Set Up Your Church's Digital Home Base

The login nobody has

A church calls its provider to change the service time on its website. They can't get in. The site was built four years ago by a volunteer who has since moved to another state, and the account is tied to her personal Gmail. She's happy to help — she just doesn't remember the password either, and the recovery email goes to an address she stopped using.

This is the single most common failure in church technology, and it has nothing to do with which tool anyone picked. It happens before the first login screen, in the five minutes nobody spends deciding who owns the account.

This module is those five minutes. It covers what to settle before you create anything, so that the setup outlives whoever built it.

Decide the four things first

The account email. Use a role address the church controls — office@, admin@, hello@ — never a person's personal email. If your church has no such address, create one before anything else. This one decision prevents most of the lockouts above.

The named owner. One person, by name, responsible in month six. Not "the tech team," not "whoever's free." The Foundations module on choosing technology makes the case at length; here it just needs writing down.

A second admin. One person is a single point of failure — illness, a move, a falling-out. Two is the minimum. Most platforms let you scope what a second admin can touch, so this doesn't mean handing over everything.

Your canonical details. The exact church name, address, service times, and public phone and email, agreed once and written down. You will type these into a dozen systems over the next few years. Deciding them once, in one place, is the difference between a congregation that sees consistent information and one that sees three different service times.

The legal name question that catches churches out

There are two names: the one on your sign, and the one on your incorporation and tax filings. "Grace Community" on the banner might be "Grace Community Church of Springfield, Inc." on paper.

You need the legal one recorded wherever money is involved, because giving statements have to carry it to be valid as written acknowledgment for donors. Find it now — on your incorporation paperwork or IRS determination letter — rather than the following January when someone asks for a receipt. The giving module covers what a valid statement needs; this is the piece to have ready before you get there.

How the tools differ here

General-purpose builders — Squarespace, Wix, Google Workspace. Ownership and admin roles are handled at the account level, and they're generally good at it. What they don't know is anything church-specific: no concept of a congregation, a legal organization name, or a giving statement.

Church-management platforms — Breeze, Planning Center, Tithe.ly, and Faith Software's own myChelper among them. These usually walk you through church profile and admin roles as part of setup, and record the church-specific details from the start. Whether that's worth it depends on whether you want the other modules, not on setup convenience alone.

Either way the four decisions above are yours to make, not the software's. A tool can store a second admin; it can't tell you who that should be.

Your exercise

Write four lines on paper before you open any signup form: the role email address, the named owner, the second admin, and your legal organization name. If you can't fill in all four, that gap is this week's work — not the software choice.

Then find one existing church account — the website, the giving platform, the social media — and check whose email it's under. If it's a person's, fix that one first. It's the cheapest hour of technical debt you will ever pay down.