ChurchZen

ChurchZen was designed to open up time and creativity in how churches are run. As the writers of the Gospel knew, setting up and running churches can be hard.  But the Good News actually lives on through meetings and planning and service orders; it lives on in ordering teabags and sending things to be printed; it lives on in Facebook posts and editing videos. This is not to make the Good News sound mundane, but to remind us that the mundane is at some points unavoidable in sharing the Good News…

ChurchZen emerged out of desire to help create the breathing space for people to apply the passion they have for their churches to the day-to-day tasks of running them. 

Our frustrations are often a reflection of our desire to do well. We’re frustrated that the line-spacing on a service order is not working because we want it to look pleasing to the people arriving in church on Sunday morning.  We stay up later than we want trying to design a good poster because we are excited about how an event could engage people in our community. We spend hours on faculty applications because we want to see a church adapt to even better serve its community.

ChurchZen is about the essential hopefulness of churches. At their best, churches strive to be happy places, filled with music and the message of Jesus, and good community, and being good in the community. But there is sometimes a gap between the intentions of a church and the resources of time and skills they can bring to a project or its week-to-week functioning. Often the missing elements are fairly small in the context of the whole life of the church, but they can have a huge impact. The energy behind organising a fundraising event that gets held up not having someone to design inspiring marketing to tell people about it? Or the preparation that goes into a Sunday service by church members and clergy that seems to drain away late on Friday night whilst trying to finalise the service order? Or excitement about the potential of having a servery that slowly dissipates as the research for the faculty application drags on with no one really being able to commit the time to doing it? 

ChurchZen wants to step in and help with those tasks before the energy and enthusiasm runs out. ChurchZen wants to help the creativity of churches to flourish. It wants to take away the barriers; it wants to give churches and clergy the breathing space they need to focus on the Good News. 

You can find out more about some of the specific ways we do that here and if you have a particular challenge that you’re trying to solve right now, and just want some more ChurchZen, just drop us a message.