PewRoster builds the greeter, nursery, audio desk and communion schedule from availability your volunteers gave you once, then sends the reminders on Thursday evening. When somebody cannot serve, they post the slot to their team and the person who accepts it is the person who shows up.
Ask any church administrator what happens at 9 p.m. on a Saturday and you get the same story: a text from the nursery, a missing sound operator, and a mental list of the four people who might say yes. Here is what that costs a congregation over a year.
The nursery lead texts you, the audio volunteer texts your spouse, and the greeter list is a printout taped inside the office cupboard. Take a week off in July and three teams quietly stop working.
6 to 9 hours of coordination each week
Someone comes down with the flu overnight and the phone tree starts before sunrise. The coffee table stays unstaffed, and a family visiting for the first time walks past a welcome desk with nobody behind it.
Roughly 1 slot in 9 is empty at service time
You ask the same handful of people first because you know their numbers by heart. They serve three Sundays out of four for eleven months, then stop answering the phone altogether.
38% of active volunteers lapse within a year
Background check dates live in a three ring binder, so a nursery slot gets covered by a member whose clearance expired in March. Your insurance carrier only asks about it after something has already gone wrong.
One lapsed clearance is one uninsured Sunday
PewRoster is built around the way a small church actually staffs a service: teams, service times, the people who said yes in January, and the swaps that happen every single week.
Import the member list from a spreadsheet or a church database export, then group people into serving teams: ushers, greeters, nursery, hospitality, audio and visual, communion, parking, van drivers. Each team gets its own slot pattern for the 9:00 and the 11:00 service.
Volunteers mark the Sundays they are away, how often they are willing to serve, and which teams they will say yes to. That rule stays on file, so you stop asking the same nine people the same question every month.
The draft roster respects blackout dates, serving frequency and clearance expiry, then flags every slot it could not cover in brass. You change two or three names, write a note for the deacons, and publish.
Reminders go out Thursday evening by text and email. A volunteer who cannot make it posts the slot to their team, the first teammate to accept takes it, and the printed Sunday sheet updates before you have read the message.
A congregation of 190 in Findlay, Ohio publishes nine teams across two service times every six weeks. Their coordinator spends 31 minutes on it, most of that reading the notes volunteers left about vacations.
No dashboards nobody opens. Every screen exists because a church administrator said the old way was costing them a Sunday.
Set two greeters and one door captain at 9:00, four greeters at 11:00, and a single sound operator for the Wednesday prayer service. The pattern repeats forever until you change it, including fifth Sundays and holiday schedules.
A volunteer who cannot serve releases the slot to their own team with one tap, and teammates see it as a text with an accept link. You get a note once it is claimed instead of a call while you are making dinner.
Choose a Thursday evening text, a Saturday morning nudge, or both, per team. Nursery workers can get the 48 hour reminder while the sound desk gets a note the night before, and everything goes out in your church's own voice.
Record background check dates, child safety training and CPR certificates against each volunteer, and PewRoster stops them being scheduled into a restricted team once the date passes. You get a warning list 60 days out, so renewals happen before the assignment does.
Volunteers set a serving frequency, a list of Sundays they are away, and the teams they will accept. Snowbirds who leave for Florida in January come back into the pool automatically when they said they would.
One page per service, in a type size that reads from the sound booth, with phone numbers for the team leads. Every volunteer also gets a private calendar feed, so their slots sit in Google Calendar or on the phone their grandchildren set up for them.
These are medians across accounts that have been publishing rosters for at least 90 days. We measure them because church boards ask, and because a coordinator deserves proof before asking for a line in the budget.
Because the draft is built from stored availability rather than from memory, the first pass covers most of the roster. Coordinators only work the exceptions the system flags.
Six weeks of Sundays across nine teams, reviewed and published in one sitting. The old average our churches report for the same work is close to four hours spread over a week.
A swap posted to a 22 person team is usually accepted the same evening. Coordinators are notified when it settles, and only paged when a slot sits unclaimed for 24 hours.
Once availability is on file, the roster reaches past the reliable six and into the 40 people who would have said yes if asked. Rotation spreads out, and the core volunteers stop burning out.
Three of the congregations who let us quote them, in their own words.
I ran the serving schedule out of a legal pad and my phone for eleven years. The first Sunday after we switched, two nursery workers traded with each other on Friday and I did not hear about it until I read the recap. That was the moment my husband said I should have done this in 2019.
We are two services and about 260 people, so we need roughly 34 volunteers every Sunday. The clearance warnings alone earned the subscription: it caught four expired background checks in the first week, including one of our elders. Publishing six weeks out has taken the panic out of Saturday nights.
My worry was our older members, because half our ushers are in their seventies. They get a text with two buttons and that is the whole thing. One usher told me he likes knowing his Sundays in advance so he can plan his grandson's ball games around them, which is the opposite of what I expected to hear.
Priced the way a church budget is written: a flat line item, no charge per volunteer, and no invoice that grows because you had a good spring.
$19per month
For one campus under about 120 in weekly attendance, running four to six serving teams.
$49per month
For one campus up to 300 in attendance, with a nursery, an audio team and a full hospitality rotation.
$99per month
For churches running two to six locations, or a parish sharing volunteers across a Saturday vigil and Sunday Masses.
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from the billing page. No setup fee, no per volunteer charge, no annual contract. Move up or down a tier whenever your season changes, and the difference is prorated to the day.
Plans are $19, $49 or $99 per month depending on how many volunteers and campuses you schedule, and every plan is billed monthly in US dollars. There is no setup charge, no per volunteer fee and no annual contract to sign. A church that outgrows the Small Congregation plan in the middle of a year moves up in one click and pays the prorated difference from that date. If your teams shrink over the summer, you can move back down the same way.
Most churches publish their first schedule nine days after the kickoff call. Day one is importing the volunteer list, day two is naming your teams and service times, and the rest of the week is spent collecting availability from the people who serve. On the Parish and Multi Campus plans we do the import for you, including phone number cleanup and duplicate merging. Nobody on your staff has to learn a new database to make it work.
Volunteer records sit on US based servers in northern Virginia, encrypted in transit and at rest. Only the coordinators you name can see phone numbers, emails and clearance dates, while other volunteers see a first name, a last initial and the slot. We do not sell congregation data, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use it to train models. You can export everything to CSV or close the account outright without asking our permission.
Every volunteer and every team gets a private calendar feed, so slots appear in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook and update when a swap goes through. Member lists import from Breeze, Planning Center, Church Community Builder or any spreadsheet with a name and a phone column. Published rosters export as a printable Sunday sheet and as a CSV your bulletin editor can paste from. There is also a read only web link you can post in the members area of your site.
You cancel from the billing page, the plan stops at the end of that monthly period, and there is no exit fee or retention call to sit through. Your schedules stay readable for 30 days so you can export the roster history, the swap log and the volunteer list. After those 30 days we delete the congregation record and the message logs attached to it. Churches that leave for a season and come back can have the last export restored if they still hold the file.
There is no app to install and no password for a volunteer to remember. They get a text or an email with a link, and they confirm or release the slot with one tap on whatever phone they already carry. For members who do not text at all, coordinators mark them as phone contact only, and their names still print on the Sunday sheet exactly like everyone else. About a quarter of confirmations on our busiest accounts are entered by a coordinator on a volunteer's behalf, and the roster treats them identically.
Nine articles on serving rotas, volunteer screening and the arithmetic of a covered Sunday, drawn from the congregations we sit with. No theory, no filler, and nothing that assumes you have a staff of forty.
Practical guide
A repeatable method for filling nursery, greeter, sound and communion slots six Sundays out, with swap deadlines volunteers understand and a bench deep enough to survive flu season.
Comparison
Two ways to keep the nursery covered every Sunday. One brings payroll, wage rules and workers compensation. The other brings recruiting, screening and the risk of an empty room at nine o'clock.
Mistakes to avoid
The same twelve people serve every week, the schedule lands on Friday night, and nobody knows who covers the door. These are the scheduling habits that quietly empty a serving team, plus the fix for each.
Send the shape of your congregation and we will walk through your own service times on a shared screen, usually within one business day. No sales sequence, no pressure to decide on the call.
We answer every request ourselves and we never pass your details to anyone else. If a form is not your preference, write directly to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.