Why Your Church Plant Needs a Church Management Software Solution

Church planting expands your church's reach, allowing you to spread God’s Word in new places. It’s a very involved task with multiple moving parts, which may be tough to track manually. Fortunately, we offer church management software solutions to help you manage your church plants.

How can church management software help with church planting? Read on to learn more.

What Is Church Planting?

Church planting is the process of sending out a team from an existing church to establish a church in a new area. Established churches usually send a group called “church planters” to a new area to gather new members and eventually build a church. Once the new church can stand on its own, the church planters will stay at the new church, or start the process again elsewhere.

Church Planter Tasks and Qualifications

The responsibilities of a church planter vary depending on the goals of their home church, but it usually involves the following:

• Spreading God’s word and gathering believers in a new area
• Pastoring people in the community
• Setting a good example for community members
• Starting a new church in their destination community

To be the right person to start a church in a new area, you need some key qualities. Here are several important characteristics of a church planter:

• Strong leadership and teamwork skills
• Good adaptability
• Attuned to the community’s needs
• Highly motivated
• Committed to building a strong church
  
  

Church Planting in the Bible

Church planting is outlined in the Bible as one of the ways that the Apostle Paul built new churches. Paul’s approach to church planting is written in Acts 14:21-23: 

“They preached the gospel in that city and won a large number of disciples. Then they returned to Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith. “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” they said. Paul and Barnabas appointed elders for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord, in whom they had put their trust.”

The Bible also details how church planting can spread God’s Word effectively. The churches that Paul planted began to send missionaries of their own, planting more churches throughout the land as told in 1 Thessalonians 1:6-8: 

“You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia – your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it,”

Church Planting Methods

There’s no “playbook” to church planting because different churches use different approaches. However, there are some prominent church-planting methods, such as:

• Parachute drop: A parachute-drop church plant refers to a group of planters that move to a new area to start a church from scratch. This method is usually more challenging because the planters can’t depend on support from their home church due to distance or other reasons.

• Mother-daughter churches: With this method, an established church (sometimes called the “mother church”) provides the personnel, money, and facilities to start a church in a new area. The daughter church is autonomous, but the mother church may have a significant say in its daily operations.

• House or cell church: With this method, a small home church helps others in the community to form their own house churches. From there, these house churches can pool resources to hold regular inter-group gatherings or to create a church in the area.
  
  

Why Does Your Church Plant Need Church Management Software?

Whichever method you choose, your church plant needs church management software because there are many elements of church planting that are hard to keep track of manually. A church management software solution helps you automate processes like reporting and task coordination, so you can focus your energies and time on growing your church plant.

Understanding Church Management Software

Before we get into how church management software helps your church plant, it’s a good idea to learn a little more about church management software.

Simply put, church management software is computer software created to help churches manage and automate daily operations. You can’t use traditional management software to run a church because the two tools are designed differently. Regular management software caters to for-profit organizations, while church management software is custom-made to run churches.

Key Features of Church Management Software

What can church management software do to help your church? Here are some of its most prominent features:

People Management Tools

People management tools found in church management systems like Breeze allow you to record and organize church member data easily. Its filters allow you to search for members by gender, age, and other categories. 

A complete member database also helps you remember birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and baptism dates, so you can send congratulatory messages on time.

Group Organizer and Messaging

Church management systems can organize your members into groups based on their activities, gender, age, and more. As you can target a specific group, it’s easier to create customized outreach messages and make the message feel personalized.

Moreover, the messaging tool often offers performance reports and statistics, helping you identify which messages resonate most with your members.

Donation Dashboard

Using church management software means you don’t have to track donations manually anymore. A donor tracking dashboard helps you identify every detail of incoming donations easily. The software also generates donation reports to ensure you always know how well the church is performing financially.

Event Management Tools

Managing multiple simultaneous events can be confusing, which is where church management software comes in. It offers scheduling tools, check-in pages, registration forms, and other useful event-related features to ensure your events go as smoothly as possible.

How Church Management Software Helps Your Church Plant

Church management software can help a church plant as much as it can help established churches. Here are three ways church management software like Breeze can help your church plant grow:

Refine Outreach Messages

Church management software gives you email statistics on how many people open and read your messages. This helps you refine future email copies based on your previous message’s performance. It might take some trial and error, but you’ll eventually land on a communication style that works well for your community.

Take Online Donations and Appreciate Donors

Most church plants don’t have a building to start with, so having a physical donation box may not be viable. Fortunately, church management software lets you take donations through the Internet or text messages without additional monthly costs.

You can also print customized year-end giving statements to thank donors for their generosity, encouraging them to donate more the following year.

Manage Community-Building Events 

When you're just starting to plant a church, you may not have enough planters to run community events. Church management software can automate more time-consuming event-related tasks like registration and attendant check-ins so your planters can concentrate on making the event memorable.

Closing Thoughts

Church management software doesn’t just help established churches – it’s also indispensable for church plants. Church plants often don’t have the same resources as their home church, which makes the automation features offered by church management software even more useful.