Jimenez Julien

Why a scheduling product for churches

PewRoster started in a church office in Ohio, with a laminated seating chart, a legal pad, and an administrator who told me she had not taken a Sunday off in six years.

I build small software for people who run operations without an operations department. In 2022 I spent a season helping congregations digitize their membership records, which sounds tidy until you sit with the person who does it. What I found in almost every office was the same: the giving records were modern, the calendar was fine, and the serving roster was a private ritual conducted by one exhausted person with a phone and a good memory. The nursery lead texted her. The audio volunteer texted her husband. The greeter list was a printout taped inside a cupboard door, updated in pencil.

That person is who PewRoster is for. Not the megachurch with a staff of forty and a paid systems administrator, but the congregation of 140 or 260 where the parish administrator is also the bulletin editor, the facilities scheduler and the one who knows which usher has a bad knee. Their problem is not a lack of willing volunteers. It is that the availability information lives in a hundred half remembered conversations, so every roster gets rebuilt from scratch and every gap becomes a phone call on a Saturday night.

What four years in church offices taught me

The first thing I learned is that the trade has its own vocabulary and its own arithmetic, and software written by people who have never sat through a Wednesday staff meeting gets both wrong. A serving slot is not a shift. A volunteer who says yes to nursery has usually not said yes to parking. Fifth Sundays break every pattern. Christmas Eve at three service times is a different scheduling problem from an ordinary week, and nobody wants to learn a new tool in the middle of Advent.

The second thing I learned is that adoption is decided by the least technical volunteer, not by the coordinator. An eighty year old usher who has served faithfully for thirty years will not create an account, and he should not have to. So PewRoster works through a link in a text message, with no password, no download and two buttons. If he does not text at all, the coordinator marks him phone contact only and he still prints on the Sunday sheet. Every feature I have shipped since 2023 has been tested against that constraint first.

The third thing is that trust is the whole product. A church is handing over the phone numbers of its members, the background check dates of the people who watch its children, and a record of who did and did not show up. I keep that data in the United States, I keep it out of advertising systems, and I will not build an integration that moves it somewhere a coordinator cannot see. When a congregation cancels, they take everything with them.

How I work with the churches who use this

I run onboarding calls myself. I read every message that arrives through the form on this site, and I answer it personally, usually the same business day. When a coordinator tells me a screen is confusing, I ask to watch them use it rather than sending a help article. Four or five times a year I sit in on a real Sunday, on site or over video, to see what happens between 8:15 and the start of the service. Almost everything worth building came out of those mornings: the printed sheet in large type, the swap deadline, the warning list for clearances that expire in the next 60 days.

Experience and expertise

• Ten years building operational software for small organizations, most of it for teams of one to five people who never asked for a dashboard.
• Four years working specifically with US congregations on membership data, serving rosters and volunteer communication.
• Direct onboarding work with 412 congregations now scheduling on PewRoster, from 60 seat rural parishes to six campus churches.
• Founder and publication director of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes this site and operates the service.
• Hands on with the parts most founders delegate: the message deliverability, the CSV importers that have to survive real spreadsheets, and the support inbox.

How this product is built and maintained

PewRoster ships small changes weekly and holds a public change note for every release that touches scheduling logic. Nothing goes out on a Friday, because a broken roster on a Sunday morning is not an abstraction. Every claim on this website is checked against the account data before it is published: the 94% coverage figure, the 3.4 hour median swap time and the 412 congregation count are recalculated each quarter, and if a number moves the page moves with it. When a metric stops being flattering, it stays on the page anyway.

Editorially, the rule is plain: no invented case studies, no stock quotes, no testimonial that a named person has not read and approved in writing. The three churches quoted on the home page each reviewed their own words. Screenshots come from real accounts with member details replaced by consenting test records. If you find a statement on this site that you believe is wrong, write to me and I will either show you the evidence or correct the page.

Support and security are my responsibility, not a vendor's. Backups run nightly with a 30 day retention window, restores are rehearsed quarterly, and the incident log is shared with any church that asks for it. I am the one who is accountable if a reminder does not go out on a Thursday, and I am the one who will tell you what happened.

Published articles

Everything I have written for The Sunday Desk, the PewRoster magazine for small congregations, published on September 3, 2026 and reviewed whenever the underlying practice changes.

• How to Build a Six Week Serving Rota for a Small Church September 3, 2026
• Paid Nursery Worker or Volunteer Rota: Cost, Payroll, Risk September 3, 2026
• Seven Rota Mistakes That Burn Out Church Volunteers September 3, 2026
• Background Checks and Mandated Reporting for Church Volunteers September 3, 2026
• Rebuilding a Children's Ministry Rota After Half the Team Left September 3, 2026
• The Once a Month Volunteer: Staffing Sundays With Shorter Terms September 3, 2026
• New Volunteer Onboarding Checklist: Application to First Sunday September 3, 2026
• How Many Volunteers a 150 Seat Sunday Actually Needs September 3, 2026
• A Sunday at the Check In Desk: Where the Morning Breaks September 3, 2026

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com for anything at all: a question about scheduling logic, a request for a walkthrough, a press enquiry, or a correction to this page. Church staff who want a demo can also use the request form on the home page, which reaches the same inbox. If you would rather see how the product behaves before you talk to anyone, the four step walkthrough on the home page is the closest thing to sitting next to me while a roster gets published.