From our Founders: What makes Churchteams different?

The direction of a business ultimately flows from the lives of its founders. I, Boyd Pelley, Churchteams co-founder, love to make disciples in the local church and have a natural bent toward systems and constant improvement. I’ve served as a discipleship, administrative, and family pastor, and currently serve as an elder in my local church. Mark Horan, co-founder and software architect, loves creating software solutions for real problems. Before starting Churchteams, he worked in the corporate world, leading software teams and projects, but has always had a heart for serving in the local church. We started Churchteams in 1999, and today we remain owner-operated, bringing our ministry, systems, and tech experience to Churchteams.

Four key values blend our lives together and form the foundation of our team and our company: Service, Innovation, Team, and Humility. These are the building blocks. Here’s how we live them out.

Service: From People Who’ve Worked on Church Staff

It starts with people.  Before the software, before the sale, how we treat everyone we serve matters.

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 7:12

From my first support interaction to the untold thousands our team has had since, we want to listen, empathize, and treat others the way we want to be treated. All of our support staff have worked on church staff.  We know what it’s like on the other side of the call, email, text, or Zoom.  No question is too simple. No strategic dream is too complex.  

For us, support conversations aren’t tasks to be measured and completed.  They are people to care for as an extension of God’s love.  Support conversations are our greatest resource for discovering needs, dreams, and, of course, bugs.  For example, a handful of clients told us that adding a check-out to our overall check-in system would be helpful or, in one case, help them comply with state laws governing preschools.  We are developing that feature now and plan to release it before the end of the month.

Innovation: Creative Solutions to Real Problems

Those needs, dreams, and bugs don’t just get logged; we build them. For example, one client needed a way for members to vote digitally and anonymously. We created a way for them to do that using hidden IDs as merge tags in our email system.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.”  Colossians 3:23

Working for the Lord means working on what matters most to Him.  Because people matter to God, they matter to us.  That’s why we’ve focused on building the best solution for managing everything people-related in a church.  

That includes discipleship. Because making disciples is the heart of the local church, we built discipleship tracking into the software. Churches can map their discipleship pathway and track where each person is. This snapshot shapes everyday ministry decisions.

Churches get a better picture when people information, groups, contribution tracking, registration forms, email communication, text interaction, follow-up notes, volunteer scheduling, secure check-in, discipleship pathways, and feedback reporting live in the same place. Staff benefit when they don’t have to link data across multiple modules.  One place to tell one story.

Solving real problems involves discernment, creativity, and excellence.  Discernment to learn from and analyze what has already been done.  Creativity to look at the original problem and start solving it from a blank canvas.  And excellence to bring it all together into a superior product. 

Team: People Helping People

As good as technology is, people help people.  Our team really matters.

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”  Philippians 2:3-4

Our company is a team of people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and gifts, but one single purpose.  We assume the best of each other.  We cover for each other. We look out for each other’s interests.

How we relate to one another shapes how we interact with our clients and every church we talk to. By loving each other well, we love those we interact with well.  We enjoy our work more.  People know we are different by the love we have for one another.  That’s one of the things we are known for.  

Humility: Honest Sales and Shared Improvement

Loving each other well doesn’t mean we always get it right.  How we handle losses says as much about us as the wins do.

“The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.”  Proverbs 11:3

We’re not perfect, but we know the One who is, and we seek to live our lives and run our company by His standards.  When a team member makes a mistake, we welcome each other’s input and learn from it.  This is how we improve as individuals, as a team, and as a company.

We treat our prospects and clients the same way.  No misleading sales calls to meet an end-of-month quota.  When we talk it over with the team and find a better way to do something, we take the initiative to share the improvement with clients. They appreciate our humility and honesty. 

What This Means If You’re Choosing Church Management Software

Whether or not you choose Churchteams, these values point to questions worth asking any church management provider you are considering:

• Has the support team worked on church staff? People who’ve sat in your seat understand the question behind the question.
• Is everything in one database, or are separate modules connected together? One system means fewer imports, fewer duplicate records, and more efficient reporting.
• How does onboarding work? Ask whether a real person will walk you through data migration and setup that’s aligned with your ministry needs.
• What does the sales process feel like? A good partner will tell you honestly whether their software fits your church.
• How do they handle mistakes and improvements? Ask how fixes, changes, and updates are communicated to clients.

At Churchteams, we customize the entire process. We’ll help you understand our feature set and work hard to understand your ministry needs. Then, our data and onboarding teams work with you to ensure you have the proper settings and systems in place.

Values Lived Out Together

You can see these four values throughout. Personalized onboarding instead of automated.  Discipleship tracking that aligns with your ministry strategy. Teammates who care for each other and clients.  Integrity in everything we do.

We’ve had the privilege of building software through decades of real change in how churches manage their people and their tasks. It would be easy to idolize technology. But God doesn’t share His glory. We serve Him by serving His church, alongside many other faithful church technology companies.

Service, Innovation, Team, and Humility aren’t aspirational; they’re the result of living life together as founders, alongside an incredible group of people. We’re not perfect, but we serve the God who is: loving, kind, patient, and holy.

See the difference for yourself.