In 2025, ChMeetings experienced steady and meaningful growth, marked by a year of focused product development across every major area of our church management platform. Rather than expanding in one direction alone, the platform evolved holistically, strengthening administration, deepening member engagement, and improving day-to-day workflows for churches of all sizes. Let’s explore the highlights of 2025 and look into the future, together.
How we grew in 2025
Worship Planning is Live
A highly requested feature throughout 2025 has been Worship Planning. We are thrilled to have brought it to you, along with an easy Plans screen where you can easily access event-specific Worship Plans and Volunteer Schedules, a versatile Song Library to access with every Plan, plus Plan Templates that make your work faster and easier, whenever you’re organizing events with a similar structure.
Accounting Got Smarter and More Powerful
One of the clearest signs of growth was the expansion of our Accounting features. Throughout the year, we added tools that emphasized clarity, compliance, and efficiency. Reports became more actionable through clickable drill-downs and budget reporting, while administrative tasks were simplified with archived accounts, centralized transactions, receipt scanning, and autofill for payees. The introduction of transfer transactions and duplicate detection during imports, subcategories, granular permissions, and the 1099 Summary Report reflected a growing emphasis on robust financial oversight that churches of all sizes can benefit from.
Giving is More Flexible
Growth was equally visible in Giving, where we broadened both flexibility and reach. Online giving controls expanded to include default recurrence options, predefined amounts, embeddable funds, dedicated batches, and multi-currency support. New tools such as fund links and QR codes made giving more accessible to donors. Negative donation entries contributed to easier refunds, while pledge imports and statements helped encourage and better manage pledges. Enhanced imports with direct provider support, Australian Direct Debit giving, and the ability to automatically record contributions from event payments demonstrates continued progress toward accommodating diverse giving methods.
Events Are Now More Adaptable
ChMeetings improved how churches organize and staff their events and activities. Search in Kiosk Mode streamlined on-site check-ins, flexible registrations now supports varied event needs, and volunteer RSVP routing ensured role leaders stay informed. These updates work together to reduce friction for both organizers and volunteers.
Calendars Are More Engaging
The platform’s Calendars matured as a shared visibility tool across ministries. Members gained access to printable calendars, birthday and anniversary views, and filtered perspectives, while churches benefited from viewing schedules across ministries and embedding calendars where needed.
Communication and Everyday Workflows Got More Advanced
Communication also advanced significantly in 2025. We introduced push notifications for forms and events, multi-channel communication tasks, expanded mailing label options, and added attendance access for members. These features reflect our growing concern for timely communication and shared responsibility.
The Branded App Experience Became More Elevated
A major area of growth has been the Branded App. For churches opting for this addon, Group chat capabilities expanded dramatically, supporting up to 1,000 participants along with attachments, message editing, quoting, deletion, reactions, and font size controls. This makes Group Chat a powerful feature that has potential to replace social media or external messaging apps for church-related conversations. The Media Library feature has become more interactive with favorites, downloads, access permissions, activity tracking, push notifications for media series, and easy sharing of both series and items. Appearance settings for both members and guests added another layer of personalization, making the Branded app a more elevated version of ChMeetings, offering an enhanced member experience.
People Data Are Better Managed
People and Profile management became more flexible and intelligent. Advanced saved search editing, enhanced conditional logic, dynamic dropdowns, and city database management gave churches greater control over their data and how it adapts to real-world needs.
The Member Portal Gets Closer To a Central Church Hub
The Member Portal saw notable refinement as well. Visual customization options expanded with container cards and background colors, while content capabilities grew to include Instagram video and Spotify support. Shareable direct page links, custom page styling, and Bible updates (last-accessed position memory, highlights, bookmarks, notes, action history, and search), all contributed to a more engaging and consistent member experience. The Member Portal makes your church app into a central digital hub, where members come to enjoy the content, experiences, and wisdom you share.
The API Has Expanded
Finally, growth extended beyond the core platform through our APIs and Integrations. Expanded People APIs, new Notes and Families API, as well as webhooks for people and contributions opened the door to deeper integrations and more connected systems.
Our Vision for 2026
Our vision for 2025 was quite ambitious, but due to our community’s priorities, we shifted gears to accommodate. Here’s what we had in mind for 2025, what we got to finish and what we pushed in 2026:
- AI-based features to take your church management into the future: This is quite the endeavor, and even if we did not manage to release it in 2025, we are continuously working on it.
- Worship Planning, integrated with SongSelect: Even though we did release Worship Planning, the SongSelect integration did not work out because there are no more partnership openings. We will launch this integration as soon as SongSelect accept new partners.
- Custom Dashboard Widgets, Reports and Charts: We did not manage to release all the reporting enhancements we had in mind, but we are happy with the improvements we made to accounting-specific reports, and are continuing work on other enhancements.
- More Automated Tasks: Although we did not release more automated tasks, we have significantly improved the existing ones, for instance with more filtering options and with the ability to add multiple communications tasks to the same automation. We
Besides this work in progress, in 2026 we will also be focusing on providing our church community with more ways to get organized and collect funding:
- Rooms & Resources: We will be helping you allocate rooms and resources for different activities.
- Text to Give: Your community will be able to just send a text message to give to your church.
- Google Pay & Apple Pay For Online Giving & Events Payment: You will be able to collect giving online and allow people to pay for events using Google Pay or Apple Play.
- Payment via Forms: When submitting a form, people will also be able to make a payment.
Our vision is shaped by you, our community, so if you do have suggestions for us, feel free to get in touch. We are so grateful to have you and we thank you for your continuous support, feedback, and feature suggestions that make ChMeetings better for everyone. We wish you all a fruitful 2026, filled with joy and true human connection. Let’s stay together throughout this new year and beyond.
