The missing bridge in Church software

I love open source software. No app on the internet would exist without it. But more than the packages and source code that it gives me, I love the ethos that lies behind it.

• Not everything needs to be commercialized.
• Sometimes the act of making the thing is the reward in and of itself.
• Others have helped you, so now you want to help others.

Simply put, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."

As you would expect, churches have this ethos as well. When I was at Hillsong, people would reach out all the time asking for copies of our resources and how we do certain things. With joy, we gave these things away. At Good Shepherd, we give our VBS decorations and resources to a church down the road for their VBS that happens the following week. Churches like Life.Church have their Open Network, Passion City Church has Passion Equip, and what God has done through Bridgetown Church is why Practicing the Way exists.

All that is to say, churches want to share resources with each other.

The benefit is obvious. A common sentiment among church staff is feeling like they have too much to do in too many areas. They have to create forms, processes, content, rosters, and service plans all while caring for their community. And not only that, they are expected to do each of these things with excellence.

Additionally, most churches need the exact same things. Why spend time having everyone create their own version of it? We all benefit when we create our thing with excellence, share it with others, and receive in return the blessing of other's hard work.

For churches who are a part of an established denomination, the means for this resource sharing are largely in place. Talk with your deacon, reach out to your sister church. But with the rise of non-denominational and unaffiliated churches, for many, those means don't exists. This means we have to rely on decentralized community forums and the networks we're able to create ourselves.

I believe there needs to exists a solution like GitHub for church resources where we can use the work of others (clone), remix it (fork), and share it back for anyone else to use (pull).

This could play out in a few ways:

Option one would be every app for themselves. Church Space could add a way to share and remix email templates, Planning Center could add a way to share and remix workflows and forms, The Church Co could add a way to share and remix webpages. This is the easiest (and most realistic) option.

Say I want to make a form for collecting photography consent. I could go to PCO, click new form, and then I would have the option to start from scratch or I could browse a library of templates other churches have shared. I click add, and then my form is populated with a great starting point for the form that I can tweak to meet the needs of our legal and compliance teams.

Option two would be a centralized platform. I go to this platform, I search for photography consent forms, and then I can click an import button that will use the platform's API to add it to Planning Center, Formstack, The Church Co, or whatever my form tool of choice is. This has the added benefit that it's not tied to one platform. This means more churches could share their resources with more people. There would be some technical challenges with getting schemas to match and handling cases where one platform doesn't support the same features as another, but I believe these things could be worked out.

Option three would be a shared standard. This would be like Git itself. PCO, Church Space, The Church Co, and so on could adopt a standard protocol to share content and resources cross-apps. This gives the native, in-platform benefit of option one combined with the wider base of contributors from option two.

Due to technical complexities and market incentives, I realistically think option one is the only one that will happen. Nevertheless, the ethos that sits behind this idea is something I would love to see more of in church software.

Imagine if I could import a “New to Faith” course with one click to a content platform and adapt that to fit our church and our beliefs? What if I could import a staff page to my website? Or if I could import a drip campaign for first-time givers? What about a service plan for an Easter service, pre-loaded with things I would never have thought of? Or even if I could share templates of our HR materials to save new and understaffed churches the time? The options are endless.

I really believe this is the ethos of Christ, and I hope that it can become the ethos of the applications that assist those serving His Church.