Church management platforms across the Connexion

What does your church actually run on? Help us find out

One of the issues we discovered during the Listening exercise was that we lacked a reliable picture of what churches and circuits actually use to run themselves: membership records, rotas, giving, room bookings, contact lists. Some of you pay for a platform. Some of you use a spreadsheet.

The gap we are trying to close

Ask how many Methodist churches run a church management platform, or what the Connexion spends on them altogether, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

We have begun closing that gap from the outside in. Earlier this month we scanned the public web estate to see what churches and circuits are running, and it gave us a first countable figure where before there was only a guess. It also moved the number we had been working from, which is exactly why the work was worth doing.

A scan only sees what a church chooses to put on its website, though. It cannot see the spreadsheet that one person properly understands, the shared inbox that has become a filing system, or the tool somebody set up in 2014 that still quietly does its job. That part only you can tell us.

What we are asking

The survey asks what you use, who pays for it, roughly what it costs a year, and what it fails to do that you need it to do.

It is deliberately short. Most questions are optional, and it does not matter if you can only answer some of them. A partial answer is still worth having.

Who should fill it in

Whoever actually holds the login. In many churches that is not the person a role list would reach, which is part of why we are asking openly rather than just writing to a list.

If you answer for a church, a circuit or a district, all three are useful. If you are answering for more than one, the survey has a place to say so.

What happens to your answers

They go into a paper this autumn setting out what we found across the Connexion.

The survey is anonymous. It asks for no name, it needs no sign-in, and it collects no email address unless you choose to give one so that we can follow up. If we quote anything you have written, we will do it anonymously and we will not name your church or circuit.

Nothing has been decided. This is not the opening of a purchase and it is not a sales exercise. Decisions about tooling sit behind other work that runs into 2027, and this survey exists so that when a question does get asked, it gets asked with evidence behind it rather than guesswork.

Why this matters

The systems we ask people to use are part of their experience of belonging to this Church. When they are wrong, they make it quietly harder for someone to keep going, and that cost falls hardest on people already giving their time freely. When they are right, they give time back.

We cannot make good decisions about any of that from estimates. So we are asking to get evidence.