The Congregation Hub Founding Story

I have a very weird technology story — but it's mine.

The Early Spark

When I was in high school, I was drawn to computers like a lot of people my age. I really excelled in computer class. I had a great teacher, and I genuinely liked it.

I happened to live in the same town where several presidential candidates were setting up campaign offices, so I volunteered at one of them. They quickly realized I was good with technology, and I ended up basically running their database for an entire summer — until that campaign fell apart.

College, Teaching, and a Growing Obsession

I went to college to be a pastor, and I loved it. But midway through, I started getting interested in web design. I picked up Adobe Photoshop, learned a little about how websites worked, and graduated around 2005.

My first job was teaching third and fourth grade at a Christian school. But my real passion during that season was making church websites. I spent my evenings reading web design books, listening to the very first web design podcasts, and trying my hand at building sites.

Then I got married at the end of 2005, my wife and I bought the first generation MacBooks and I got the Adobe Creative Suite. I hung out my shingle and started making church websites for people on the side.

Tennessee and the Office I Drove Past

We moved from New Hampshire to Tennessee, where I served as a youth pastor, camp director, and Christian school teacher. All the while, I was still learning and moonlighting as a web designer.

I have a very special picture of me holding my oldest child in my lap in my little home office in our little apartment in Tennessee. She's now almost 17 years old — and I have never stopped learning, building, and tinkering since that moment.

I remember driving by this one office. It sat along the road between our house in Athens, Tennessee, and my in-laws' place in Dalton, Georgia, in a town called Cleveland. It was a web design company. I drove past it and thought, "I would love to work there. That would be so cool."

The Call to Illinois

We spent four and a half amazing years in Athens, working at Fairview Baptist Church. Then one day I got a call to come up to central Illinois — to a place I'd never visited before — to be their pastor. We prayed about it, talked to our pastor, and made the move to become the full-time pastor of a small church in Mattoon, Illinois.

But the web development bug never left me. I kept building websites for churches, ministries, and missionaries, and I kept learning as much as I could.

The Church Software Idea

Eventually I started to get good at it — good enough to notice a pattern. All of these church websites were basically the same. They shared the same structure, the same features. It would be so much better and cheaper for people if, instead of building each site from scratch, I built a church website engine.

The problem? I was nowhere near good enough a programmer to pull that off. But I didn't know that. So I started building it anyway.

I started dreaming up different church tools: a Prayer Request Generator for making prayer sheets, a Sermon Library, a system for tracking missionaries. I spent a ton of my free time playing with different technologies and experimenting with ideas. It was my main hobby for really fifteen years.

Punching Above My Weight

During all that time, I was absolutely punching above my weight.

When I first started making websites for money, I had no business making websites for money. When I first started building tools, I had no business building tools. I started a company making software for other businesses just to earn some extra income — and I had no business doing that either. I didn't know what I was doing. I learned through a lot of failure, and I learned on the job.

Build Online

Around 2020, I teamed up with a business partner and we started a company called Build Online, making software for entrepreneurs. We started hiring developers, and for three years we just went all in. At our peak we had 20 developers. I was flying all over the place, helping design software, leading teams.

Remember that web design office I used to drive past in Cleveland, Tennessee — the one I dreamed about working at? Well, without ever planning it, I ended up leading something way bigger than that little office. Way cooler than that. Build Online was so much fun, so rewarding. It was such a blessing.

When Everything Changed

But at the end of 2022, my son — I think he was eight at the time — started to get really sick. We were spending huge amounts of time going back and forth to big hospitals. All of this while I was pastoring a growing church.

I needed to step away from the company.

I also had this pull to get back to what I'd always cared about: making tools for churches. That's when I started Congregation Hub.

Building Congregation Hub

By then, I knew a lot about the church software industry. We'd had plenty of church software clients. I'd done quite a bit of work for big church software companies. But I wanted a different take on it. I thought we could make something simple.

So I went back to being a full-time pastor, and Congregation Hub became my hobby project — built from everything I'd learned over the years. I had my own church, Bible Baptist, in mind from day one. My church has always been the first user of Congregation Hub.

Two years went by. The money from selling my part of Build Online was gone. With five kids and a pastor's salary at a small church in the middle of Illinois, and a wife busy caring for our son’s medical needs, I needed to get a job. I took a position as a lead developer at Rural King — which happens to be headquartered right here in our town. All the while, I've kept working and tinkering on Congregation Hub.

The Heart Behind It

Through all of this, the Lord has taught me and reminded me that my goal isn't to get rich. My goal is to help smaller churches.

Churches like the one I've pastored for close to 15 years — Bible Baptist Church in Mattoon, Illinois. We have about a hundred people on a Sunday. We hold three services a week. We're fairly traditional. We're never going to be a huge megachurch.

I've been a bi-vocational pastor for a long time now. I know the time constraints that come with that. I know what it's like to run a church where most of the people serving are volunteers with full lives and limited hours. That shapes everything about how I think about church software.

I've seen the blessing our church has been in our life and in the lives of so many people around us. And I know the church software industry doesn't prioritize churches like ours. There's no money to be made there. The industry chases the growing churches, the ones with enough people to charge a premium.

I want to serve churches like mine.

That's the heart behind Congregation Hub. The reason I keep it so cheap — the reason I'm trying to give so much of it away — is because I know the budget constraints of smaller churches. I would much rather see that money go toward your missions than into a software product.

I think that's one of the things that makes Congregation Hub special.

If this resonates with you — if you're one of those smaller churches — I just want to serve you. I want to make tools that make your life easier. I'm not trying to make a ton of money off you. I'm trying to be a genuine blessing. Why don't you give Congregation Hub a try and let me know what you think?