Congregation Hub Progress Update - July 5, 2025

Last week, I laid out a timeline for a relaunch of Congregation Hub. My goal is to make it a much better platform by August 12, featuring:

• Mobile Apps

• Better Onboarding

• Service Planning

• Integrated Web Sites

I'm working toward that goal steadily, dedicating time to this project every day. This week, I primarily focused on building the attendance system and laying the groundwork for service planning.

Taking Attendance

Congregation Hub now has a comprehensive system for taking attendance. When you create a service type, you can attach a group. During attendance taking, you can toggle between that specific group and everyone in your church directory.

I invested significant time into developing this "people picker" module, ensuring that:

• You can quickly search for people and families

• You can select groups of people to move between lists

• You can switch between the whole directory and the group for that specific class or service

• It works seamlessly on phones, which is likely where this module will be used most

I've also added attendance handouts that you can print for individual services or classes. Alternatively, you can click a button and print handouts for an entire week of services to distribute to your Sunday School teachers and ushers for attendance taking, then enter the data into Congregation Hub later.

Once the data is in the system, you'll be able to see helpful information about attendance trends. Eventually, you'll be able to compare this month's average to the same four-week period from previous years. The screenshots you see represent real data from the church where I pastor—this is extremely useful information for church leadership.

Service Planning Foundations

I'm building what I believe will be the most robust service planning tool for traditional churches. This tool will be simple to use while offering advanced features like notifying musicians of assignments and tracking how often you sing certain songs. This development will likely continue throughout the summer alongside other projects.

To build this properly, we need to allow churches to add their hymnals to the system so they can select the songs they normally sing. Having been down this road before, I know that manually entering hymn book data is tedious. The team at Hymnary.org has graciously allowed me to integrate their data into the system.

I've built a tool for importing hymn book indexes, including:

• Hymn number

• Composer

• Songwriter

• First line

• Key

• Meter

• Topics

This provides an excellent foundation for service planning functionality.

Other Recent Additions

In addition to revamping the attendance module, I've made several improvements to prayer requests and prayer request handouts.

First, I fixed the automatic archive feature. Prayer requests older than a date you specify will now automatically be removed from the active list. I also created an easy way for admins to view their church's archived posts and restore them to the active list when needed.

I've added a new "featured request" post type, allowing churches to highlight a missionary, ministry, or other special request on their automatically generated prayer request handouts.

For handouts, clicking the "print handout" button now takes you to a preview screen where you can make last-minute edits before printing.

Behind the scenes, I've implemented several improvements you'll never see directly, including a system that alerts me whenever the queue worker is down (the most common reason SMS and email messages fail to send). I also experimented with moving the system to an automatically scaling host but ultimately decided the current system works better and abandoned that approach.

Prayer Request

I'm currently in the ER with my son Noah, and we're about to be transported by ambulance to Chicago. He's been experiencing low oxygen levels and elevated heart rate, and doctors suspect they may be seeing bacterial spots in his lungs (possibly sarcoidosis).

The timing couldn't be worse—it's VBS week at our church, and I'm scheduled to present an important initiative to our CEO and executives on Monday. My wife also has jury duty, and we have family visiting. When it rains, it pours.

Please keep Noah and our family in your prayers during this challenging time.