Ministry Tracker ChMS is joining Faithlife!
Our mission at Faithlife is to use technology to equip the Church to grow in the light of the Bible.
Equipping pastors and Bible students with Logos Bible Software is the first and most important thing we do. Resources like Proclaim, Faithlife Groups, Logos Mobile Ed, Bible Study Magazine, Faithlife TV, etc. build on that Bible study base. Our tools help pastors present their sermons and engage their congregations; our expanding content resources equip people at all levels of depth in their Bible study and Christian education.
I am excited to announce that Faithlife has just acquired Ministry Tracker, a church management system (ChMS). This new addition to the Faithlife family complements our existing (and planned) tools by providing a place for churches to manage people, finances, and resource records. The Ministry Tracker team is joining Faithlife and bringing their years of experience serving churches.
Ministry Tracker started years ago as a tool to manage records of ministry contacts, evangelism activities, and relationship development. We are excited to integrate it with Faithlife Groups, Proclaim, SoundFaith, and some other soon-to-be-announced tools for your church. We will be investing in improving the product even faster, and connecting it to other ministry resources.
For more than 25 years, pastors have been our target users of Logos Bible Software. Yes, pastors are less than half the Logos Bible Software users; we have students, teachers, faculty, and all kinds of people who just want to study the Bible. But pastors are the largest single group, and a very useful proxy for all of our users. Even those who aren’t pastors are very much like pastors in terms of the hours they dedicate to Bible study each week and the role many serve in teaching others.
We want to serve the whole Church, though, and we particularly want to equip everyone to grow in the light of the Bible. For many people in the church, that’s more likely to happen on the web, on their mobile phone, or even in front of a television, than through using Logos Bible Software. For many people their Bible education will come not through Logos, but through the teaching and discipleship of Logos users. We want to support people with the tool that’s right for them.
We continue to invest in Logos Bible Software and to improve its utility for our core pastor and pastor-like users. We love you, and you’re our first priority! But how can we help you connect with and teach the people in your church who may never be Logos users?
We are working on answers to that question.
I can tell you the big strategic plan right now, though: integrated technology that helps equip the Church to grow in the light of the Bible. You can see that plan in action already:
- Proclaim features a unique on-screen Bible that presents Scripture in context, and it can record and publish sermons automatically.
- Faithlife TV is like other streaming video platforms, only it has special support for streaming an endless video Bible, delivering Bible courses, and automatically presenting sermons recorded by Proclaim.
- Faithlife Groups is a social platform with special support for prayer requests, Scripture reading, curriculum distribution, and more.
Yes, Faithlife is expanding beyond ‘Bible software’. Yes, we are entering some new product categories. In the coming months we will offer more and more tools for managing the church itself.
But please be assured, the Bible remains at the center of all that we do, and we have some very exciting plans for how Logos will integrate with what traditionally is thought of as ‘church management tools’.
Our mission remains: to equip you, and all the people you worship with, and/or pastor, to grow in the light of the Bible.
P.S. You can try Ministry Tracker right now at MinistryTracker.com! There is a demo account ready to use, and you can sign up and move your church onto the platform today. Look for frequent improvements and integration with Proclaim, Faithlife Groups, and more!
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the link is broken.
L2 lvl4 (...) WORDsearch, all the way through L10,
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Hi Bob
i was very interested to see this - we are just looking at investing in a set of management tools like this.
Are you able to give any indication of what types of integration with the rest of the Faithlife product family you are hoping to provide?
I'm not looking for commitments of any sort here but trying to get an understanding of what benefit there would be in using a product that is (tightly) integrated with other Faithlife products we are / may be using. What might this give us that a totally separate product wouldn't?
Thanks, Graham
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Hopefully Bob will see Graham's query and skip over mine.
I think this is an absolutely great opportunity for Faithlife. Like many, through the years, I got asked to help out on church software (management, worship, pastor's, etc) and it's a mess, especially for churches that are not too small and not too large. Legacy 'had it for years, and Bill used to know how that worked' ... volunteer turnover, and haphazard updates. How pastors survive is a wonder.
My observation was that a total church package would allow far better day to day support, training, and tagging on to modernization. Even better, it allows the financial viability for a paid part-timer excited by the spiritual prospects.
I hope Faithlife does some good integration and combo-pricing, though I'm not sure about the current legacy ChMS users.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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The biggest benefit is single sign-on: one account, for admins AND church members, for managing your church. Content licenses, document access, web page, messaging, email, newsletters, social, etc.
We're starting to license content to churches for the whole congregation. (Like our incredible church deal, which is still available.) To administer this, we need to know who is in the church. Millions of people already have a Faithlife account (even if just to use our mobile Logos and Faithlife Study Bible apps). They can all connect to their church and then use Logos, Faithlife TV, and https://app.logos.com to access the licensed content.
The Logos 7 Sermon Editor already integrates with Proclaim, SoundFaith, Faithlife groups, and Faithlife TV. It's pretty cool how you can write the sermon in Logos, send it to Proclaim with slides, have a digital bulletin with the Bible passages show up on the phones of church members Sunday morning, and have the recorded sermon show up at SoundFaith and Faithlife TV automatically. Add your church web site to that automatic publishing process, and you've got both a major time saver and a way to better-engage your congregation.
A church web site that's well integrated with your ChMS, and which supports personal accounts, enables member-only pages. As few as 2% of church web sites have a members-only area you can log into, but many churches would like to have a place to publish a member directory, group information, detailed schedules, and other documents that they don't want on the public web.
Faithlife Groups already supports group reading plans and prayer requests; better prayer list management for groups is coming, as well as tools for pastors and teachers to share biblical and educational content via social platforms. (Both Faithlife and secular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
Many churches have a collection of random tools with different accounts, duplicate calendars, disconnected messaging, etc. Even in some pretty small churches, joining, volunteering, giving, and getting the newsletter could result in needing several accounts. I've seen churches with:
- MailChimp (or Constant Contact) for email newsletter subscription
- Planning Center Online for scheduling volunteers for the worship service
- A separate check-in database for parents and kids for nursery/children's church
- Google Calendar for the public calendar
- Copied email addresses on CC lines for scheduling non-music volunteers
- A third-party solution with separate sign-in for online giving
- A Facebook group for the youth group and some (not all) ministries
- Excel sheets / documents for the church to track phone numbers and addresses
- Various accounts for software, media libraries, web site editing, online curriculum, etc. ("Joe is the only one who can update the web site, and he's on vacation this week...")
Bringing people into the church, helping them engage, volunteer, and give is a long process of multiple signups and lots of duplicated information.
Often churches abandon a tool or service because it was set up by one person who isn't at the church anymore, or stopped volunteering. (A weakness when accounts are single-person, and not tied to a group affiliated with the institution.)
Many times churches are maintaining multiple calendars with duplicate information.
Changing your email or phone number could take months to get to all the right duplicate databases, lists, and scraps of paper some churches use to track people.
We aren't going to be able to fix all of this, and no one solution is going to work for every need at every church. But we are looking to make things easier, to help churches deliver enough content and utility that users won't mind having an account, to save pastors and church staff hours each week, and to improvement engagement.
We want to help turn visitors to regulars to givers to members to volunteers to deep students of the Word and connected, engaged church-family-members.
Want to 'see around the corner?' Join our Church Tools Focus Group.
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Thanks Bob
Appreciate the insights, Graham
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Looks really interesting software but the pricing doesn't include a purchase option - so it looks unlikely for us.
Shalom
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I pretty much expected this was only a matter of time. Glad to see this acquisition for Faithlife.
The mind of man is the mill of God, not to grind chaff, but wheat. Thomas Manton | Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow. Richard Baxter
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Looks awesome. Our church uses ChurchTeams which I guess is the same type of program. Anyway, congrats!
Cynthia
Romans 8:28-38
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