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Any church that has experienced significant growth in the last year will be quick to point out that simple ministry tasks complicate as numbers grow. Software can be the solution to simplify things.

Finding the right software

With more than 7,000 members and an office staff of 75, Asbury United Methodist Church of Tulsa, Okla., relies on church management software to help run the administrative side of the church. Teresa Springer, Asbury's director of information technology, said ACS Technologies has become the church's central knowledge base.

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The system in place at Asbury keeps track of data for more than 12,000 people and helps the church manage the information as it continues to grow.

“ACS helped us prepare for the anticipated 40 percent growth in members when we moved into our new church building last year,” Springer said. Some 896 new members have joined the congregation since then and more than 600 visitors attend Sunday services each week, with approximately 50 family units being first-time visitors, according to Springer.

Growing churches find church management software helpful in tracking attendance, prospects and membership. Shelby Systems has been providing technology to do just that; they serve some 8,000 users and are a Microsoft Certified Partner. But what impresses customers most is their help.

“They are quick to hear the needs of the church and provide a solution,” network administrator, Janie Ervin, said. Those solutions are big at Ervin's church, Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio, a congregation Time magazine noted as one of America's fastest-growing. The congregation exceeds 8,000 members. And Ervin reports that they handle more than 14,000 entries in their database.

But she said she finds Shelby supportive and progressive to meet the needs of any size church. She recommends the system to smaller churches as well. “Shelby does grow with the congregation and with our needs,” she said. In fact, she said the company is often a step ahead.

Customized software

Sometimes staying on the cutting edge requires a custom software solution. ACS wrote a special statistics software program to work directly with Asbury's activities module in order to provide them with information they needed to help manage a large number of volunteers.

Other software, such as Church Helpmate, used in more than 1,300 churches varying in membership from 40 to 6,000, customizes by interfacing with existing software.

Jean Burt, business administrator for Christian Life Church in Eliot, Maine, said that saves time, something she was looking for in new church management software.

“We use Quickbooks for our accounting,” Burt explained, “and the ability to export contributions information from Helpmate to Quickbooks saves time.” Compatible software also decreases errors from entering data on two different systems at two different times, she said. “We just enter everything once.”

Burt said the 300-member independent church will continue to use Helpmate as it grows because there is an unlimited amount of data storage with the software, and because the system is quick and easy — the bottom line for any church management software.