Moving churches is hard. Moving church software isn’t.
Here’s the whole plan, in public: what you export, what we import, what gets decided in which week, and who’s responsible for each piece. Most churches run their first real Sunday on Churchory inside a month.
The three fears, answered.
“We’ll lose our data.”
You won’t, because you keep it. Nothing is deleted from your current system by moving — you export a copy, we import it, and your old tool stays exactly as it is until you choose to cancel it.
“It’ll eat our whole spring.”
The work that genuinely needs your staff is roughly a call a week for four weeks. The import, the cleanup, and the configuration are ours.
“Our people won’t adopt it.”
The honest risk. It’s why chat and groups go live first: people open the app for the conversation, and everything else gets discovered from there.
A month, week by week.
Faster if you’re small and organised, slower if your data is thirty years old. Both are normal.
One call, one export
We meet for 45 minutes, look at what you run today, and agree what moves first. You export your people from your current system as a spreadsheet — whatever comes out is fine, including the messy version.
- Export people, families, and groups
- Decide who your administrators are
- Set up your church in Churchory
- Review your export and flag problems
Your directory, in and clean
We import your people, match them into households, and walk the duplicate review with you. This is the part every migration gets wrong, so it goes first and it gets done properly.
- Sit with us for the duplicate review
- Confirm household groupings
- Import and match
- Merge duplicates, clean up orphaned records
Roles, ministries, and the shape of your church
We build your roles together — twenty areas, four levels — and name them what your church already calls them. Then groups, teams, and ministries get set up around them.
- Tell us who does what
- Name your roles in your own language
- Build the permission matrix
- Set up groups, teams, and tags
The parts that touch money and children
Connect your Stripe account for giving, and configure kids check-in and family intake. Both get tested with real people before a real Sunday depends on them.
- Connect your church’s Stripe account
- Pick who runs kids check-in
- Configure check-in and intake links
- Load historical giving records if you have them
Invite your church
Announce it, get people onto the app, and run a Sunday. Chat channels, the first weekly guide, the first check-in. We’re on call for the whole first Sunday.
- Announce it from the stage
- Ask leaders to post first
- On call all Sunday morning
- Fix whatever the first real week surfaces
Export this, and we’ll take it from there.
Every church database exports a spreadsheet. That’s all we need to start — you do not need to clean it first, and you should not spend a weekend trying.
- People — names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and whatever custom fields you’ve accumulated.
- Families or households — if your system models them. If it doesn’t, we’ll build them from shared addresses and surnames and you’ll review the result.
- Groups and their rosters — even if it’s a list of group names and a list of members.
- Giving history, if you want it carried over. Bring a sample export to the call and we’ll tell you honestly what will and won’t come across.
What usually doesn’t move — and why that’s fine
Historical attendance and years-old notes are rarely worth migrating, and every church that tries discovers the data was less useful than they remembered. Keep a read-only export of your old system for the record, and start clean. If you genuinely need something moved, ask — we’d rather do the work than have you talk yourself out of switching.
Running both at once
Nothing stops you keeping your current tools running while Churchory fills up. Most churches overlap by a month: giving switches over at a clean month boundary, and the old system stays readable until the next renewal date comes around.
One more thing about adoption
The single biggest predictor of whether a church app sticks is whether the leaders post in it during week one. Not the staff — the small group leaders, the worship lead, the youth volunteers. We’ll help you line that up before you announce anything from the stage.