OpenChruch

OpenChurch is an open source church management system designed to organize all kinds of data, events and tasks related to the complexity of daily church life.

Motivation

The Church is a complex organism, not just on Sunday morning.

• First of all it consists of people who are connect by Jesus Christ and His word.
• The people gather at specific places and are using different resources to take steps forward.
• Resources are e. g. rooms, inventory, songs including lyrics and sheets, etc.
• The church members organize themselves in groups. They set goals, make decisions, share knowledge.

For all that OpenChurch shall be a platform connecting all the relevant parts of the Church.

Features (for now)

1. Members

• Members are able to see, who their Brothers and Sisters are. Therefore every member gets a minimal about page.
• Members can be managed by admins. Furthermore they need to be different roles for each member.

More Ideas for Members

• Members are able to organize in different groups (bible study groups, worship teams, etc.).
• Members can offer all kinds of services and at the same time ask for help (e. g. helping with a move or supporting with job applications).

2. Ministry (Tasks and Responsibilities)

• An organigramm provides information about ministries, responsibilities and contacts at specific concerns.
• Authorized staff can organize plans for "housekeeping" the church amenities and other duty rosters.

Project setup

This rails app connects itself to a postgres database running in a docker container. I am currently using postgres:16.3-alpine. For your dev environment to work properly, start a persistant postgres container and configure your database.yml to fit your connection.

That's it for now. Let's see how far we can go to provide a useful tool to all churches for free, to help them grow and work properly.

Soli Deo Gloria.