Lately, I have been thinking alot about ChMS (Church Management Systems) and digging deeper. There is something that I have never quite understood and I figured I would understand it now, at the point I’m at. I have been given the opportunity to explore a few different ChMS’s fairly in depth and I have several on-going discussions going on, as well. So, needless to say, I know more now than I did a month ago or so, but I still have this lingering question.
What is ChMS? What functionality does it include? What functionality does it not include? Is it a website? Is it check-in? Is it finance? Is it attendance tracking? Now that I know more about what’s out there, I still don’t know the answer to this question.
I asked for a low-cost or free ChMS here and have been given many good leads, however, what I have found is that many solutions enable churches to make their websites more interactive, which is not a bad thing at all, but it’s not what I need right now. I wanted child check-in and that is not as common of a solution, in the lower end market, at least not yet.
I have gotten the impression as I read more about ChMS, that we, as ChMS users, don’t fully understand what this entails and the term is used loosely to fit our own particular need.
Tony has a great post on a similar vein, asking the question of what ChMS entails and on that post, I commented, stating that maybe we need to have ChMS subsets, such as ChMS.check-in, ChMS.facility, ChMS.congregation, ChMS.web etc.
I don’t know if this is a solution, but it would help to further define what each product does. Then, if I’m looking for a check-in solution, and I see your product is ChMS.web, then I can know up front that this is not the way to go.
I’m going to counterpoint myself. In reality, I think this thought process just serves to complicate the issue because then we’re forcing ChMS providers to fit into a box, then as their product evolves and new features are added, they have already been labeled as one thing, but now they are so much more.
So, what is ChMS? Everything I have seen recently and everything else that I’m aware of has one single common goal and that is to provide the church with a tool to manage the business of being a church, at some level.