I am always skeptical of a church that even contemplates writing its own Church Management System (ChMS). In fact, even before I was involved with the spin out of what was known as Switch at the time from Fellowship Church, I questioned the church’s efforts of writing its own software. It is a complex and expensive endeavor. Put simply: writing software is not a core competency of any church.
Sometimes a church believes it needs to write its own software so that it can get exactly what it wants and needs. This has been tried in the corporate world for quite a long time, with very limited success, even by the very large companies that have a lot more financial resources than a church - thus the success of the SAPs and Oracles of the world. Unfortunately, what a church needs or wants will most certainly change before the software is designed completely, let alone programmed and tested. Even still, once the church feels all the work is complete the application will need to be supported, fixing bugs, process improvements, etc. To minimize the time lag of these changes, the proper way to design applications is to build it to be flexible, configurable, almost pliable, so that as the needs or strategies of the church change, the system can be easily tweaked to allow the software to conform to theses changes.
However, a church does not have the time, money or inclination to contemplate what changes will be needed in the future, let alone the time and money to test out all the various behaviors of a system based on the potential application variations. One of our challenges was that very thing – how do we support church processes that were not contemplated or needed by Fellowship Church. Other churches should not be required to “do church” the same way as the original architects of Fellowship One had designed it. The result has been a significant rewrite of certain areas of the application so that a church can “do church” the way they want or need to. Today, Fellowship One is being used by hundreds of different churches of every shape, size, and denomination.
Grace to you,
jhook