[darinpantley]

What would a 'Church Management System' do? Have you been to http://www.monkdevelopment.com ?

A large number of HN users are based in Silicon Valley and the surrounding area, which is well known for being largely non-religious. That said, I am a software engineer who is a Christian and spent last summer in the Bay Area, so don't let statistics discourage you. I met plenty of other Christian software engineers while I was out there. Most of them have full-time jobs at well-known tech companies. I don't know if any of them use HN.

Depending on how many software engineers are in your area, it may be more efficient to ask people at church if they are entrepreneurial software engineers than to ask HN users if they are Christians.

[timmorgan]

Church Management System (ChMS) refers to a database system to track member/visitor information, donations, volunteer efforts, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_management_software#Chur...

[pbhjpbhj]

What research have you done so far on the current offerings? Do you have a list - presumably there are some on Freshmeat/github/Sourceforge/... somewhere.

Some quick leads:

* http://www.churchaccountingsoftwareguide.com/church-manageme... mentions ChurchTrac, ChurchDB and several others including a couple of user comments.

* http://www.churchcommunitymatters.com/category/chms/ blog posts about "Church Community Builder" the author might be a useful contact; http://www.churchcommunitymatters.com/questions-to-ask-when-... looks particularly pertinent

* http://www.ccmag.com/page/index.php?pageid=16&articleid=... is a review of ChMS from late 2010.

* http://www.churchdb.org/ "Church Info" a ChMS

* http://www.capterra.com/church-management-software directory listing of about 80 (?) different systems with star ratings, reviews and a filtering system

* http://www.christianitytoday.com/cbg/officequip/chmangsoftwa... CT section on ChMS

HTH. Grace and Peace.