Ask HN: Any Christian software engineers here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any Christian software engineers here?

17 pointstimmorgan16 comments

I have a passion for the Church, and the tools it uses. And I think they all, for the most part, suck. I have half a mind to make something better, specifically a sort of Church Management System.

I'm wondering if I can find any kinship here on HN, the best hacker/engineer community I've ever found. Though I have a feeling the community here is largely non-religious, or at least hesitant to express it openly.

Is HN a good place to find people like me, or is there somewhere else I should look?

[edit] I'm not looking for a co-founder -- just someone to maybe bounce ideas off of.

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I too have considered how church specific software could be made better.

My old church uses a program called The City (http://www.onthecity.org/) to create a social presence for themselves. This was a nondenominational church in Southern California that had ~1000 people/week split into 3 services.

In general, I think the implementation of this idea was awful. Younger people are already on facebook/twitter/etc and don't need another account to maintain. Older people have a hard time getting on it and using it, although I think it does help older members of the church keep in touch with each other. This church has had a hard time getting people to sign up and use it regularly despite the pastor mentioning it every week for months in the service and bringing in outside tech support people to train the congregation.

I see two major problems with church software. First, drawing the line at what exactly is a church. I know many Baptist congregations that would be offended at the thought of using the same software as an Episcopalian parish, nevermind Catholic/Jewish/Muslim/New Age Hippie. The needs of a small Baptist congregation and a small Catholic one are going to be much more similar, however, than a small Baptist church and a mega church.

The second problem is how to handle accepting money. It feels wrong to develop church software with a profit motive, rather than a make the church more Christ-like motive. (I've always wondered about the companies that make the Eucharist crackers and all the other church paraphernalia.) I think the best solution would be to offer the software at-cost (whatever that means for software... hosting fees maybe?) to churches, and then have a recommended donation above that amount.

One of the biggest problems I have with the tech-culture of the church is the lack of open source. I think that OSS nearly perfectly aligns with Jesus's ideals, and it is frustrating when religious people don't see that. A service that brought Linux awareness to more churches would be amazing.

I'd love to chat more about this issue. What type of church do you attend? Are you ordained or have you been employed at churches?

Thanks for the thoughts!

My wife and I have volunteered in a local ~800/week church for close to ten years, managing the technology there. We've worked hard to introduce OSS in as many places as possible. Our network servers are mostly Linux, and I even wrote a SaaS (also OSS) similar to The City called OneBody (http://beonebody.com).

So I agree with your thoughts on OSS.

Unfortunately, OneBody suffers from many of the same problems as you describe of The City, only worse since I have no marketing budget, and I'm about the only guy doing the coding.

I think I might like to build a new solution for churches, possibly OSS, that integrates with social media, but is designed for use by minsters and leaders -- not another private social network, which I have decided will forever be a hard sell.

I'd like to follow you on Twitter or get your email address if possible.

Something that integrates with social networks rather than replaces them could work. Maybe an automated way to setup a Facebook group, G+ Circles, twitter feed, etc. Sort of like a super-blog for churches to make sure everyone gets announcements in a format that's convenient for them.

I've noticed that lots of pastors create a blog, post actively for a few months, and then never post again. 5 years later and there's still a huge link to the defunct blog on the church's website.

My email's jackpirate@gmail

I started a new blog at http://church.io where I hope to eventually flesh out some of my ideas about church software.

Thanks so much for your thoughts.

I agree about pastors blogs as well -- I've seen the same phenomenon.

I actually work for a church management software provider, Icon Systems (http://iconcmo.com). I think our aim is rather different than yours, though: we intentionally aim at management tools, where I get the feeling you are aiming more at engagement tools for ministry. Is that a fair statement?

If so, you might take a look at the Table Project (http://tableproject.org/). I think there might be some parallels between your thoughts and theirs—plus, it is a free product, to boot!

David, you've nailed it.

I guess the problem is that ChMSs are notoriously bad with interoperability in my experience and want to keep the data within their black box. A separate engagement tool would be fairly impotent if it was separate and had no way of accessing the membership database.

Viable solutions for churches tend to be afterthought bolt-on modules for their existing ChMS, which is a shame.

My dream would be for ChMS vendors to agree on a standard API for exchanging member information. But I'm afraid hell might freeze over before I see something like that.

Out of necessity, a good church engagement tool may have to be also a ChMS as well.

The Table is a product similar to my other project OneBody, and I haven't yet seen how far it goes toward helping ministers/leaders engage with members via existing social media (rather than just creating another private social network). I definitely need to take a look.

Does it matter? While I would bet that of the few thousand registered here, at least a few consider themselves "Christians", what you need is someone who is interested in building a system that you have envisioned. Good luck in your search though. If you can get your whole mind into the project I think you will be half way there.

Agreed, it doesn't take a religious person to build software to spec, but I guess I'm looking for more than that -- someone who is entrepreneurial, a hacker, and has a similar heart for the Church.

This isn't an appeal for a co-founder -- more of pure curiosity than anything.

I work as a software engineer and am a part time pastor. Yeah I would agree most church software is not that great (I use Easy worship instead of PowerPoint and that totally rocks). First because a lot of what the church does has echo's in business software. Office managers use MS office and off the shelf accounting software. I know pastors use facebook to connect with others (or should be but that is a different post). The church software that I have seen was either too expensive for the churches I was serving at or was not a felt need for us to go out and purchase. I have thought long and hard about church software and I see needs, but most of those needs are being met by off the shelf software that helps with the need to manage or the need to connect.

I guess I'm talking more specifically about church management software. As for using off-the-shelf solutions, I would expect CRM software to maybe come the closest, but it really does seem like a niche that needs special software, if only for the reason that no minister wants to feel like the software they're using cheapens the Gospel by treating it as a sell-able good.

Maybe it's just a problem of terminology. Regardless, I still think there's a need not currently served by off-the-shelf CRM or specialized Church Management Solutions. Ministers need help with engagement and communication, especially with the explosion of social media, which no current church software is equipped to integrate with.

What would a 'Church Management System' do? Have you been to http://www.monkdevelopment.com ?

A large number of HN users are based in Silicon Valley and the surrounding area, which is well known for being largely non-religious. That said, I am a software engineer who is a Christian and spent last summer in the Bay Area, so don't let statistics discourage you. I met plenty of other Christian software engineers while I was out there. Most of them have full-time jobs at well-known tech companies. I don't know if any of them use HN.

Depending on how many software engineers are in your area, it may be more efficient to ask people at church if they are entrepreneurial software engineers than to ask HN users if they are Christians.

Church Management System (ChMS) refers to a database system to track member/visitor information, donations, volunteer efforts, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_management_software#Chur...

What research have you done so far on the current offerings? Do you have a list - presumably there are some on Freshmeat/github/Sourceforge/... somewhere.

Some quick leads:

* http://www.churchaccountingsoftwareguide.com/church-manageme... mentions ChurchTrac, ChurchDB and several others including a couple of user comments.

* http://www.churchcommunitymatters.com/category/chms/ blog posts about "Church Community Builder" the author might be a useful contact; http://www.churchcommunitymatters.com/questions-to-ask-when-... looks particularly pertinent

* http://www.ccmag.com/page/index.php?pageid=16&articleid=... is a review of ChMS from late 2010.

* http://www.churchdb.org/ "Church Info" a ChMS

* http://www.capterra.com/church-management-software directory listing of about 80 (?) different systems with star ratings, reviews and a filtering system

* http://www.christianitytoday.com/cbg/officequip/chmangsoftwa... CT section on ChMS

HTH. Grace and Peace.

Interesting idea. There are some guys in our diocese that run a company called Solutio. More web based stuff but really nice.

We use ParishSoft as a church management system for our church. Even thought it's MSAccess based, it's better than I would have expected. Also, since many churches are on a tight budget, including us, it works well for that. Could get some ideas there.

IIRC patio11 is Catholic. Not going to find someone better to bounce this idea off of. If he doesn't respond here you could try sending an email.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/about/

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