Church Tech — Faith-Based Software Development for Churches & Ministries

Faith tech, church tech, tools that serve the kingdom directly. That’s where Heartwood started, and it’s close to our heart. Our founder Michael came out of YouVersion and Planning Center — environments where engineering serves spiritual formation, where every line of code touches someone’s relationship with God or their generosity to a community that depends on it.

The phrase isn’t decoration. It names a way of working:

• Build for what still matters years from now. Not what spikes a metric this quarter.
• Treat resources as sacred. Every hour of staff time, every donor dollar, every line of code that someone else will read.
• Tell the truth, even when it costs us the project. Better one handful with peace than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind. We say no a lot.
• Stay. Software that ships and decays didn’t actually ship. We’re built around partnership, not transactions.

Much of how we think about doing good work has been shaped by N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope — particularly the conviction that the work we do now isn’t killing time. It participates in the renewal of all things. Every act of care, every honest line of code, every team member given dignity in their work matters. Not because we’re building the kingdom ourselves. Because the kingdom is breaking in, and we get to build alongside it.

You don’t have to share that conviction to share our table. But it’s how we work, and it’s why we work. You can read more about that framing in our founder’s letter.

The Pushpay and Barna 2026 State of Church Technology study surveyed 1,306 U.S. church leaders. Three findings stand out.

86% of churches use a church management system. 67% have a mobile app (up year over year). 87% continue to livestream services — only a slight dip from the 91% pandemic peak. 70% of leaders say digital tools have increased generosity in their congregations. Churches that accept online giving see, on average, a 32% increase in overall donations[5][6].

The mobile-first reality is starker. 80% of people only ever see a church website on their phone. 78% of all church website traffic is mobile. Up to 80% of visitors check a church’s website before attending in person[7]. Yet a 2025 audit of 2,725 church websites found 64% had no website or a substandard one, and 59% offered no online giving form[8]. The opportunity gap is enormous, and it’s the most basic kind: mobile-friendly, fast, with a working donation flow.

In November 2025, YouVersion’s Bible App reached one billion installs. 2025 was a record year: 12% growth in installs, 18% growth in daily usage. Sub-Saharan Africa saw a 27% jump in daily Bible engagement; the Middle East/North Africa/Central Asia saw 33%[9][10]. Two-thirds of U.S. Bible users now access Scripture digitally[11]. Print isn’t going away, but it’s no longer where formation primarily happens. Faith publishing is now an app problem.

This is the work some of our team helped build. We carry that experience into every faith-tech project.

45% of church leaders now use AI — up 80% in a single year[2]. 77% of pastors believe God can use AI[12]. But fewer than 25% are using generative AI to write sermons or devotionals. Pastors are wisely treating AI as a back-office accelerant, not a pulpit replacement. The opportunity is in the workflows underneath ministry — donor stewardship, communication, member care follow-up, missionary support — not in performative AI features.

The cautious posture is right. Software that shapes spiritual formation should be built with the seriousness that calling deserves.

When SaaS doesn’t fit, churches and faith-based startups need custom builds. The categories that come up most:

1. Custom giving and stewardship experiences — for churches where the off-the-shelf options either don’t fit the donor base or push integrations that compromise data ownership. Not every church should leave Pushpay or Tithe.ly. The ones that should know exactly why.
2. Member portals and discipleship platforms — small group sign-ups, mentoring matches, sermon-paired devotionals, prayer requests, milestone tracking. The ChMS does the data; the member portal does the relationship.
3. Mobile apps with depth — beyond a service-time-and-podcast app. Apps designed for daily formation, prayer, family discipleship, missions engagement.
4. Multi-site and denominational tooling — when a single church planting network or denomination needs unified data and decentralized control.
5. Faith-tech startup MVPs — for founders building the next YouVersion-shaped tool. (Some of us were there. Ask us about it.)
6. Integration architecture — the connective tissue between Planning Center, Subsplash, ChurchTrac, ProPresenter, Mailchimp, Stripe, and whatever ministry-specific tool your team can’t live without.

SmartMetrix (by Data for Good) is a SaaS platform helping churches collect metrics, surface accountability, and visualize data in ways that actually drive ministry decisions. Founder Amber Smart had a working MVP and a clear vision but needed experienced eyes on the codebase before putting real churches on it.

Through a Heartwood Clarity Sprint, we conducted a deep code review that identified critical security gaps and architectural opportunities, then delivered a production roadmap to take the product from promising prototype to something 900 churches could trust with their data. That’s the kind of work the Clarity Sprint exists for. Not building blindly. Earning real clarity before the bigger investment.

Read more about the SmartMetrix engagement.

The questions that matter aren’t on a sales page. Ask these.

• Have you actually shipped for a church? Not “served the nonprofit sector.” A church. With elders or a board. With a budget cycle that runs January-to-December and a high season that runs October-to-Christmas.
• What’s your point of view on formation? If the answer is blank or generic, the software they build will reflect that.
• How do you handle donor data? Encryption, access logs, role-based permissions, compliance — not as add-ons but as defaults.
• Who owns the code at the end? You. Always. If they hesitate, walk away.
• What happens when something breaks at 7 p.m. on a Saturday? A real partner has an answer. A vendor doesn’t.
• Can you tell me something I shouldn’t build? The best partners scope down before they scope up.

For a full framework on evaluating agencies, see our guide on how to choose a software agency.

A partner who won’t tell you the cheapest path. A team that subcontracts your project without telling you. A “Phase 2” upsell mentioned before Phase 1 ships. A discovery process that’s actually a sales pitch in disguise. A quote on day one that didn’t ask about your board.

We start with a Clarity Sprint — a one-week engagement, starting at $2,500, that delivers a prioritized feature roadmap, a technical architecture recommendation, a risk and feasibility assessment, a go/no-go recommendation with rationale, and a written brief you can hand to any dev team. Whether or not we end up building it together. You walk away with real clarity and a plan you trust.

Custom Projects start at $20,000 — for focused tools, integrations, and full platform builds. When projects need more capacity, we partner with TechVision to connect economies and invest in communities around the world. Because doing good isn’t a tagline for us.

Team Partnership starts at $12,500/month — we embed with your team, bring senior leadership, and make everyone better through the partnership. If you have a product in market and need engineering capacity you can trust, this is the model.

For organizations that need strategic technical guidance without a full build, Fractional CTO engagements are available — senior leadership on the architecture, vendor, and build-vs-buy decisions that shape everything downstream.

If software can help you set your corner of the world right, we’d love to hear about it. See our work, or meet the team.