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Serving a More Organized Church

Safety and convenience arrive at the touch of a screen.
Mark Cutshall | Outcomes, Apr/May 2008

In 1999, Rick Chatham, a software engineer, was struggling over his church's problem managing its growth. One of the biggest issues occurred on Sunday morning at crowded children's sign-in counters, where standstill lines and frustration were the norm. "Even with all of the best-trained volunteers in the world," Chatham says, "with felt pens, name tags and tokens, we were fighting a losing battle."

He was sitting in a Dallas restaurant when inspiration struck. "I noticed how waiters and waitresses at a local restaurant were using touch screens to assign tables for arriving customers," Chatham says. "No one was writing anything down, nor chasing after or losing little slips of paper. Instead, with a simple touch of a color-coded screen, this ingenious little system kept the lines moving. Hungry customers were seated, and everyone kept smiling."

As a result, Fellowship Church, which was averaging 6,000 in weekend attendance, tore an electronic page from the Dallas restaurant scene and developed its own fast, convenient, touch-screen children's check-in system. The new approach, part of a software package today known as "Fellowship One," reduced parents' typical Sunday morning children sign-in time from one and-a-half minutes to less than 20 seconds.

Fellowship Church developed its own software because nothing else quite fit. The automated yet-still-personable approach improves children's safety in this ever more complicated world. A well-designed identity and tracking system eliminated any risk from a non-guardian picking up a child who had been received into the church's custody. The touch-screen system can be used for adult activities and to track volunteers, as well.

But the complexity and burden of developing its own software proved costly for the church over time. In 2003, the church's executive staff concluded that the costs were more than it could comfortably bear. They decided to sell the software and all its rights to a company that had the core competency to build and support such a robust computer system. After looking at several marketplace alternatives, church leaders approached Jeff Hook, an accomplished software executive, to gauge his interest in taking the software to market.

"To be honest, I didn't want to sell software to churches," confesses Hook. "However, after telling a couple of friends about the opportunity, I felt God lead me to do just that."

Hook, along with a core group of developers, founded Fellowship Technologies in January 2004. Chatham became founding applications architect.