Apps provide a way for churches to keep in contact with their members every other day of the week, not just on Sunday. A sense of community is necessary to having a thriving church. In this article we’ll go over some great features that can help you bring an additional sense of community over and above what you already have for your church, and help enhance your churchgoers’ experience.

When you’re first navigating through our system, it can be a bit daunting thanks to the vast possibilities of what can be done with your app. That's why we’ve put together a list of some features that you can start off with which we feel will help get you on the right path to creating an amazing app for your church.

Keeping in touch is important in keeping your community alive. Whether it’s staying in contact with other campuses or staying in contact after mass ends, our features provide you several options to do this.

With the Social Wall feature you can create different chatrooms dedicated to the groups that exist within your community such as Youth Groups, Bible Study, etc. With the Social Wall anyone who interacts with the wall will receive a notification whenever there’s new activity within it. You can also use this feature for prayer requests.

If you want to give users a more private way to submit prayer requests, you can use either the TypeForm, JotForm, or Google Form feature which will allow anyone to fill it out a form that you create and send it off to your church’s staff. That way only those who have access to the form’s replies will be able to see the prayer requests.

Have small groups at your church? You can use the Places 2.0 feature to show those small groups’ locations as well as the locations of your church’s campuses or sister churches. This makes it super easy for any church goer to find out which home groups meet nearby, or visit another campus location while traveling. 

Just have one location? No problem! You can still use the Places 2.0 feature to show your church’s location. Alternatively you can use the Contact Us feature to give users easy access to the contact information of your church. You can also use the People feature to show your church’s staff and give your churchgoers the ability to contact specific pastors directly.

Every thriving church has events going on year-round, and with the Events Manual and Events Feed features, you can bring in your church’s events calendar into your app. You may be wondering what’s the difference between the two features. The Events Manual feature allows you to manually input events into the in-app calendar via the App Dashboard, while the Event Feed feature allows you to add events to the in-app calendar by syncing it with an iCal link.

Does your church have Social Media pages? If so, you can bring your social media pages into the app with the Facebook and Twitter features. Have an Instagram account? You can bring that into the app with the WebView feature. This allows you to bring all of your social media pages into one place making them more easily accessible for your customers.

Another great way to connect with churchgoers  is through Push Notifications. With our system you have complete control over your notifications. You can send out scheduled notifications, create notification groups that deal with specific topics that users can subscribe to, as well as set up automatic notifications. We also have the GeoFence feature that allows you to send out locations-based notifications. Want to welcome visitors to your church? You can set up a notification to trigger whenever someone gets within a certain distance of your church which can send them a welcoming message, or a blurb on what your current sermon series is.

Let’s face it: We’re all human, and life can get busy sometimes. It’s rare to find that individual who attends church every single Sunday. For those of us who don’t, what better way to catch up on a sermon series than to access them in an app? Each church has their own way of presenting a sermon, so some features will work better for your church than others.
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Have videos of your sermons on YouTube or Vimeo? With the YouTube and Vimeo features you can bring those video sermons into your app. Just have audio? Then we recommend using the Media Center Manual feature which will allow you to create an archive of audio sermons in your app. You can pair that feature with the Audio Media Player feature which gives the user additional control over the audio in your app. If you have an RSS feed tied to your sermons or your blog, you can bring that feed into your app with the Media Center RSS Feed feature.

Another great feature to keep in mind is our Seminar and Lecture Notes feature which allows users to bookmark and add their own notes to sermons, or any other presentation that you may hold at your church.

Want to include this week’s bulletin? If you have it stored in PDF form, you can use the PDF Viewer feature, or if you have it stored elsewhere online, you can also bring it into your app with the WebView feature. All of these features can help you bring your pastor’s sermons into your app making them easily accessible to everyone!

Along with the features already mentioned, there’s some other ones that we recommend you take a look into for your church’s app.

Do you want to include a digital version of the Bible in your app? We recommend using the WebView feature which will allow you to bring whatever translation you typically use from a site such as biblegateway.com. 

Along with bringing a digital version of the Bible into your app, you can also use the WebView feature to collect tithes and donations. Funding a church can be tough, and with the WebView feature you can bring in a donations page for your church into the app. While creating another revenue source might not be the main reason for having one, if your church has a cafe, you can use the Loyalty and Coupon features to help encourage people to visit the cafe. While these were made for more business-centric apps in mind, there’s plenty of creative ways to use these to encourage your churchgoers.

How about sharing pictures of your church’s community and events. With the Image Gallery and Info Slider feature you can include a digital gallery of all the fun events and people that new and old members alike can encounter at your church.

Does your staff offer counseling services? If so, you can use our YouCanBook.Me or Calendly features to give users the ability to schedule appointments with your staff if you have accounts with those services.

Have Sunday school classes? You can use the Flashcards feature to help your younger (or older) churchgoers brush up on what they’ve learned. 

Another great feature to help your churchgoers share your church and app is the Share App feature. With this feature, your church members can quickly and easily share your church’s app with their friends and family thus growing your app’s user base organically!

With smartphone users constantly on the rise, a mobile app is just another tool you can use to keep your church members connected. So what are you waiting for? Start building! These are just a small handful of features that you can use in your app to help expand your restaurant’s reach, but we have many more in our system. We encourage you to check out all of the amazing features that we offer in our system so that you can make the best app for your establishment.

Have additional questions? We’re here to help. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions you may have.