accounting software has a secure audit trail. This feature not only ensures accuracy across your accounts but also allows you to track all activities within the software—so if you ever encounter an issue, you can see which user implemented the change, and when.

Account for Fluctuations in Giving

This may seem obvious, but it’s worth noting: When you budget annually, make sure to take into account seasons where giving may be higher, based on past years’ records.

Do you see a slight bump during Lent and Advent because of your midweek services? Is Christmas your biggest giving day? Maybe you see more offerings given at Easter. Or maybe your church sees a slight increase after Vacation Bible School.

Whatever the trends are in your church, you can account for those in your yearly budget to get a bigger picture of your finances for the year, rather than estimating the same amount for each month.

Utilize Last Year’s Data

Save time in your budgeting process by using last year’s data within your church accounting software to give you a starting point for the next fiscal year’s budget. You can, of course, adjust the amounts to account for inflation and raises in pay. So, while you’ll still have to make changes, you can avoid reinventing the wheel each year!

Start implementing these effective church budgeting tips with your free 37-day trial of Church360° Ledger, the CTS web-based accounting software.

Streamline Your Workflow with These Simple Email Hacks

Stephen Bornheimer — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMT

In a world brimming with technological innovations, some tools prove their enduring value time and again, and few are more valuable than email. Despite the rise of platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and WhatsApp, email remains a steadfast communication tool across workplaces.

The Power of Email

In churches worldwide, email is vital for connecting with members, coordinating volunteers, and maintaining partnerships. For some, managing email is straightforward: a quick delete, a brief read-and-reply, and done. For others, email can be a chore. Yet, email is essential for connecting with volunteers, parishioners, and fellow staff, which means inboxes fill up rapidly and require structured management.

In and amongst the stream of data flowing into our inboxes, there are obviously messages we want to see—a daily Bible verse, special sales at our favorite store, a deal on candles for the church sanctuary. However, anywhere we spend our time is an area to be monetized and a space for generating revenue. Therefore, our emails get bought and sold, passed around in databases, and collected. It is no surprise when things show up in our inboxes and make us ask ourselves, “How did that get there?” or “When did I sign up for that?”

This post offers step-by-step instructions to implement powerful sorting features in just a few minutes. Tools like Filters and Rules will help you clear the clutter, leaving only the essential emails that allow you to start your day focused on ministry rather than battling inbox noise.

Before digging too deep into the weeds, I would like to clarify a few terms. Understanding the distinction between email providers and email clients will be useful for this post. Your email provider is the company service that provides the necessary infrastructure to collect and route email to your inbox. You then have an app or website where you go to open, read, and manage your email—we usually call this an inbox, but its broader and more encompassing term is email client.

Email Provider: The service enabling you to send and receive emails (e.g., Google, Microsoft, iCloud).

Email Client: The interface where you manage your emails (e.g., Gmail app, Outlook, Apple Mail).

There is a good reason we are focusing on Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Not only do these products provide powerful, easy-to-use features to streamline inbox management, but they are also prolific in workspaces globally. These platforms are user-friendly and affordable, making them accessible to churches of all sizes. Whether for personal or professional use, most church workers likely use one of these platforms.

Practical Examples of Filters/Rules

So, what are Filters and Rules? Filters or Rules are action and reaction commands that automatically sort and perform tasks on your inbox so you don’t have to. Apple Mail and Outlook calls them "Rules," while Gmail calls them "Filters." Here are some practical examples:

Move all emails from “newsletter@churchdomain.org” to the Church Newsletters folder.

Label emails from the worship committee with a color or tag for easy identification and move them to the Worship Planning folder.

Automatically move all solicitation emails from target.com into a retail or Target folder.

Automatically star and/or mark as important all emails from your pastor(s).

Investing time to set up Filters or Rules will give you more time to focus on essential work. Whether sorting emails from a specific sender or organizing important messages, these automation tools can enhance productivity.

The Basics of Email Structure

Filters and Rules can be customized based on different email components. To set up them up effectively, it's helpful to understand the core components of an email that clients use for sorting:

Send Date: When the email was sent

Subject Line: A brief summary of the email content

From: The sender's email address

To: The recipient's email address(es)

CC (Carbon Copy): Individuals copied for awareness but not as the primary audience

BCC (Blind Carbon Copy): Individuals copied without the primary recipients knowing

Domain: The part of an email address after the “@” symbol (e.g., “gmail.com,” “churchdomain.org”)

Using the terms above, a user can build Filters and Rules that operate on a criteria/action model by selecting one of these components from a list or dropdown and then applying the actions to be taken if the email meets those requirements. Let's look at a few examples below.

Example 1: Organizing Important Emails

Let's say you want to organize all emails from a school principal and apply skip, move, and mark actions. Here is a quick layout of what that might look like:

Criteria: All emails from “principal@schooldomain.org”

Actions: Skip the inbox. Move to a folder labeled “Principal.” Mark as read.

This rule moves emails from a specific sender into a designated folder, bypassing the main inbox. It declutters the inbox while keeping important messages accessible in a folder, where a simple search brings up relevant information when needed.

Example 2: Volunteer Coordination

Another example would be to try and enhance transparency for volunteer communication by making sure everyone is in the loop and that emails get to the right people quickly. In this case, instead of using From as the criteria, use To followed by the actions of Label, Forward, and Mark.

Look at how to structure this Filter/Rule below to improve communication:

Criteria: All emails sent to “volunteers@churchdomain.org

Actions: Apply a "Volunteers" label. Forward a copy to a designated team member. Mark with a star for visibility.

If you coordinate volunteers, filtering emails sent to a shared address ensures that you and your team members remain updated. This helps streamline communication and prevents important messages from being missed.

Implementation

The true advantage of Filters and Rules lies in their adaptability. They can streamline your workflow by automating the organization of newsletters, event registrations, and volunteer communications. The sky is the limit! Now, let’s quickly look at some simple step-by-step instructions on how to implement these time-saving practices into your daily workflow. Please note that while most of us consume email on our phones, some of these Filters and Rules can only be implemented using a desktop or laptop. That isn’t to say they don’t work on mobile devices. You will see the immediate impact of these tools in your inbox wherever you use it (mobile, tablet, laptop, or desktop), but they must be set up on a PC or Mac computer.

How to Set Up Filters and Rules

Apple Mail on Mac (Rules):

Open Mail and go to Mail > Settings > Rules.
Click Add Rule.
Name the rule and set the criteria (e.g., “From” contains “worshipcommittee@churchdomain.org”).
Choose actions such as “Move Message to mailbox” or “Apply color label.”
Click OK and apply the rule to existing messages if needed.

Gmail (Filters):

Click the settings gear icon and choose “See all settings.”
Go to the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab.
Select “Create a new filter.”
Enter criteria (e.g., email address, subject line).
Choose actions (e.g., skip the inbox, apply a label).
Click “Create filter.”

Outlook (Rules):

Click File > Manage Rules & Alerts.
Choose New Rule.
Select a template or start from a blank rule.
Define the conditions and actions.
Complete and save the rule setup.

Automating email management is not just about decluttering; it’s about reclaiming valuable time and mental energy. Implementing a strategic set of filters and rules can make a significant difference in productivity, allowing church workers to focus on their ministry and service. Take a moment to set up a few rules today and enjoy the benefits of a more organized inbox!

For more tips to make life easier in the church office, subscribe to the Concordia Technology Solutions blog, Technology and Your Ministry.

Maintaining Healthy Church Staff Communication with Technology

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:00:00 GMT

When it comes to church communication strategy, we often think of communicating with our members or visitors. But what about your church staff? How can you maintain healthy church staff communication?

While in-person communications are vitally important, you can use technology to foster open communication and keep everyone on task and on mission. You want your church staff to be organized and on the same page, working toward a common goal—and technology can help you get there.

We’re breaking down some basic tips to remember for healthy church staff communication, whether your church has a large staff across multiple campuses or a handful of faithful volunteers.

Utilize Different Apps for Different Purposes

There are many different forms of digital communication, and each can serve a unique purpose! Sometimes, maintaining healthy church staff communication comes down to using the right tool for the right message.

Email is the most popular option. The general rule of thumb in corporate America is to reply to emails within 24 hours, and many churches have adopted similar policies for their staff. Because of this, email communication can be used for nonurgent matters or general mass communications amongst staff or church volunteers.

Chat apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams have greatly increased in popularity. These apps generally serve for more immediate and simple communications such as “Do you have time for a quick meeting?” or “Can you approve this Instagram post that’s going out today at 2:00 p.m.?”

Remember Tone

When writing any sort of digital communication, it’s important to remember how your message will come across without the recipient seeing your facial expression or body language. Sarcasm doesn’t come across well, and some statements can be misinterpreted as anger. This doesn’t mean you need to completely change your communication style—it’s just a reminder that digital communications can be interpreted differently than expected.

Additionally, different generations interpret writing differently, so keep that in mind when crafting your church staff communications. If you have a sensitive message to share, consider saving it for your next in-person meeting to avoid any miscommunications.

Organize and Share Everything

Use the cloud to improve your staff ministry communications! Organizing all of your files in one place (such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive) can help members of your staff to easily find what they’re looking for. Migrating from desktop apps like Microsoft Word to Google Docs means everyone can collaborate on docs together, such as meeting notes, to-do lists, and content planning.

This solution also allows you to avoid endless email threads about edits to documents or posts. Most online word processors have comments features, so everyone can leave notes, respond to questions, and make edits easily without having to send a separate email.

Meet in Person

This isn't technology, but we need to remember that using technology to communicate should be secondary to in-person communications. Having regular meetings with your staff and church volunteers can make your digital communications more seamless and can also reduce the amount of back-and-forth over emails.

This also allows you to connect more deeply with your staff, which can’t be achieved with technology alone. Balancing in-person and digital communication is key to fostering open communication and productivity! Organize your church records in one place with Church360° Members church management software.

Rethinking Email Management: Why Unsubscribing and Deleting Aren’t the Best

Stephen Bornheimer — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 12:13:50 GMT

You may find this scenario familiar: you’re driving into work, mentally listing everything you need to accomplish for the day. After arriving and grabbing a warm beverage, you sit down at your workstation, start your computer, and sign in. Your first stop? Email.

Solutions for Organizations

“You’ve Got Mail”

If you grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, the phrase “You’ve got mail” is likely familiar. AOL introduced its email service in the early 1990s, and the phrase was popularized by the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Since then, society has never looked back. Now, 30 years later, email remains the workhorse of communication and a primary method of connection in our church ministries.

With your beverage in hand and your inbox open, you start scanning your email. Is there anything important? You sift through the mix, trying to discern meaningful messages from the “need to know” or “buy this” emails. You delete the obvious ones, and you open, read, or star the messages that need your attention. Meanwhile, the mental list you made on your way to work persists. But you feel the need to handle email first. Before you know it, an hour has passed, and now you’re behind on your day. Sigh. On to the next thing.

By the Numbers

A 2016 study of workplace email habits, conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, and Microsoft, found that the average worker checks email approximately 11 times per hour, with 84 percent of users keeping their inbox open throughout the day.

This same study revealed that only about 30 percent of emails require action, while time spent reading, sorting, and composing emails accounts for 10 to 28 percent of daily work time. This data underscores how much time we spend interacting with email and how integral it has become to our workflow.

A Unique Role in Ministry

Staying connected and “in the loop” is vital for our ministries. The church, by its nature, brings people together. While phone calls and snail mail continue to serve as communication tools, email has risen to the top in technological use. Open any church newsletter or bulletin, and you’ll likely see email addresses scattered throughout.

As church workers, we strive to connect people to one another and to Christ. Romans 12:4–5 says, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” Technology plays a role in facilitating this connection, and email is a crucial part of it. But like any tool, email works best when used wisely.

For Good or for Evil

Like any worldly tool, email presents a dichotomy. It’s a beneficial tool for connecting people, but it also serves as a platform for distractions that can pull us away from the ministry’s mission.

Email marketing is big business, with billions of dollars spent annually in the US alone on marketing tools, subscriber lists, and strategies designed to capture attention. Secular businesses know that email consumes much of our time, and they will go to great lengths to grab attention for profit.

You’ve seen it: inbox advertisements, promotional emails, newsletters, and offers. What’s our usual response? Delete. Unsubscribe.

Delete and Unsubscribe

Don’t get me wrong—deleting emails and unsubscribing from lists are useful tools. If an email isn’t worth reading, deleting it clears space. If certain emails keep coming back, unsubscribing cuts them off. But these solutions often provide only temporary relief. Let’s explore this further.

Delete

Time is ticking, and you have a mental checklist to complete, so you start deleting. It feels good—satisfying even—to see the unread count drop. You spend 5, 10, or even 45 minutes on this task. However, after repeated deletions from the same sources, fatigue sets in. You see emails from retailers, the same old promotions, or suspicious messages that make you nervous. You hit Delete and move on.

Unsubscribe

At some point, after spending weeks deleting the same emails, you wonder, “Why am I doing this over and over?” So you take the extra step to unsubscribe.

Unsubscribing is a more permanent solution, albeit a drastic one. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 gave users the legal right to unsubscribe from marketing emails, ensuring that companies must honor these requests. But the question remains: Is unsubscribing always the best solution?

For example, maybe you receive emails from your favorite retailer along with order confirmations and receipts. You want to keep the transactional emails, but not the promotional ones. Fortunately, the CAN-SPAM Act mandates that marketing and transactional emails be kept separate. You can unsubscribe from promotions without losing important notifications.

To Unsubscribe or Not to Unsubscribe

Unsubscribing may seem like the right move, but consider the implications, especially if you manage a group or shared inbox, such as a general church office email (e.g., pastor@churchdomain.com). If a volunteer managing the inbox gets tired of emails from a local food pantry and unsubscribes, that decision affects the entire church staff, cutting off communication with that ministry.

Unsubscribing isn’t a decision to be made lightly. Here are a few best practices for managing inboxes, especially in ministry:

Understand the distinction between marketing and transactional emails: You can unsubscribe from one without affecting the other.
Don’t rely on deleting as a long-term solution: If certain senders flood your inbox, consider using filters or rules instead of repeatedly deleting emails.
Use discernment when unsubscribing: It’s a powerful tool, and it should be used carefully.
Avoid unsubscribing from shared inboxes: Ensure that the entire organization agrees before making lasting decisions that affect everyone.

Alternative Options

Rather than defaulting to unsubscribing, consider other methods. Both Gmail and Outlook offer advanced tools such as labels, folders, filters, and rules to automate inbox management. Nonprofits, including many churches, often use Google’s nonprofit pricing or Microsoft’s Office 365 grant to access these features. Church360° Unite, in its email service, offers these features and more. These tools can help you spend less time managing email and more time on meaningful work. They streamline the inbox experience, allowing you to focus on what matters most.

Next time you’re tempted to delete en masse or unsubscribe, consider automating your inbox instead. These tools can free up your time, allowing you to focus on the work that truly matters—connecting with people and fulfilling your ministry’s mission. Soli Deo Gloria.

Looking for more ways to sort through the clutter and make more time for your mission? Subscribe to the CTS blog Technology and Your Ministry for more posts like this.

How to Write Church Announcements That People Actually Read

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:00:00 GMT

If you’re looking to improve your church announcements, you’re not alone. You need to share pertinent information with your members in a way that gives them all the necessary information without overwhelming them. You want it to be interesting but informative—which can be a tall task!

Whether you are writing all the announcements yourself or are responsible for editing and compiling announcements from others, it’s an overwhelming feat to write church announcements that people actually read.

As a writer of many church announcements, I’m here to share my top tips for how to write church announcements. These tips apply to every church announcement, whether you’re printing them in a bulletin, sharing them on your website or social media, or announcing them live in your service.

Think Outside the Box

How many times have you read (or written) a church announcement that said “food, fun, and fellowship”? For me, too many times to count! There’s certainly nothing wrong with this phrasing, but it is very overused and surprisingly vague. It gives no information as to the type of food that will be served, what activities will be fun, and who will be at the event.

Instead, try to be a little creative and think outside the box! Tell a story about what to expect at the event—talk about the perfectly grilled hotdogs, the prize for the cornhole tournament winner, or what you’ll learn at women’s Bible study.

Share Only the Most Important Details

One of the hardest parts about writing church announcements is figuring out how much detail to share. You want to make the announcement interesting and enticing, but you also don’t want to overwhelm your readers with information.

At a minimum, you should share the date, time, and place, as well as a brief description of the event itself. If you have more information you want to share, you can share that information on your website or within the event itself (either on Facebook or your church app).

Give a Clear Call to Action

In every announcement, you should have one clear call to action: the next step you want your readers to take. By limiting your announcement to just one action, it’s clear what your readers should do next.

Here are some of our favorite calls to action!

Mark your calendars!

Visit the booth after service.

You might have an announcement that necessitates two calls to action—such as registering to attend and signing up to volunteer. You can make an exception here and include both next steps, but I recommend splitting them up into two separate announcements! It might seem counterintuitive, but these two announcements really have two different audiences.

Create Guidelines

If you have many different people writing announcements, it’s helpful to create a set of guidelines for people to follow. This helps your church office staff avoid having to cut down lengthy announcements or reach out for basic details.

We’ve created a basic church announcement guideline to get you started:

Limit your announcement to 100 words.

Include the date, time, and place.

Provide one specific call to action (register, contact, etc.).

Get a starting point for communicating with your congregation by downloading these FREE text, voice, and email blueprints!

How to Use Your Church Management Software to Engage Visitors

Hannah Hansen — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 14:13:12 GMT

Engaging visitors is a key part of any church communication strategy. While in-person interactions and communications are of the utmost importance, you can support your efforts with technology!

Your church management software can support your church’s communication strategy to engage visitors. And, best of all, many of these strategies involve automation, so they do not require any ongoing work from you or your office staff! Here are some ways to use your church management software to engage visitors so your church can continue sharing the Gospel.

Send Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are an important part of any church communication strategy, especially when it comes to engaging visitors. It’s important to note that you should only send emails to your visitors if they have explicitly agreed to receive marketing emails from your church. You can have them opt in via your website using a QR code, or check a box on your communication card.

Note from Pastor

After a person’s first visit, you can send that visitor a note from your pastor. You can make this email automated but personal. Have your pastor write a note signed with his name and contact information, encouraging visitors to reach out to him if they have any questions!

Next Steps

Identifying your next-step communications can help visitors understand how they can get involved further in the life of your church. You can share weekly events, such as Bible study groups or the dates of your next new member class.

No matter what your next steps are, make sure that it’s the logical next step for your visitors. You don’t want to ask a first-time visitor to set up recurring giving. Choose the next steps that have a low barrier to entry.

Follow Up

It is possible to follow up with your visitors without being creepy. You can use your follow-up emails to ask your visitors if they have any questions, would like to hear from the pastor, or are looking for ways to get involved. Sometimes, all people need to reach out is the invitation to ask questions!

Monitor Attendance

Most churches that use church management software utilize it to monitor attendance to accurately report trends. However, you can also monitor the attendance of your visitors—without seeming like Big Brother.

Monitoring your visitors’ attendance allows you to see who becomes a recurring visitor and who visited once. It will also help you notice if a visitor has previously visited your church but has not attended for some time, allowing you to engage him or her differently!

You can send emails to visitors after a certain number of visits to share the next steps with them, as shared above.

Tag Interests

If a visitor expresses interest in getting involved or volunteering, you can tag his or her profile with his or her interests, such as playing in the worship band or attending a women’s Bible study. This allows your visitors to stay in the loop with what they’re interested in and what’s relevant to them.

All of these can be easily done through Church360° Members, our people-focused church management software. Start your free trial today!

Cybersecurity Basics for Churches

wscjohnson@gmail.com (Rev. Bill Johnson) — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 21:29:13 GMT

At first glance, churches might seem like unlikely targets for cybercrime. After all, why target churches or nonprofit organizations when there’s more money to make by exploiting the vulnerabilities of wealthier corporations?

Yet churches have a great deal of personal information about their members, including giving information and sometimes very private notes and information about pastoral care. With the rise of easier-to-use tools and specialized artificial intelligence agents, the skill level needed to execute sophisticated cyberattacks has dropped substantially in the last several years. Simply put, more attackers are using better tools to carry out these attacks, and churches aren’t immune to them. Fortunately, there are a few easy things you can do to help protect your church’s data and the privacy of God’s people.

Covering the Basics

We’ll start from the assumption that you’re doing the basics, meaning you have a good firewall/router in place, have a standard antivirus solution on every computer on the network, and are keeping up with software updates on a regular basis. None of those things are particularly difficult today, nor especially expensive. Your local computer geek probably has some solid recommendations for the antivirus software, and the core operating system updates are, frankly, just a matter of insisting on weekly reboots of all machines on the network. Chances are your internet provider set up a basic firewall/router combination. While the basic settings are usually pretty solid, a more custom configuration for maximum protection is best left to a trained network analyst.

What’s Left?

So what’s a church to do to help itself once the basics are covered? The single most hackable piece of any computer system is, unfortunately, the people. This has been true for years, and it’s the hardest part of the system to properly secure. Most cyberattacks start with individual users, and the attacks are growing more sophisticated with time. We’ll take a look at a couple of different attack vectors that target naïve or inattentive users and how they can mark the beginning of an attacker’s work to compromise your data.

Social Engineering

While most of us think of hackers as shady characters in dark rooms working by the light of their terminals, the truth is that many hackers are genuinely charismatic people who specialize in manipulating users to reveal information they shouldn’t. Take, for example, the technician who calls from your internet provider and needs to take a look at your connection equipment. While this could very well be a legitimate request, it’s also a common vector for gaining physical access to your network, or, at minimum, information about the structure of your organization/network. Let’s consider several possible outcomes:

The user allows the tech to schedule an on-site visit and access the equipment directly without supervision, or with supervision that doesn’t understand threats from normal updates and operation. This is your worst-case scenario. Ideally, on-site visits should be scheduled with the network administrator and closely monitored to ensure the work being done is within the scope of the visit.

The user tells the technician that he or she will have to schedule with the network admin and gives him or her contact information to reach out directly. This is better, but it still gives away a key advantage to the bad guys; they now know who your network admin is, and the next phishing email (more on those in a moment) will no doubt use their name and contact information to make it seem more genuine.

The user takes down contact information for the technician and passes that direction to the network admin, who vets the credentials with the company to ensure this is legitimate work and to schedule time to supervise the implementation. This is ideal. We don’t want to go without updates, but we also want to ensure that the people we’re giving access to have been properly vetted and are adequately supervised as they work.

Phishing

Chances are you’ve at least heard the term phishing at some point in recent years. Phishing is when an attacker sends an email that pretends to be from a legitimate source to deliver a payload (link or attachment) or to attempt to engage a user in conversation to earn trust and exploit that confidence in time. Most data theft incidents start with some form of phishing. Phishing attacks used to be easy to spot, as they’d often have mistakes in the template or layout of the email, but the advances in the tools available to even the least-skilled hackers have made those flaws harder to spot. So what can you look for?

An unexpected email that demands urgent action, often with dire consequences and a timetable, is a likely suspect for being a phishing attempt. Examples in the wild include threats of account suspension, fraud warnings for fake Amazon orders, or even urgent warnings from your system administrator (information they got from your website or via social engineering).

A reply to an email that doesn’t match the purported sender. The sender’s emails are often spoofed, but they will include a reply-to that allows the hacker to convince the target that the sender is real if he or she replies. Watch out for lookalike domains, such as googl.com, googlemail.com, or microsoftofficeManagement.somehackersdomain.com. If you don’t recognize the domain, do not click the link or open any attachments. Instead, follow up with the company directly to verify the email before taking any action.

Do not click on any links in any emails. The attacks are becoming more sophisticated. Often, simply looking at a link address is no longer enough to enable even skilled users to know what’s safe and what isn’t. Take these two examples:

- https://www.concordiatechnology.org/

- https://www.cοncοrdiаtechnοlοgy.org/

Visually, these are indistinguishable, but the second link uses a combination of Greek and Cyrillic characters that look identical to our standard alphabet but lead to dramatically different places. (The second one doesn’t lead anywhere right now, but it’s a great example of how even trained folks can’t tell the difference anymore.)

So what’s a church office to do? The safest policy is to simply not click links or open attachments in emails unless you expressly know they are coming and trust the source (and the source’s security practices!). Some cybersecurity training firms will even send your users test phishing emails to help train them to spot these sorts of attacks and instill a culture of security first.

Ultimately, your end users are your greatest vulnerability in network security. But with some training and vigilance, they can become the best defense against attackers who would seek to compromise your congregation’s data.

To be notified of helpful blogs like this, subscribe to the CTS blog Technology and Your Ministry.

Church Website Design Tips for Mobile Devices

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:00:00 GMT

When coming up with strategies for your church website design, you absolutely have to consider the mobile design of your site. It is said that more than 50% of all website traffic is on mobile devices. Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means that they’re looking at the mobile version of your site to determine where it should rank in search results.

These two facts should be enough to encourage you to prioritize your church mobile website design—and we’re here to show you just how easy it can be!

Adopt a Mobile-First Mentality

When designing church websites, most experts advise adopting a mobile-first mentality. So, when you’re creating your site, you should ideally create the mobile version of your site first and then develop your desktop site. Many web designers use the Bootstrap framework to make mobile web design easier.

If you’re not comfortable doing that yet, or if your church website is already built, you can still adopt a mobile-first mentality. Spend time reviewing and testing your mobile site, making sure text is readable and images are properly sized.

Use Mobile-Responsive Themes

If you’ve been overwhelmed so far, the good news is that most website builders feature mobile-responsive themes that automatically adjust your church website design to fit mobile screens. So, at the very least, if you’ve designed a solid desktop site, you’ll have a mobile design that works well and is formatted correctly.

Church360° Unite comes with multiple customizable themes for your church to choose from—and each theme is mobile responsive! Remember: Google is looking at your mobile site to determine where to rank you in search results, so picking a site theme that's mobile responsive makes a big difference in your church’s discoverability in search results.

Utilize White Space

It can be hard to properly utilize white space on a mobile site’s design since there’s far less space to work with. However, it’s still important to ensure there’s a proper balance between the text, images, and empty space on each page.

White space is the space in a design that doesn’t have any elements on it—so no text, images, or graphics. Having ample white space prevents your site from feeling overcrowded and increases the readability of the text on your site.

While you won’t have as much white space on your church mobile website as you do on your desktop site, you can still include as much empty space as you can to ensure maximum readability and flow.

Hide Extra Elements

One way to ensure you have enough white space is to hide non-essential elements on your mobile design. It might seem obvious, but mobile website designs have a lot less space than desktop designs. To prevent your church mobile website from feeling crowded, don’t be afraid to hide non-essential elements that are overcrowding your mobile design.

For example, if you have two images in one section on your desktop design, you might want to hide one of those to save space. Or, maybe your header font size is too big for your mobile design, causing line breaks in the middle of a word—then, you’d want to adjust the header font size across mobile.

Want to make sure your website isn’t missing vital information? Download this FREE checklist that walks you through everything you need.

Designing Church Social Media Graphics 101

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:00:00 GMT

If you’re tackling your church’s graphic design, you’ve likely had to design church social media graphics. Whether you’re posting on Instagram or Facebook, creating eye-catching posts that clearly convey the necessary information can be difficult.

You don’t need a degree in graphic design or experience in social media to effectively create social posts for your church. By keeping a few simple tips in mind, you can easily and consistently design church social media graphics that will engage your followers—and look great on your feed too!

Keep It Simple

One of the biggest mistakes I see on church social media graphics is including too much in the design—too many images, fonts, colors, and text.

When in doubt, keep it simple. Include no more than two fonts, no more than three colors, and two or three lines of text in each post.

Don’t be afraid to utilize white space—the part of your design that has no text or elements in it. Try to keep about half of your design as white space. Not only does this make it easier for your viewers to read, but it also limits the amount of information you can include, forcing you to keep it simple!

Think about Hierarchy

When you’re designing your church’s social media graphics, think about the hierarchy of your design. Decide the main element you want your viewers to see—this will likely be the title of your event or the point you’re trying to convey.

For example, if you’re advertising your upcoming church garage sale, you want the primary focus to be the text “Church Garage Sale.” As the primary text, it should be in a large, readable font and a bold color. Then, the date, time, and location should be included beneath that in smaller text and a more muted color.

Include Your Logo

One small way to provide a consistent experience across your church’s social media graphics is to always include your church logo! Oftentimes, you’ll have what’s called a submark, which is usually just the image part of your logo. (You can see an example of my church’s submark in the following Instagram post.)

Even if you don’t have consistent branding or design across all your church’s social media graphics, including your logo is an easy way for viewers to recognize that the post belongs to your church.

Use Templates

For posts that you make every week (like your upcoming setlist or a quote from your pastor’s sermon), don’t be afraid to use the same template each week. You might think it’s boring, but consistency and familiarity can be beneficial—your followers will begin to recognize each post from you and what it will be!

If you want to (subtly) switch it up, you can choose different colors or fonts, as long as they complement your branding! No matter what type of content you’re posting, templates can be a great way to save time each week.

For more church social media strategy posts, subscribe to the CTS Blog Technology & Your Ministry.

Best Ways to Display Sermons on Your Church Website

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 17:00:00 GMT

Sermons are a must-have on any church website—but what’s the best way to display sermons on my church website? The good news is you have a few options to choose from. The best choice will depend on your goals and how you’re recording your messages each week.

The even better news is you don’t have to be an expert at coding or technology to add sermons to your site! Here are my top three recommendations for the best ways to display sermons on your church website.

Best Ways to Display Sermons on Your Church Website

1. YouTube Feed

Many churches upload their sermons to YouTube each week. Showcasing these videos on your website is (in my opinion) the best way to display sermons on your church website.

The process will look slightly different depending on your website platform, so you might have to install a plugin to get the results you want. On my church’s site, I was able to embed a YouTube channel within Wix, so all of our sermons automatically appear on the site once they’re uploaded to YouTube.

2. Embedded Podcast

If your sermon audio is being uploaded to a podcast, you can embed that podcast on your site to easily display your sermons! This is a great option if you don’t have video recordings of your sermons but still want to encourage people to listen.

The process is relatively simple, and you can easily find instructions for embedding a Spotify or Apple podcast in different website hosts. I recommend only embedding one podcast platform—it’s too confusing otherwise!

3. Blog Post

If you want to turn your sermons into readable and shareable content, you can convert them into blog posts! This option requires much more time and effort than the others, but if you have a robust search engine optimization (SEO) blogging strategy, it could be a great option.

Use a transcribing service to write out your sermon, and then break it up using formatted headers. At the beginning or end of the post, you can embed your sermon video YouTube link or link out to the podcast episode!

Tips for Your Church Website Sermon Page

Embed Your Videos

One of the biggest mistakes I see churches make is uploading their actual sermon video file to their website. This drastically reduces your site speed, which can negatively affect your SEO (how high your page will appear in search results) and your bounce rate (traffic leaving your website).

Instead, I recommend embedding your sermon videos into your website directly from YouTube or Vimeo. Visitors to your site can still play the video on your website, but it won’t affect the speed at which the page loads!

Automate the Process

The last thing a pastor or church worker wants to do is add another item to their to-do list each week. To avoid having to upload your sermon to your website each week, automate the process. If you’ve embedded your YouTube channel or podcast, you can check this off the list—videos or episodes will automatically appear on your website once they’re live!

Building a church website doesn’t have to be difficult. Download this FREE checklist worksheet that walks you through everything you need for your church website—in under an hour.

How to Create Sermon Series Graphics

Hannah Hansen — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:00:00 GMT

If your church uses a projector on Sunday mornings, you’ve likely had to buy or create sermon series graphics. These slides create a cohesive experience week to week and visually indicate when you’ve started a new series.

But figuring out how to create sermon series graphics can be tiresome, especially if you’re not well-versed in graphic design. We’re here to walk you through the basics of making slides that are easy to read while standing out!

Step 1: Figure Out the Details

The first step in creating your sermon series graphic is to iron out all the details of the series itself—identify the title, theme, and Scriptures. Having this basic information nailed down will make it easier to create a graphic that aligns with the overall series!

Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas

Once you have all of your details figured out, you can begin brainstorming some creative ideas to support your theme. There are no bad ideas in this stage—the goal is just to end up with an idea that you‘re excited to run with!

Your ideas could range from identifying a specific, literal element (like a palm branch for Palm Sunday) or a more metaphorical one (like using green for Palm Sunday). Or, you might go for an overall feeling, not necessarily a specific icon. For example, you might make all-black, moody slides for Black Friday rather than featuring a crown of thorns or a cross on your slides.

Step 3: Design Your Sermon Series Graphic

Now comes the fun part—designing your sermon series graphics! As usual, our top free recommendation is Canva. There are a select few sermon series templates on there, but there are enough free fonts, graphics, and backgrounds that you can easily create your own.

If you’re looking for something more ready-made, Igniter Media or Church Motion Graphics are paid subscriptions that have some great templates that are super unique and easy to implement. Keep in mind that some of these templates are only editable in Photoshop, which also requires a paid subscription.

Step 4: Check Readability and Accessibility

This next step is perhaps the most crucial. You need to make sure that people can actually read what’s on your slides! Is your font big enough? Is there enough contrast between the background color and the text color? Did you put enough spacing between lines?

I highly recommend doing two fail-safes to ensure readability. First, check your slide on your projector so you can see what it will look like on Sunday morning. Some projectors might have lower contrast than your computer screen, so you will need to adjust. Second, run your image through a contrast checker. This isn’t the be-all and end-all, but it can often be a good indication of whether your content is easy to read.

Step 5: Make Slide Variations

Once you’ve ensured your slides are readable, you can create all the variations you need for worship. In my church, we usually create these slide templates to use for different elements throughout the worship service:

Overall sermon series slide

Individual sermon slide (with sermon title and Scripture)

Welcome/goodbye slide

Worship element slides (songs, Scripture readings, liturgy, prayer, etc.)

Our best practices for church presentation slides apply here, so be sure to keep those tips in mind as you create your slide variations!

For more tips like these, make sure to subscribe to the CTS blog, Technology & Your Ministry.

Social Media for Churches: Best Practices and Strategies

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 17:00:00 GMT

I recently started running my church’s social media accounts, and I’ve been having a blast diving into the world of social media strategy for churches! Whether or not you’ve worked in the social media world before, planning social media posts for churches is a whole different ball game.

You don’t have to be an expert in graphic design, social media, or marketing to effectively run your church’s Facebook or Instagram accounts. With a few simple tips (and some help from automation), you can easily start posting on socials and engage with your followers!

Social Media Strategy for Churches

Creating a social media strategy is key to seeing success on any social platform. Whether you’re on TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram, you can utilize these strategy tips!

Find Your Voice and Style

When posting on social media, you should have a distinct style and voice that you abide by. These are common terms when referring to your church brand—which is how people perceive you. This concept of brand voice bleeds into the style of imagery you share, the fonts you use, and the captions you post.

The easiest way to do this is to figure out a few words that describe your church and how you want people to view you. You might want to be real, organic, and witty or reverent, historic, and devout. There’s really no wrong answer, and it will be different for each church!

Define a Purpose for Each Post

Randomly sharing posts on social isn’t the worst thing in the world—at least you’re posting!—but having a strategy and purpose for each post will really make a difference in your content.

We categorize posts by whether they’re for education, information, or engagement purposes.

Education: sharing our beliefs and mission as well as definitions of church terms and seasons of the Church Year

Information: letting people know about an upcoming event, a change in our worship schedule, etc.

Engagement: highlighting our volunteers, creating shareable content like Bible verses or sermon clips, or appreciation for our community

Share a Next Step

In almost every social post, I try to include a next step. Commonly referred to as a call to action in the marketing world, it’s basically the action you want people to take after they view your social post.

Here are a few of my favorite calls to action for social media posts:

Join us for worship

Invite a friend

Email our pastor

Send this post to a friend

Create a Content Calendar

Creating a social media content calendar is the easiest way to organize your ideas and schedule your posts. There are content calendars and scheduling software, but I find that Google Sheets works just as well—it’s free, and you can invite other volunteers and staff to collaborate.

Social Media Post Ideas for Churches

These are just a few of my favorite posts to share on Facebook and Instagram, but you can find 100 more social media post ideas in our previous blog post!

Share Your Worship Schedule

Each week, we share our upcoming worship schedule and setlist on Facebook. We include the Scripture our pastor will be preaching on, the songs we’ll be singing, and what time everything starts.

While members will already know what time your worship services and Bible classes start, visitors will appreciate the heads-up. And, it gives guests a chance to listen to your songs or hymns ahead of time so they can be somewhat familiar with them!

Explain a Church Term

When I’m ideating what to post on my church's social media account, I try to have a guest-first approach, thinking about what a first-time visitor to my church would want to see on our socials. One thing I think confuses a lot of people who haven’t been to church in a while (or ever) is the amount of church terms!

To combat this and educate visitors without making them feel silly for not knowing the term, we’re planning to share definitions of commonly used terms, such as sanctification, grace, and repentance. In addition to the definition, we’ll share what this term means for you as a Christian!

Advertise an Upcoming Event

Sharing an upcoming church event on Facebook is a great social media post idea! Not only does this drive people to register for an event and invite their friends, but it also allows you to reach your greater community. When people browse for events near them, your event will appear!

If you don’t have the bandwidth to create and manage a Facebook event, you can also just create an image with all the necessary details! Be sure to include how they can reach out if they have any questions.

Pray for a Current Event

One trend I’ve seen among churches is sharing custom-written prayers for a current event. Especially on Instagram, I love the idea of sharing a multi-slide post with the first slide being a simple “A Prayer for Good Friday” and the subsequent slide being a two to three sentence prayer.

You can share prayers for holidays (like Independence Day), seasons of the Church Year (like Lent), or Feast Days (like Trinity Sunday). If you’re writing these prayers and you’re not a pastor, we recommend running these by your pastor for approval before posting just to be safe!

For more social media and communications strategies for your church, subscribe to the CTS blog!

How to Make Church Graphics without a Designer

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 18:00:00 GMT

If you work at a church and are responsible for designing graphics but aren’t a graphic designer, you’ve likely pulled your hair out a time or two. If you don’t have experience in graphic design, it can be hard to come up with fresh ideas that look the way you want them to.

But the secret is that you don’t have to have a graphic designer at your church to make eye-catching, creative, and informative graphics! We’ve outlined our favorite tips and resources so your church can stand out—without a graphic design degree!

What Are Church Graphics?

At their simplest, church graphics are images with text used to share information. This could include social media posts, sermon series graphics, worship presentation slides, physical posters, email headers, website banners, and more.

What Makes a Good Church Graphic?

Clarity

Above all else, it needs to be clear what exactly your church graphic is advertising or sharing. For example, if you’re making a sermon series graphic, you would likely want the title of the series to be the main focal point. Or, if you’re advertising an upcoming food drive, you want the words “Food Drive” to be the focus.

Simplicity

Along those same lines, keep your designs simple. You don’t need to include every piece of information—only the most important. A good rule of thumb is to succinctly address what, when, and where in your church graphic. For more information, you can forward them to a Facebook event, your website, or the person in charge of the event.

Readability

Lastly, church graphics need to be easy to read. Choose high-contrast colors and limit yourself to a few colors per graphic. Select fonts that are easy to read, and make sure they’re big enough for everyone to decipher.

How to Make Church Graphics without a Designer

Use Premade Templates

In a previous blog post, we shared a list of free graphic design software, one of which is Canva. Canva has thousands of templates for every type of graphic your church could need, making it a great resource for churches without a graphic designer on staff.

You have the freedom to change out colors, images, and fonts within each template, but don’t feel pressured to get creative if you like the template as is.

Be Consistent

It’s more than fine for graphics for different events to have a different look and feel to them—it helps differentiate events from each other! But there are a few ways you can help all your templated designs feel cohesive, even if they look nothing like each other.

First, you can limit yourself to a color palette. This can be a general guideline, such as no neon colors, or you could select 5 to 8 colors that your church has identified as its brand colors.

Second, you can include a small version of your church logo on each graphic. Especially for social media, this can help your graphics feel like they’re branded to your church.

Get Feedback

Many church graphic design problems could be solved by bringing in a few trusted opinions. If you have other staff members at your church, ask them for their feedback. Sometimes others will notice something you completely overlooked that will make for a better end graphic!

However, we’ve all been in situations where too much feedback is given and it unnecessarily complicates a process. To limit feedback overload, you can ask specific questions like “Is this font hard to read?” or “Does this yellow show up on your screen?”

To get more church design, communication, and other tips, sign up to receive updates on our blog!

How Churches Can Reach More People with Local SEO

Hannah Hansen — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 17:00:00 GMT

Churches often look to rank themselves on Google with SEO, so that they can reach more people for the sake of the Gospel. Local SEO is a subset of SEO, or search engine optimization, that allows your business to appear specifically in search results for your area—because you wouldn’t want your church to appear to someone located five hundred miles away.

Like any other strategy for your business, it takes time to see the benefits of local SEO. It can take months or even years to see results from your efforts, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Local SEO might sound scary, but it’s not complicated. We’re breaking down the basics with actionable small steps your church can take today to improve your ranking.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is similar to basic search engine optimization in that you are trying to get your church website to appear in searches for certain words or phrases. Local SEO takes that concept one step further and focuses on ranking your church (or business) for keywords that include your city name. For example, “Oceanside church” or “church in Oceanside.”

This strategy also allows your church to show up when someone searches for a phrase like “church near me.” Google recognizes where the person searching is located, so it automatically detects the city name and includes that keyword in its search.

How Can Local SEO Help Your Church?

Local SEO is especially beneficial for churches because, usually, a church’s main goal is to reach people in its local community and encourage them to visit its physical location. With local SEO, your church can reach that goal with more visibility in search results.

How to Implement Local SEO

1. Add City Name to Website

The easiest way to implement local SEO for your church is to include your city name across your website. Include the city name in headers and paragraphs across multiple pages, especially on your contact page and in the footer of your website.

2. Update Name, Address, and Phone Number

Along those same lines, ensure that your church name, address, and phone number are accurate across your website, Google Business Profile (we’ll get to this in a bit), and social media. Not only does this make for a consistent experience for visitors, but it also signals to Google that your business is legitimate and up to date.

3. Create a Business Profile on Google

If you’ve ever searched for a business on Google, you’ve likely come across its Business Profile. It’s a block that appears after you search on the right side of your desktop or as the first result on mobile.

These snippets give visitors an overview of the business, including the information they care most about—like address, reviews, hours, and phone number.

Google prioritizes listings that regularly upload new photos, respond to reviews, and update their information. It might seem like a small thing, but having a Google Business Profile can really impact your local SEO!

Additionally, your Google Business Profile allows your business to appear in Google’s featured places when someone searches for “churches near me.” (See screenshot below for an example.) Your ranking on this snippet can be increased over time by optimizing your listing!

4. Be Active on Social Media

Lastly, your church can improve its SEO by being active on social media, such as Facebook or Instagram. Including your church's physical address on these profiles gives Google an additional page to find and add to Google search results and verifies that your business is legitimate and consistent, which could increase its ranking. Create Facebook events for upcoming activities at your church and regularly promote them on your page.

All you need to get started on local SEO is a simple website, which you can create for free with a 30-day trial of Church360° Unite!

Church Website Home Page Essentials

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 11:00:00 GMT

Your church website home page is the first page visitors will see when they come to your site. To that end, it’s important for this page to include all the information they’d need to understand what your church believes, how they can attend services, and how they can reach you.You don’t have to be a web developer to create an impactful home page. We’ve compiled our best church website home page ideas to give you some inspiration to design your own!

Eye-Catching Banner

At the top of your church website home page, you should have an eye-catching banner. We recommend keeping this graphic simple and clear—including a simple message like “Welcome to St. Luke’s Lutheran Church.” The background of this banner could be an image of your church or sanctuary or just a plain-colored background.

A well-designed and high-quality banner is key to your home page because it sets the tone for the rest of your church website. And, because it’s the first item visitors will see on your site, it’s important to make sure it’s easy to read and clear.

Service Times and Location

Next, you should always include your service times and location when building your church website home page. When someone visits your site, they’ll likely be looking for this information first, so including it toward the top of your home page is a good strategic decision. You can keep it simple, including your address (or addresses if you have multiple campuses), service time(s), and worship styles.

Keep your descriptions of your services short here—you can dive into more detail on other pages on your website. On your home page, it’s best to keep this information as brief yet informative as possible.

Brief Statement of Beliefs

Being upfront about what your church believes can answer many questions a potential visitor might have. You don’t need to dive into your full statement of beliefs here. Rather, your church website home page is a chance for you to share a brief statement on what you believe so that visitors can have an overview of your church.

Try limiting this section to two-to-three sentences, and then include a link to your full beliefs page, where people can go to read more if they’re interested. We’ve included a sample statement to give you an idea of what to include!

St. Luke’s is a Christian church that believes in the triune God, that Jesus died for our sins, and that salvation is found in Christ alone. We joyfully belong to The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Call to Action

Perhaps the most important part of your church website home page is a call to action. A call to action is the next step you want your website visitors to take. Maybe it’s to contact your pastor, or maybe you want them to plan their in-person visit to your next worship service.

Think strategically when building your church website about what next step would make the most sense for visitors but also would make the most sense for your staff. Does your pastor have time to reply to every email that comes through from a site visitor? Are you able to manage multiple pages and forms on your website to help visitors plan their visit to your campus? It’s important to not just create these avenues of communication but also maintain them.

Get started designing your church website home page with a free 30-day Church360° Unite trial.

How to Use Facebook to Share Church Events

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 11:00:00 GMT

If your church is looking to expand your ministry using Facebook, having an effective Facebook strategy for church events is a great place to start. There are many benefits to creating Facebook events for whatever your church has going on—from summer block parties to family movie nights.

You don’t have to be a social media expert to have a church Facebook strategy. All you need is a few simple tips to get you started!

When you hear “Facebook strategy,” you might think it involves a complicated spreadsheet and schedule. But when it comes to creating a Facebook strategy for your church’s events, you really just need to follow a few simple steps to optimize your listing.

Follow Facebook’s Prompts

This may seem obvious, but input all of the information that Facebook prompts you to—including the date, time, location, and description. This basic information not only correctly categorizes everything but also makes it easy for any viewer to find.

Write a Clear Event Description

When writing your event description, make sure any important details are crystal clear, such as what the event is and what people need to bring or do beforehand.

Remember: The people reading your event description might not have heard of your church before. Avoid using churchy language or insider information. Also remember that date, time, and location are all within the Facebook event itself, so no need to repeat that information in the description!

Add a Cover Image

While this might be an afterthought when creating your event, a cover image can speak volumes. It’s often the first thing people see when the event appears in their Feed, so make sure it includes some basic information like the name of the event. You don’t need to include every piece of information, but including one important part can catch viewers’ eye.

You can design your own Facebook event image in a site or tool like Canva, or you can choose an image from a previous event (e.g., from last year’s summer block party).

Open Up the Conversation

Allowing for people to write posts in the Discussion tab within your Facebook event can build excitement, foster community, and give you the chance to answer any questions people may have.

If you’re wary about what people might post, adjust your communication settings within the event to mark “Posts must be approved by a host.” This allows an admin on your Facebook account to approve each post before it goes live.

Encourage Invites from Members

Lastly, one of the major parts of creating a comprehensive Facebook strategy for church events is to have more people attend your events. To that end, encourage your members to invite their friends and family to the Facebook event.

While a personal, in-person invite might be the most effective form of outreach, an event on Facebook that comes from someone they know can open the door for conversation. You can encourage your members to invite their friends in person, and then follow up with the Facebook invite.

Communicating with your congregation or guests can be difficult, but articulating what you need to doesn't have to be painful. Use these FREE text, voice, and email blueprints to kick-start your church communication strategy.

Best Practices for Church Presentation Slides

Hannah Hansen — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 11:00:00 GMT

Church presentation slides are an important part of your worship. While, of course, they’re not as important as truthfully preaching the Word of God, slides help transmit the message you’re preaching to those in the pews—hopefully in an easy-to-read way.

However, many churches struggle to put together slides that are clear, consistent, and well-designed. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to make effective slides—we’re here to show you how!

What Are Church Presentation Slides?

Church presentation slides are the graphics that appear on the screen, wall, or TV in your worship space before, during, and after the service. There are many different types of slides, including welcome slides, announcement slides, and worship slides.

These slides can be designed in a variety of presentation programs, including PowerPoint, Canva, Google Slides, and Proclaim. Whether you choose a paid or free option, there are some best design practices you will want to keep in mind.

Best Practices for Using Slides in Worship

We’ve compiled some of our best graphic design tips for church slides here. Whether you have past experience in graphic design or are totally new to the concept, our tips will help you make your slides look professional.

Keep It Simple

One of the biggest mistakes to make when it comes to designing presentation slides is to include too much: a busy background image, different colors, different fonts, clipart images—the list goes on and on.

If you want your slides to be legible and clear, keep it simple. This doesn’t mean having black text on a white background—although that can be a good choice sometimes! We recommend making one element (background image, font color, etc.) visually interesting but keeping the rest simple. For example, you might choose a video background of water flowing but keep your font simple, bold, and sans serif (with no little tails on the letters).

Make Sure Everything Is Consistent

For your worship slides, everything should be consistent from slide to slide. If you don’t want to worry about having to change backgrounds and fonts each week, just choose one design with a few variations for different types of slides—such as liturgy, Scripture verses, prayers, and songs. This ensures that from slide to slide (and week to week), everything is consistent.

Of course, it’s your choice if you want to have different thematic backgrounds for different songs, but you should make sure they’re simple and easy to read. If you choose to have thematic backgrounds, we recommend keeping your font the same across slides!

Choose the Right Slide Backgrounds

We’ve mentioned this many times already, but the slide background is critically important to ensure the words on the screen are legible and easy to read. There are many options for slide backgrounds:

Plain color
Image
Video

All of these options can serve your church well in different types of slides, and you should have the creative freedom to experiment and see what works best for your church!

Just keep in mind that no matter what type of background you choose for your slides, it shouldn’t distract from what people need to read on the slide. If your image is too light and makes the words illegible, try putting a 30% opacity black overlay on top of the image. If your video is moving too fast, choose one that moves in slower motion. These small changes can make a big difference in legibility!

Subscribe to the CTS Blog Technology & Your Ministry for more church-specific design tips!

Game	Neighbor Relay	Who’s My Neighbor?	Mercy Match
Theme Connection	The Samaritan acted quickly to help his neighbor, while others passed by. This game emphasizes noticing and acting.	The lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?” This game highlights recognizing people and paying attention.	The Samaritan showed mercy, not just words. This game emphasizes quick recognition of merciful actions.
Supplies	None	One blindfold	Prepared slips of paper with simple “helpful” or “ignoring” scenarios (e.g., “You see someone drop books—do you help?” vs. “You walk past someone crying in the lunchroom.”).
Rules	Divide youth into two teams of three. Arrange them in relay formation across the room. At the leader’s signal, the first person runs to the other side, taps the next person, then stays there. Here’s the twist: the person running must also “notice” a teammate who pretends to stumble (at random, a leader can call out someone’s name to “fall”). The runner must pause, help the “fallen” person up (quick hand-up), and then continue. First team with all members across wins.	Form a circle with one blindfolded youth in the center. Silently, the leader taps one youth in the circle. That person says, “Hello, neighbor” in a disguised voice (funny accent, whisper, etc.). The blindfolded player must guess who spoke. If correct, they switch places. If not, another round continues.	Scatter the slips face down in the middle of the group. Youth take turns grabbing one slip, reading it aloud, and deciding aloud whether it reflects showing mercy or ignoring a neighbor. If they get it right, they keep the slip; if not, it returns to the pile. Play until all slips are taken.
Tips	Rotate who gets called to “fall” so everyone plays both roles.	Encourage creativity in voices but keep it respectful.	Keep scenarios relevant to their lives (school, sports, farm chores, etc.).
Debrief	Who noticed? Who rushed? How easy was it to ignore someone?	Tie in afterward: It’s not always obvious who our neighbor is—but they are still there.	Which actions looked most like the Samaritan’s mercy?