Planning Center is a church management software. It also changes how we do church.

Digital and Spiritual Transformation utilizes Planning Center to help church communities create the structure for the future of church.

• It’s learning new technology - and it’s a way to reimagine how we ‘do’ church.
• It’s support for small (and large!) congregations and dioceses - and it’s a way for lay and ordained ministers to serve multiple congregations simultaneously, regardless of geographic location.
• It’s record-keeping and administration - and it’s community and faith formation.
• Planning Center creates a digital structure and centralized platform for every part of church, making it easier to communicate, organize, and administer faith communities.

At Free Range Priest, we chose Planning Center to be the core of the Digital and Spiritual Transformation because we found it to be the best church management software currently available:

• It works on a sliding scale, making it the most affordable, especially for small communities. And their core Product - People (database and its management) is free for all, always.
• It’s a privately-owned company, started by church people, who truly understand both the technical and spiritual challenges that churches face.
• It’s extremely versatile - and while this does make it a challenge to learn sometimes (because you can do so many things with it), there are almost infinite ways to configure Planning Center to make it the best for your own community.
• They’re very security-focused in terms of technology, and understand that this is important to churches.
• Planning Center provides a video library to learn how to use their products (Resources from Planning Center, 24/7 email support, and helpful tips and articles built into every page.

FYI, Free Range Priest is not an affiliate of or in any way associated professionally with Planning Center. We get no discounts or commissions. We just feel that this product aligns with our mission of reimagining ministry in the digital age.

There’s one way, though, that Planning Center does not mesh entirely with the vision of Free Range Priest:

Planning Center is designed for large, evangelical churches who have their own tech staffs. Digital and Spiritual Transformation is designed for small, denominational churches who have very little paid staff! (and for the dioceses that support them).

For this reason, at Free Range Priest we use Planning Center a little ‘off brand’. We don’t train congregations to use all the Planning Center ‘Products’ (though they are free to learn to use these on their own). And we work to create ‘recipes’ of how to use Planning Center in ways that support both ministry re-imagination and the kind of organizational and administrative structure that most denominational churches are used to.