A 175-attendance church plant in a West Coast city

A 175-attendance church plant in a West Coast city runs Planning Center People, Planning Center Services, Pushpay, and 3 more. Staff: 2 full-time, 1 part-time. Compare this 150–400 attendance mix before you buy another subscription.

By Caleb Brooks · Published September 2026· Editorial standards · Conflict of interest

Field guide page: steps and costs from hands-on church-tech work, written under a pen name. Church names stay private. See how we write and verify.

What kind of church is this?

A 175-attendance church plant in a West Coast city. Two full-time and one part-time staff. Renters, students, and young families turn over fast. Absence care has to be intentional or people vanish between month four and month nine.

Why does this mix exist?

Planning Center People and Services power check-in and the three-week absence list. Planning Center Giving plus a first-gift thank-you owner launched online giving cleanly. Text In Church sends personal Monday absence texts from a shared inbox. Mailchimp covers the weekly note on a free tier.

How the week actually runs

Greeters check people in on one Services plan. Monday, a saved People list shows regulars gone more than 21 days. The care text is written by a person who was in the room Sunday, not a generic nurture sequence. Unanswered names become Friday calls. Giving batches review Monday at noon for failed gifts and first-gift tags.

What breaks if you copy this blindly

Building absence lists from midweek event attendance alone. Automating the care text until it sounds like a product. Launching giving before a $5 test gift clears. Stacking three apps before Sunday hospitality has a named owner.

What they would change next

Treat Sunday check-in as pastoral infrastructure from week one. Write the Sunday giving script before designing the give page. Add do-not-contact tags the same day someone asks for space.

How should you use this page?

Plants under 200 should nail attendance truth and one human follow-up owner before stacking more apps. Keep one printed give card at the welcome table for guests who will not install another app on Sunday morning.

Field note after month six

A household disappeared between month four and month nine with no angry email, only silence. The plant had event RSVPs but no Sunday check-in truth. Once greeters marked attendance every week, the 21-day list became a care list instead of a guess. Apps did not fix the gap. A named Monday owner with a true absence list did.

Field note after a soft goodbye

A renter family stopped checking in without a hard conversation. The 21-day list caught them while the email sequence still called them “new.” A person texted, learned they had moved two neighborhoods over, and closed the loop with a blessing instead of a nurture drip. Plants need exit care as much as welcome care.

Field note after a launch-week tool binge

They bought five apps the week before launch. Volunteers learned none of them. They cut to one people database, one give page, and a Sheet for Sundays, then added tools only with named owners. Plants die from login fatigue before they die from missing features.

Reality check before you renew

If two people cannot name the weekly job without a slide deck, wait (an urban church plant on the west coast).

Size check for this church

Keep a paper cancel card in the foyer when the uplink fails.

Keep the public checklist honest: named tools, ordered steps, real cost, last-checked date.

Weekly heroics from ordinary staff are a stop sign for that seat on an urban church plant on the west coast.

Print-day confirmation

Confirm the vendor quote on print day, not from memory (an urban church plant on the west coast).

Keep named tools, ordered steps, real cost, and a last-checked date on every public page you copy.

Who owns admin

On a team sized like 2 full-time, 1 part-time, one named staff lead should hold master admin for the people database and any tool that can export households or send church-wide texts. Ministry directors get limited views for their rosters. Greeters and foyer volunteers should search and check in, not download the full list.

Write a backup admin before vacation weeks. Role changes get a five-minute access checklist the same week: remove logins, remove export rights, confirm the backup still works. Leftover volunteer IT access is how old Sheets and pastoral notes leak into personal inboxes.

If engineers or “techy” members help, they still need a staff owner. Unpaid IT without an owner becomes a single point of failure when that member moves.

What this stack costs

Software lines from this page (confirm the week you brief elders):

• Planning Center People: $14/mo
• Planning Center Services: $0 (included)
• Pushpay: processing fees only
• Text In Church: $29/mo
• Slack: $0 (free tier)
• Planning Center Publishing: $0 (included)

Add card processing fees beside any giving tool. December volume can dwarf the SaaS stickers. Put weekly admin hours beside each line on the board packet. A cheap tool with unpaid heroics is not cheap.

Attendance bracket on this page: 150-400. Staff shape: 2 full-time, 1 part-time. Region context: US West Coast. Copy the ownership pattern before you copy every logo.

Copy this if

Copy this mix when your church is near 150-400 attendance, you can staff the Monday jobs these tools assume, and you will name owners for guest follow-up, scheduling, and giving reconcile. Steal the weekly rhythm and the permission habits first. Steal the logo list second.

Good signs you are ready: cards leave the building with a named enterer, texts leave a church-owned number or watched inbox, and one person can explain each tool in one sentence.

What breaks first

What usually breaks first when churches copy A 175-attendance church plant in a West Coast city without the staffing: guest cards sit until Wednesday, personal phones become the cancel channel again, dual databases appear “for transition,” or export rights stay with former volunteers. The tools (Planning Center People, Planning Center Services, Pushpay, Text In Church, Slack, Planning Center Publishing) only work when the Monday owners are real.

Refuse a second people list. Refuse automations nobody watches. Refuse measuring success by open rates while replies sit unread. If your staff hours are thinner than 2 full-time, 1 part-time, shrink the stack before you expand it.

Board packet checklist

1. Name master admin and backup for the ChMS (church management system).
2. List monthly software fees and estimated processing fees on one page.
3. Write the weekly job each tool serves in one sentence.
4. Schedule a ninety-day pre-renewal review with actual hours beside each fee.
5. Confirm vendor quotes the same week elders vote.

Keep churchRef and slug stable when you link workflows to this stack. This page is a field pattern, not a mandate to buy everything at once.