Online Church Management

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A website is a powerful tool for churches to advertise who they are, where they are and what they do. It’s also a great medium for Church administration. The Gateway Church uses WordPress to drive our website and I’ve written a powerful administration plugin to help manage Church life.

It contains an address book with bulk email and sms facilities to keep in touch with people. There’s a powerful rota with unlimited tasks, attendance tracking and graphs, visitor tracking and a great calendar that allows “nth day” recurring that Church leaders love – “the prayer meeting is on the fourth Sunday of the month”.
The back end is for logged in administrators to edit what is going on. Here are some back end screenshots
Firstly adding or editing address details

When communicating to everyone – lots of people look at emails daily, but everybody looks at an sms straight away!


If your website is on a “shared host”, chances are there are restriction on how many emails a website is allowed to send an hour, to stop sites become spammers. My plugin allows a non-technical user setup email queueing…

The calendar section has multiple categories with a neat colour picker…

And viewing, adding and editing of events…

Keeping track of visitor followup is important to see how people are settling in – and what you measure improves.

The plugin also has attendance graphs to help with future planning and to help spot seasonal high and low spots.
The monthly average shows seasonal dips…

The rolling average, smooths the seasonal dips out…

For us at The Gateway Church, you can see the classic Church Plant plateau, which we are working hard to burst out by being thoroughly outward looking.

The latest version is available at http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/church_admin. Enjoy

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR - ANDY MOYLE

Andy Moyle is a church leader and web developer. His biggest project is the Church Admin WordPress plugin and app. He also runs, mainly so he can eat pizza.