Steven Hovater

Author: Steven Hovater

  • Youth Ministry App—Schedules and pdf Export

    A weekend retreat, a mission trip, or even a packed weekly meeting can live or die by its schedule. The Schedule component is the place in each event where you turn “what we’re doing” into a time-blocked agenda — and then hand it to students, leaders, and parents as a printable PDF.

    When to use the Schedule component

    The Schedule component is automatically active on most event types that involve a run of the day: retreats, mission trips, camps, service projects, weekly meetings, classes, and special events. If it’s not there and you need it, add it from the event’s component list.

    For a weekly meeting, a schedule might just be three or four blocks (games, worship, teaching, small groups). For a weekend retreat, it might be fifty blocks across three days with sessions, meals, free time, and lights-out.

    Schedule blocks

    Each entry in the schedule is a schedule block with:

    • Start time and end time
    • Title — what’s happening
    • Location — optional, where it’s happening
    • Info — optional notes, supplies needed, who is leading, etc.

    Add a block with the + button. The form lets you pick start and end times, type the title and location, and add any info you want printed on the final schedule.

    Ordering and editing

    Blocks automatically sort by start time. If you’re building a multi-day schedule, just enter the real date and time for each block and they’ll group themselves by day. Edit any block by tapping it. Swipe to delete.

    The “Schedule Finished” checkbox

    Like every component, the Schedule rolls up into event progress through a milestone — in this case, Schedule Finished. Check it when the schedule is truly done and ready to share. Until then, the event’s progress bar will reflect the missing milestone, and the Dashboard’s Pressing Tasks may surface it as the retreat gets closer.

    Exporting to PDF

    Once the schedule is ready, tap the export button in the Schedule component to generate a printable PDF. The PDF uses a clean, readable layout:

    • Event title and dates at the top
    • Blocks grouped by day, with day headers
    • Start/end time, title, location, and info for each block
    • Minimal branding so it prints well in black and white

    You can share the PDF directly from the iOS share sheet (Messages, Mail, AirDrop) or save it to Files on Mac. Parents love a printed schedule before a retreat, leaders appreciate one in their pocket during the event, and you can keep the file with your event records.

    Tips

    • Build the skeleton first. For a retreat, block out sessions, meals, and sleep before filling in details. You’ll notice gaps and conflicts faster.
    • Be generous with the Info field. Print-time is not the time to remember who’s leading games. Put it in Info and it shows up on the PDF.
    • Print once, adjust, print again. Generating a PDF is free — use it as a proofing tool, not just a final export.
    • Re-export after last-minute changes. If something changes the morning of the event, regenerate the PDF. It takes seconds and prevents confusion.

  • Youth Ministry App—Import and Export

    Importing and Exporting Data

    Youth Ministry is designed to work alongside the tools your church already uses. You probably have a roster in a church management system, a spreadsheet of parents, or a shared document you’ve been maintaining by hand. And at various points in the year you’ll need to hand data back to a secretary, a pastor, or a parent. Import and export features exist to make those hand-offs painless.

    Importing a roster from CSV

    The most common “get started” path is to bring in your existing roster from a CSV file.

    Preparing the file

    The importer is flexible about column order, but it looks for specific column headers. A minimal CSV needs at least a Name column. The importer also recognizes (and will map automatically if found):

    • First Name / Last Name / Name
    • Email
    • Phone
    • Birthday (most common date formats work)
    • Graduation Year
    • Person Type (Student, Leader, Parent, Alumnus, Guest, Other)
    • School
    • Engagement Level
    • Notes
    • Gender
    • Group

    Extra columns you don’t care about are ignored. Missing columns become blank fields on the person.

    If you’re exporting from a church management system that uses “Grade” instead of “Graduation Year”, you have two options: rename the column in your CSV to Graduation Year and convert the values (a 9th grader this year is Class of 2029), or just import with the Grade column and manually set graduation years later.

    Running the import

    From Settings → Import Roster, choose your CSV file. The importer shows a preview of the first several rows with its best guess at how columns map to person fields. You can correct any mapping before confirming. On confirm, each row becomes a person in the roster.

    Handling duplicates

    If a row matches an existing person by name and email, the importer will ask whether to update the existing record or skip it. Nothing is silently overwritten.

    After importing

    Once the import completes, head to the Roster tab and spot-check a few records. It’s worth setting engagement levels by hand for the core students in your ministry right after import — that data is what drives most of the app’s suggestions later on.

    Exporting your data

    You can export data from several places in the app:

    Roster CSV

    From Settings → Export Data, export your full roster as a CSV. The export includes every field on every person and is useful for handing data to a church administrator, producing a printed directory, or just keeping a backup.

    Events CSV

    Export all events in a given fiscal year, including dates, type, progress, and total costs. Good for year-end reports.

    Attendance CSV

    Export attendance records as a CSV showing person, event, and date. Useful for answering questions like “how many students came to at least three meetings this quarter” — pull the CSV into a spreadsheet and pivot.

    Budget CSV

    Export a budget (all line items for a given fiscal year) as a CSV for finance meetings.

    Schedule PDFs

    Individual events with a Schedule component can export a printable PDF of their schedule. Open the event, go to the Schedule component, and tap the export button. The PDF uses a clean layout suitable for handing to students, parents, or volunteers.

    Data ownership

    Everything the app stores is yours. The CSVs and PDFs you export are plain files — no proprietary format, no cloud lock-in, no dependence on the app staying around forever. If you ever stop using Youth Ministry, you can export your roster, events, attendance, and budgets and take them with you. That’s a deliberate design choice: the app is a tool that serves your ministry, not a container that captures your ministry.

  • Youth Ministry App—Custom Event Types

    The built-in event types (Retreat, Mission Trip, Camp, Service Project, Weekly Meeting, and so on) cover the most common kinds of gatherings a youth ministry runs, but every ministry has its own rhythms. Custom Event Types let you define your own presets so the events you run over and over start from exactly the right configuration.

    Why custom types exist

    When you create a new event, the app uses the event type to decide which planning components to turn on by default. A Retreat automatically gets Housing, Food, Transportation, and a dozen others. A Weekly Meeting just gets Overview, Schedule, Volunteers, and Communication. That’s a huge time-saver — but what if your “Parent Night” event always needs Overview, Food, Communication, and Costs? Or your “Leadership Gathering” always needs Curriculum, Food, and Attendance?

    Custom Event Types let you save those combinations once and pick them from the create-event screen every time.

    Defining a custom type

    From Settings → Custom Event Types, tap + to create a new one. You’ll fill in:

    • Name — what it’s called (e.g. “Parent Night”, “Elder Brunch”, “Confirmation Class”)
    • Icon — an SF Symbol that represents it
    • Color — a tint used on event cards and in the creation grid
    • Default components — the exact set of planning components events of this type should start with
    • Default frequency — how often this type of event happens (weekly, monthly, annual, or ad hoc), used for future batch-creation features

    Save the type, and it now appears as a card in the event creation grid alongside the built-in types.

    Editing and deleting

    You can edit a custom type at any time. Changing a type affects new events you create from it — existing events that were already created with that type keep whatever components they had at the time and are not retroactively modified. This is intentional: you never want a settings change to quietly alter an event you’ve already been planning.

    If you delete a custom type, existing events created from it continue to work normally. They just become regular events without a link back to the deleted preset.

    Tips for using custom types well

    • Start from a built-in type. If your “Parent Night” is basically a Special Event with a couple of components removed, create one Special Event first, see which components you actually use, and then build your custom type to match.
    • Don’t over-specify. It’s tempting to create a custom type for every slight variation. In practice, three or four custom types cover most ministries. If you find yourself making “Retreat – Winter” and “Retreat – Summer” as separate types, just use the built-in Retreat and change the couple of things that differ per event.
    • Use color and icon deliberately. Custom types show up in the Events list with their color strip, so if you pick distinct colors and icons, you can skim the list and instantly tell a Parent Night from a Weekly Meeting from a Retreat.

    Custom Event Types are a small feature, but they’re one of the fastest ways to make the app feel like it was built for your ministry specifically.

  • Youth Ministry App—Prayer Space

    The Prayer Space is deliberately different from the rest of the Youth Ministry app. Dashboard, Events, Roster, and Budget are administrative tools — they help you do ministry. The Prayer Space exists to help you be with God about the people you’re doing ministry with. It’s calmer, warmer, and more spacious on purpose.

    The design philosophy

    A youth minister’s prayer list is made up of real people with real situations — a student whose parents are divorcing, a leader discerning a call, a teenager wrestling with faith. The Prayer Space is built to keep those names and stories close at hand without losing them in a notebook, and to give you a dedicated, undistracted place to actually pray through them.

    The design intentions:

    • Quick capture. You should be able to add a prayer request in under ten seconds, because the moment you notice it is often the best moment to record it.
    • Community-connected. Requests can link to people in your roster, so a prayer for “Jake” carries all of Jake’s context with it.
    • Contemplative. The Carousel mode strips away every UI element that isn’t the prayer itself, one at a time.
    • Celebratory. Answered prayers should feel like answered prayers, not like closed tickets.

    Prayer requests

    A prayer request has a short title, a longer details section, a category, and optionally a link to a person in your roster. You can mark a request as urgent or pinned to keep it surfaced. Each request has a lifecycle:

    • Active — an ongoing prayer need. The default state.
    • Answered — God answered. The date is recorded and the request is marked for celebration.
    • No longer needed — the situation changed or resolved. The history is kept but the request is out of rotation.

    Each request also tracks when you last prayed for it. The app gently marks requests as stale when they’ve been active for a while without being prayed for — not to shame you, but to make sure nothing quietly slips off the bottom of the list.

    Categories

    Prayer requests are organized by category:

    • Student — for a specific youth
    • Community — church or neighborhood
    • Ministry — direction, decisions, provision
    • Personal — your own needs
    • World — missions, global concerns
    • Other — anything else

    Categories aren’t prescriptive — use them as broad buckets, not rigid definitions.

    The Prayer List

    The Prayer List is the main view of the Prayer tab. It shows all your requests with filters for status and category, a search box, and sort options (most recent, urgent first, least recently prayed). Pinned requests rise to the top. Each row shows the category icon, the person link if there is one, and any staleness or urgency indicators.

    From the list, you can swipe to mark a request as answered or delete it. Tap a request to open its full detail view.

    Prayer detail and updates

    A prayer situation usually isn’t static — things develop, get worse, get better. The Prayer Detail view lets you add prayer updates over time: brief notes about what’s happening. Updates appear as a timeline on the request, and when the prayer is eventually answered, you can see the whole arc of how it unfolded. This is what turns a prayer list into a testimony journal.

    From the detail view you can also:

    • Tap I Prayed for This to update the last-prayed date.
    • Tap Mark as Answered to record the answer (with an optional celebration note that becomes a final update).
    • Edit, delete, or re-categorize the request.
    • Jump to the linked person’s profile.

    The Prayer Carousel

    This is the heart of the Prayer Space. Tap the carousel button from the Prayer List and the app goes full-screen into a focused prayer mode:

    • One prayer per page with generous whitespace and larger typography
    • Soft warm gradient background — visually distinct from the rest of the app
    • Swipe or tap to move through the list
    • “I Prayed” button on each page with a gentle checkmark animation
    • A progress indicator showing where you are in the list
    • Shuffle and filter options before you start, so you can pray through only urgent requests, only stale requests, or a specific category

    The intention is that you sit down with your coffee in the morning (or in a quiet corner of the sanctuary), choose how you want to pray, and spend real time with God about each situation before moving on. Nothing else on your screen fights for attention.

    Group prayer with external displays

    When you’re leading a prayer meeting, connect your device to a TV or projector via AirPlay mirroring. (Yes, we know that “mirroring” feels wrong, but just trust us.) The external display shows a large-format version of each prayer request — title, person, details — in typography sized for a room. Your device keeps the controls, and you can set an auto-advance timer (30, 60, or 90 seconds) so the group can pray through a list together without you having to touch the screen.

    A note on privacy

    Prayer requests are often deeply sensitive. Like the rest of your ministry data, they sync through your private iCloud account — they’re not on any shared server, and they’re not visible to anyone else. Use the details field to record whatever level of context you need without worrying about who might see it. The carousel and external display features only show what you put in the request itself, so you can keep a fuller private version and a shorter version suitable for group settings if you want.

  • Youth Ministry App—Annual Budgets

    The Budget section is a birds-eye view of your ministry’s finances. Individual events already track their own costs and surpluses in the Costs component. The Budget section sits one level above that, letting you plan a year of spending across every category and see — at a glance — how your real spending is tracking against the plan.

    Fiscal years

    Budgets are organized by fiscal year, not calendar year. If your church runs on a July–June year, set that in Settings → Fiscal Year Start Month, and every budget view will automatically group events by your real financial year. A fiscal year is named by the calendar year in which it begins, so “FY2026” with a September start runs September 1, 2026 through August 31, 2027.

    Budgets and line items

    A budget is a container for one fiscal year. Inside it you add line items — the individual things you’re budgeting for. Each line item has a name, a category, a budgeted (planned) amount, and an actual (spent) amount. The sum of all your line items is your total budgeted spend for the year.

    Line item types

    Not every expense works the same way. Youth Ministry supports three kinds of line items:

    • Manual — You type both the budgeted and the actual amount. Use this for things that aren’t tied to a specific event: office supplies, a curriculum subscription, staff training, a speaker stipend that isn’t attached to a retreat. The actual amount is whatever you enter, updated as the year progresses.
    • Single Event — Linked to one specific event in the app. The budgeted amount is what you planned to spend on that event; the actual amount is pulled live from the event’s total costs. Great for “Fall Retreat” or “Spring Mission Trip” line items — the number updates automatically as you plan and reconcile the event.
    • Event Type — Linked to an event type rather than a specific event. The budgeted amount is for the whole category; the actual amount is the sum of every event of that type within the fiscal year. Perfect for “All Service Projects” or “All Weekly Meetings” where you don’t want a separate line item for each one.

    This flexibility means you can budget at whatever level of detail makes sense for your ministry. Some categories deserve a line per event; others can ride on a single rolled-up line.

    Categories

    Line items are grouped into categories so the view stays organized:

    • Events — spending tied to gatherings
    • Operations — facilities, admin, recurring costs
    • Personnel — staff, stipends, contractors
    • Curriculum — teaching materials, subscriptions, books
    • Outreach — community engagement, communications
    • Other — anything that doesn’t fit the above

    The Budget Overview

    The main Budget Overview screen shows:

    • Summary cards — Total Budgeted, Total Spent, Remaining, and % Used. Color-coded: green when you’re under, yellow as you approach the line, red when you’re over.
    • Category sections — Every line item grouped by category, showing name, budgeted, actual, and variance.
    • Charts — A horizontal bar chart comparing budgeted to actual per category, and an optional donut chart showing your spending distribution.
    • Year picker — Jump between fiscal years, or create a new one.

    Tap any line item to drill into its detail view. For single-event line items, you’ll see that event’s full cost breakdown. For event-type line items, you’ll see every matching event with its individual totals. For manual line items, you can edit the actual amount and notes in place.

    Copying from a previous year

    When you create a new budget, you can choose to copy line items from an existing budget. The app carries over the names, categories, types, budgeted amounts, and event-type links. Single-event links are cleared (since those events belong to a specific year), and manual actuals reset to zero. This lets you build on last year’s plan rather than starting from scratch every September.

    Comparing years

    The Budget Comparison view lets you put two fiscal years side by side. Matching line items (by name) appear with columns for each year’s budgeted and actual amounts and the year-over-year delta. It’s the tool for conversations with your pastor or finance committee about where costs are drifting and where the ministry is growing.

    Income vs. expenses

    The Budget section is primarily expense-focused. Income (per-participant charges, budgeted funds, surplus) stays on individual events where it belongs, because most youth ministry income is event-specific. If you want the full picture of an event’s finances — what you charged, what you budgeted, what you actually spent, whether you came out ahead — open that event’s Costs component. The Budget section tells you how your planned ministry spending is tracking against reality across the whole year.

  • Youth Ministry App—Attendance and Contact Management

    Youth ministry runs on relationships, and relationships run on showing up and staying in touch. Youth Ministry treats attendance and contact as two sides of the same coin: the app records who was present at each event, and surfaces the people you should probably reach out to based on who’s gone quiet.

    Attendance vs. registration — two different things

    Many tools conflate “who signed up” with “who actually came.” Youth Ministry keeps them separate on purpose:

    • Registration is stored on the event as an Event Participant. It tracks who committed, whether they paid, whether forms are in, and any medical notes. One participant record per person per event.
    • Attendance is stored as an Attendance Record. It records that a person was physically present on a given date. Multi-day events can have multiple attendance records per person — one per day you check in.

    This matters for two reasons. First, your weekly meetings, classes, and drop-in events have attendance but no registration — you want to track who showed up without inventing a sign-up list. Second, for a retreat, you probably care both about who paid and who actually made it on the bus. The separation keeps both answers clean.

    Taking attendance

    From any event, open the Attendance component (or tap Take Attendance on a simple event). You’ll see a check-in view with your roster on one side and the current session on the other. Tap each person as they arrive. You can:

    • Filter the list to students, leaders, or a specific group to speed things up
    • Add a guest on the fly if someone new walks in — the guest is added to the roster immediately as a person of type Guest
    • Take attendance across multiple sessions for multi-day events (day 1, day 2, morning session, evening session, etc.)

    Only people you mark present get an attendance record. The app doesn’t store “absent” entries — silence means absence, which keeps the data clean and makes “last seen” calculations straightforward.

    The Contact Log

    Everything else — the text you sent a student, the call you had with a parent, the coffee you grabbed after school — goes in the Contact Log. From a person’s profile, tap Log Contact and fill in the date, method (text, phone, email, in-person, social media, other), and any notes you want to remember.

    Contact logs power the “Students to Contact” section of the Dashboard. A student who was contacted two days ago drops off the suggestion list; a student nobody has talked to in three weeks surfaces near the top.

    The Contact Management view

    The Contact Management view (accessed from the Roster tab) is a dedicated workspace for outreach. It’s organized into sections:

    • Birthdays This Week — everyone whose birthday falls in the next seven days
    • Needs Follow-Up — students flagged for follow-up or who’ve gone quiet
    • New Guests — recent guests you haven’t contacted yet
    • Recently Contacted — a record of who you’ve been reaching out to

    You can filter all of these by engagement level, grade, school, gender, or group, and each row offers one-tap shortcuts to text, call, or email.

    Attendance reports

    The Attendance Report feature (launched from Contact Management) answers questions like: “Which Core-level 10th graders haven’t been to a Wednesday meeting in the last month?” You pick engagement tiers, event types, and a time window, and the app returns the list. Use it when you’re planning a push to re-engage a specific slice of students, or as a regular check-in on the health of your community.

    The rhythm

    The whole attendance + contact system is designed to run on a weekly rhythm:

    1. Take attendance at each event. It’s quick — a minute or two at the door.
    2. Check the Dashboard each morning and reach out to the one or two students it surfaces.
    3. Log each conversation so the list stays accurate.
    4. Once a month, run an Attendance Report on the engagement tiers that matter most and catch anyone the Dashboard missed.

    You don’t need to keep the app open to do ministry. You need a tool that notices the drift between Sundays so you can go do the ministry.

  • Youth Ministry App: Roster and People

    Building Your Roster

    The Roster is where the people in your ministry live — students, leaders, parents, alumni, guests. The app treats the roster as more than a contact list; it’s the lens through which attendance, contact history, and prayer are all tied back to real people.

    The Person record

    Every person in the roster has a single record that captures:

    • Name, contact info, and birthday — the basics
    • Person type — student, leader, parent, alumnus, guest, or other
    • Graduation year — used instead of a fixed grade so the student’s grade stays accurate automatically as school years roll over
    • Engagement level — how involved this person is in your ministry
    • School, notes, medical info, emergency contacts — as needed
    • Groups — custom tags you define for small groups, teams, or affinity groups

    You can access a person’s full profile by tapping their row in the Roster list.

    Graduation year vs. grade

    A common frustration with youth ministry tools is that students’ grades go stale on September 1st. Youth Ministry stores a graduation year instead and derives the current grade from today’s date. A student you enter as “Class of 2028” will show up as a 9th grader this year, a 10th grader next year, and age out of the youth group on their own without any maintenance from you.

    Engagement levels

    Engagement levels describe how deeply someone is participating in the ministry. The defaults are things like Core, Regular, Occasional, and Fringe, but you can rename and reorder them in Settings. Engagement levels drive several features:

    • Filters in the Roster and Contact Management views
    • The Attendance Report (see the Attendance & Contact guide), which can look for students at a given engagement level who haven’t shown up recently
    • Sorting priorities on the Dashboard

    Update a student’s engagement level as their involvement grows or fades. The app uses it to help you notice and respond to those shifts.

    Filtering and finding people

    The Roster list supports filtering by:

    • Person type (students only, leaders only, etc.)
    • Grade (derived from graduation year)
    • Engagement level
    • Gender, school, and group
    • Free-text search for names

    Filters combine — so “11th graders at Central High who are Core-level” is one tap and a search box.

    The Person detail view

    Tap any row to open a person’s detail view. Along with their contact info and notes, you’ll see:

    • Attendance History — every event they’ve been checked in to, most recent first
    • Contact History — every text, call, email, or in-person conversation you’ve logged
    • Prayer Requests — any prayers in your Prayer Space linked to this person

    This gives you a quick, complete picture before a conversation: I know this student hasn’t been here in four weeks, I know I last texted them on the 3rd, and I know what’s going on in their life that I’ve been praying about.

    Adding and editing

    Adding a person is a tap of the + button on the Roster list. You can also import a whole roster from a CSV — see the Importing and Exporting Data guide. The Person record is deliberately simple: add what you need, leave the rest blank. Nothing is required except a name.

  • Youth Ministry App: Planning Events

    Using Components to Plan Events

    Events are the beating heart of the app. A Wednesday night meeting, a weekend retreat, a mission trip, and a parent night all live side by side in the same Events list — but they each have very different planning needs. Youth Ministry handles this with a component-based event system that lets every event show only the planning sections that actually apply to it.

    The core idea: one event, many components

    Every event in the app is a single record that can turn on or off any combination of planning sections, called components. A weekly meeting might only use Overview, Schedule, Volunteers, and Communication. A weekend retreat uses all of those plus Housing, Food, Transportation, Curriculum, Costs, and more. A class might just use Overview, Curriculum, and Attendance.

    Because everything lives in one model, you never have to remember “is this a retreat or a service project?” to find the data. All events share the same list, the same filters, the same exports.

    The 15 available components are:

    ComponentWhat it covers
    OverviewTitle, dates, theme, mission, milestone checklist
    CurriculumSpeaker, teaching notes, content prep
    Ministry PartnersPartner organizations and contacts
    RegistrationParticipant list, payments, forms
    ScheduleTime-blocked agenda and PDF export
    HousingLocation, groups, cost, booking status
    FoodMeals, menu, chef, cost
    CostsFull cost breakdown and surplus calculation
    TransportationVehicles, drivers, transit cost
    VolunteersRoles and recruiting progress
    CommunicationParent and student messaging
    DesignGraphics, printed material, design costs
    While AwayWho is covering ministry and personal responsibilities
    Packing ListWhat to bring
    SuppliesMaterials and their cost
    AttendanceSession-by-session check-in history

    Creating an event

    From the Events tab, tap the + button. You’ll see a grid of event type cards:

    • Retreat — full planner with housing, food, costs, transportation, curriculum
    • Mission Trip — like Retreat, but with Ministry Partners and no speaker
    • Camp, Service Project, Weekly Meeting, Special Event, Class, Small Group, Worship, and Other
    • Any Custom Event Types you’ve defined yourself

    Pick the type that’s closest to what you’re planning. The app creates the event with the right set of components already turned on, and drops you into the Overview for that event. You can always add or remove components later — the type just chooses a smart starting point.

    Working inside an event

    Once the event exists, you’re looking at the Event Overview. The layout adapts to your device:

    • iPad / Mac: A colored sidebar lists every active component. Tap one to see its content on the right. A progress header at the top shows how many milestones across the whole event are complete.
    • iPhone: Components appear as a list. Each row has a colored strip, a milestone count, and expands into that component’s detail view.

    Each component has its own fields and its own checklist items that roll up into the event’s overall progress. For example, completing “Speaker Booked” in Curriculum and “Housing Booked” in Housing both count toward the progress bar on the Overview — but if those components aren’t active for this event, they don’t count at all.

    Costs and surplus

    The Costs component is the financial home of each event. It pulls together the costs from the other components automatically: housing totals, food totals, transportation, design, supplies. You fill in what you charged per participant and any budgeted funds you have, and the app computes your expected surplus (or deficit). This per-event surplus is separate from the annual Budget — see the Budgets guide for how the two relate.

    Milestones and progress

    Every active component contributes a handful of milestone checkboxes (things like “Speaker Booked”, “Housing Booked”, “Communication Sent”). Checking them is how you track preparation progress. The Event Overview shows the completed count and an overall percentage, and the Dashboard pulls these up for upcoming events so you can see what’s lagging.

    Deleting components

    If an event doesn’t need a component you see, you can turn it off from the event’s edit menu. Turning a component off hides its view and excludes its milestones and costs from totals — but the data isn’t destroyed, so if you change your mind you can turn it back on and pick up where you left off.

  • Youth Ministry App: The Dashboard

    The Dashboard: Your Command Center

    The Dashboard is the first screen you see when you open Youth Ministry. It exists to answer one question: “What should I be paying attention to right now?” Instead of a generic home screen, it pulls live information from your events, roster, and prayer life into a single glanceable view.

    What the Dashboard shows you

    The Dashboard is made up of several sections, each pulling from a different corner of the app:

    Upcoming Events

    A short list of the next events on your calendar, with a summary card for each showing the dates, how many days away it is, and a progress bar if the event has a planner attached. Tapping a card takes you straight into that event.

    Pressing Tasks

    Tasks from all of your active events, filtered down to the ones that need attention soon. Tasks rise to the top when they are incomplete and their due date is approaching (or already past). This is the place to check each morning before opening individual events.

    Students to Contact

    A curated list of people from your roster who the app thinks you should reach out to. A student will surface here if:

    • It has been more than three weeks since they last attended an event.
    • They are a recent guest you haven’t logged contact with yet.
    • Their birthday is coming up this week.
    • You marked them as needing follow-up.

    A colored dot shows attendance recency at a glance — green for recent, yellow for slipping, redfor not seen in a while, gray if there’s no data yet. Tap a student to jump into their profile, log a contact, or start a text/call.

    Prayer Reminders

    A gentle nudge showing urgent and stale prayer requests. A “Pray Now” button launches the Prayer Carousel (see the Prayer Space guide) so you can step out of admin mode and into prayer without digging through menus.

    How the Dashboard is meant to be used

    The Dashboard isn’t meant to be exhaustive — it’s a morning check-in. A typical flow:

    1. Glance at Upcoming Events to see what’s on the horizon.
    2. Knock out anything in Pressing Tasks that you can handle in a minute.
    3. Scan Students to Contact and send one or two texts. Log each one as you go so the student drops off the list until next time.
    4. Tap Pray Now before you dive into the rest of your day.

    If you do this every morning, most of the app’s other screens are optional on any given day. The Dashboard is the hub; the rest is there when you need to go deeper.

  • Why Do You Look for the Living Among the Dead?

    An Easter Sermon from Luke 24:5

    They were witnesses. They had seen it all.

    Mary Magdalene, a woman named Joanna, another woman named Mary, some others that had been, the text says, followers of Jesus since Galilee. They had come with him as he went around those cities of Galilee, teaching and doing signs of power. Somewhere along the way, as he picked up some disciples named Peter and James and John and the rest of those brothers, he picked up some sisters too—Mary, Joanna, some of these others. They became disciples of Jesus too. They left their lives, left their homes, and began to follow him.

    They were witnesses of the things that he had taught. Imagine them sitting there on the mountain. Perhaps when Jesus gave those incredible words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” you can imagine Mary nodding right along, or maybe Joanna’s jaw dropping in disbelief as Jesus proclaimed that those who were poor in spirit were the ones who were living the good life. Maybe they didn’t catch it on that mountain, but they caught it when Jesus said it in the Plain version that Luke records. Maybe they heard him teaching in the synagogue as it was his habit to teach there. Maybe the places that meant the most to them were the homes in which Jesus often found himself. Even though it wasn’t usually his house, he found himself hosting people. We know that once, Mary Magdalene of all people found herself a surprising guest. She wasn’t on the guest list, but she invited herself and found herself welcomed by Jesus.

    They saw all of that. They heard all of that. They were witnesses to the deeds of power. In the book of Acts, when the apostles give their testimony about Jesus, they’ll say things like, “He went about doing deeds of power, signs of power, healing people, healing all the sick, and releasing people from demons.” This is the sort of thing that Jesus did as he traveled around the region of Galilee, and that kind of ministry led people like Mary and Mary, (it seems like there are a lot of Marys)—and Joanna to become his disciples.

    At some point, maybe they saw something, or maybe they heard something, and they decided to be his disciples, his students. They decided, “That guy, this Jesus of Nazareth, that’s going to be my rabbi. I’m going to be his student. I’m going to follow him.” Maybe it was because he spoke, as the text often says, with authority, and they recognized within his voice the very voice of God. Maybe they perceived the wisdom of the things that Jesus had to say, or maybe they saw or experienced, even in their own bodies, some of that power of God, which was on evident display as Jesus traveled through Galilee. But at some point, they decided.

    At some point they had seen enough—and knew that they wanted to see more. They had seen enough to follow him. And so they, like those well-known fishermen, left their boats too, and they became people that were completely sold out to follow Jesus.

    They were witnesses when Jesus found himself teaching there in the temple or in the city of Jerusalem, as he finally made his way to what was the center of the Jewish religious landscape, the great temple of Jerusalem, a marker place in the story of God’s people. And they saw, they heard, Jesus getting into brawl after brawl with the theologians of his day, who would much rather that he followed every little letter, every suggested letter of the law, even if it meant excluding the great majority of the people.

    They saw Jesus going toe-to-toe with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians—all the people who had power. They were there when Jesus gave them answer after answer that thwarted their attempts to discredit him. They were there when they saw Jesus getting the best of every objection. They were there—they were witnesses.

    They saw Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. They saw Jesus standing up and proclaiming that even the sinners and the tax collectors would enter into the kingdom of God before all those power brokers. They were witnesses when it all went bad, when the crowd turned against him. The text is very careful to tell us that not all of the disciples ran away, and in fact, it was some of these women disciples who were the ones who watched every step of the way.

    They were witnesses when the very crowd of people that had thrown their coats in the street on Palm Sunday became part of the mob that was shouting to crucify him. They were witnesses when Pilate washed his hands and said, “I’ll have nothing more to do with him,” but still turned him over. They were witnesses when Jesus was paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, carrying the cross on his back. They followed with the crowd—these women disciples who had come with him from Galilee were witnesses when Jesus was laid on the cross, when his hands and his feet were nailed to the cross, and he was lifted up. They were the witnesses that heard him say, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

    How else would we know that he said things like “I thirst,” except for the fact that there were witnesses there watching and listening the whole time? And some of those witnesses—Mary, Joanna—they were witnesses when the empire murdered Jesus. They were witnesses to the brutality and dehumanization that came with the cross, which sought to strip Jesus, like it did all of its other victims, to strip Jesus of his last shred of human dignity, his very humanity. They were witnesses when Pilate, by the authority of Caesar, made this Jesus not a person anymore. They were witnesses as the blood, the precious blood of Jesus, the life blood, drained out of his broken body. They heard him say, “It is finished.” They watched as he gave up his spirit. They were witnesses of his teaching, of his deeds of power, of his incredibly unexpected embrace, and they were witnesses of his death.

    Joseph of Arimathea, was on the high council but had disagreed with all of this, had objected when Jesus was being thrown before Pilate. He went to Pilate and said, “He’s died. Can I take his body and bury it?” And I don’t know if they were there for that part or not—I kind of doubt it—but they were witnesses when the body was removed from the cross. They were witnesses when it was wrapped hastily in a shroud as it was carried to a tomb cut out of rock.

    The text is careful to let us know that they watched as he was laid in the grave. They knew, it says, how he had been laid in the grave. They watched. They saw him be buried. They watched as the stone was rolled across the face of the grave. Mary, Joanna, and their friends—they were witnesses that it was over.

    When the long Sabbath had passed—a long Sabbath in which they had waited to go and finish the burial process of Jesus, to go and anoint his body, to spread perfume and ointments on his body as was the custom of that day to honor his body—these women had waited over a Sabbath, honoring God’s command. Even though they were desperate to go and pay their rabbi this great final honor, they waited through that night and the next day.

    Luke says that in the last verse of Luke 23, “They returned and prepared.” They returned to their homes after the burial, and they prepared the spices and ointments. Imagine the scent of that, the aroma of that in the home. They prepared these burial spices, and it’s not something that just wafts out of the kitchen immediately, right? And I can imagine—it says, “On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment”—but I can’t imagine that being all that restful. Imagine a restless rest, a Sabbath in which there is no outward activity, but commotion in the heart, the sense of things that have been left undone that desperately need to be done, the helplessness of not being able to do for their rabbi that last great honoring task. And I imagine the aroma of the house that reminded them in every moment of where Jesus was, waiting for them.

    But Luke says, “On the first day of the week at early dawn”—no sense in waiting around, right? At early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.

    They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground in this angelic encounter where they are at the most confused moment of their lives. Their confusion turns into fear when they encounter the angelic. They are absolutely at their wits’ end in this moment, and they receive this word: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” He is not here, but he is risen. That’s what these witnesses were told in this critical moment that we come to celebrate even all these hundreds of years later—a moment in which the ones who were the very witnesses of his death are told that what they knew as bedrock reality—he was dead, that’s how people stay—in that moment, they are told that reality has been broken.

    This question that the angels ask them I find to be a profound question, and not just for those witnesses, who were honestly just doing the best they could in the moment. Why were they looking for the living among the dead? Well, they didn’t know, right? Of course, I feel like the angels could have cut them a little slack in the moment. But there are still many, many, many people who look for Jesus among the dead, who still count Jesus as just one of the dead ones, one of the many, many characters of history who came, had something to say, did what he did, and died. And I would tell you, just as people who have bothered to come on this Easter morning to church, I would tell you that sometimes even we disciples do the same thing.

    Just like these women, we can be people who are ready to celebrate the things that Jesus said or the great powers of the miracles that he performed. We might even think of ourselves as witnesses to the cross, as people who speak to the gift of Jesus’s death, where Jesus allowed his blood to be poured out for people. The church often gladly celebrates the cross, and yet sometimes I wonder if we might need to hear the question that these faithful witnesses were asked on that Sunday morning. We might need to answer the question about why sometimes we still treat Jesus like he’s dead—why he just came, and his life was taken away from him, and he was killed. He was poured out, and maybe we even act like that is the result. As a result of that death, we have been given our forgiveness. We’ve been given the grace that allows us to know that God still loves us.

    I can tell you, you can know all of that, you can celebrate all that in the name of Jesus, sing songs about that, and still act like Jesus is dead. The Jews came to the temple all the time and gave things for sacrifices in which they were forgiven, and they didn’t expect any of those sheep or bulls to get up off of the altar. Jesus’s sacrifice, even for our sake, for our atonement, doesn’t necessitate Easter. For many, many people, I think they’ve treated our faith like Good Friday is enough without moving onto the rest of the story.

    Jesus, the crucified Messiah, has become the living Lord. He is the king. He’s the one who is empowered and enthroned at the right hand of God. Jesus is not just a story of the way back when, but of living presence now. The story of Jesus is ongoing. We ourselves take on that story, even in our most common rituals. We say things like this from time to time: we come and we take the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper. In that moment, as Paul says, you “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”. It is a recognition of the body broken. It is a recognition of the blood poured out, but it is also a recognition that Jesus lives and that we await his return. It is not just a memorial for a fallen teacher. It is anticipation of the living risen Lord.

    Baptism also represents the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus, and I’m going to tell you, I think we’d have a lot harder time signing people up if it only represented the death and the burial. Like if you went into the water, and that was it—I just feel like the kind of baptism takes on a different tone! It is the rising up out of the water, the living in the new life as Paul says—to live, to rise, to live in newness of life, where the sinful part of us is laid to rest, and we seek to live to follow Jesus in his life and his new living resurrected life.

    These rituals are just on the edge of it, but in all the other parts of our life, the same is true. Paul in Colossians is speaking to disciples and even recognizes their baptism in their resurrection in that moment. “If you have been raised with Christ”—that’s what Colossians 3:1 says, and I’m sure that that is about this baptismal moment. “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” In other words, he’s not saying don’t think about anything that is happening in this world. What he is saying is even as we live now, there is a way of life that is seeking the things of God even among this fallen place. Don’t go chasing death. Don’t seek death—seek now, seek life, seek the living Jesus. Seek the living Jesus here on Sunday morning. Seek the living Jesus tomorrow on Monday. Seek the living Jesus in your neighborhood. Seek him in your community. Seek living in Jesus wherever he can be found—in your family, amongst your friends and your neighbors. God is alive and is at work even in our city.

    God is here in his presence. Yesterday, because of all the rain, (terrible on the day we were supposed to have our Easter egg hunt), we put a bunch of eggs all over this auditorium. I know that’s strange, after all, there’s no bunny in the Jesus story. There are no disciples looking for eggs. But I do like that there’s a seeking game in the midst of all this, and all those little rascals and youngsters who hopefully today have brought some of their candy to share with you, were seeking after Sour Patch Kids and Nerds and gummy sweets. .

    Those kids that were seeking are a sign to all of us to seek Jesus—not a dead Jesus whose history has moved on, but to seek the living Jesus. I want to proclaim the gospel to you today that if you are seeking Jesus, you will find him. Even beyond that, I want you to know that he’s already started hunting you down.

    The story goes here that the disciples, these women, at the tomb—they don’t meet him there, but they go with this message that he is risen. They go tell the disciples, and Jesus will show up there. In the meantime, as Luke tells the story, there are a couple of disciples who are just completely dumbfounded by all of this that’s happened, and they go on a journey back home. They’re going from Jerusalem. They’re leaving town. It’s all wrapped up and they’re leaving. Jesus finds them on the way, and that’s where the story will go from now. Now the seeking is being done by Jesus, and he goes on and he’ll find people all over Jerusalem that didn’t know to look for him. Then he’ll start finding people in the rest of Judea and Samaria.

    They’ll tell a story about somebody who was on his way seeking disciples of Jesus to persecute—a man by the name of Saul—and it says that he was persecuting Jesus. He was persecuting disciples. One of my favorite little Greek flips in the whole New Testament is this: it says that he was seeking Jesus—seeking disciples—but in the end, it is Jesus that seeks him out.

    In fact, Paul will use the very same word that he uses to talk about what it meant to persecute Christians—to seek them out and chase them down—in the book of Philippians, he uses the same word to talk about chasing Jesus, but now he is chasing Jesus quite differently. It says he reaches for Jesus—because Christ has already reached form. He says, “Not that I’ve already obtained all this or reached the goal, but I press on to make it my own, because Jesus Christ has made me his own.”

    In that language, he’s saying, “I’m chasing Jesus. I press on for that for which Christ Jesus laid hold of me.” The gospel is that the living Jesus is now the one doing the seeking. He’s the one calling people to himself. And the cast of characters that he is calling to himself—just like it was with the Marys and with Joanna—are not the people that look like they fit in the story. But he is calling people, and he’s calling the outcast and the people that don’t fit in. Some of the people who are willing to lay down power and some of the people who never had it to start with—he’s calling all those people. He’s saying, “You will be my witnesses too”—not witnesses of the death of Jesus, but witnesses of his life.

    And my friends, he is calling you to that very task. He is calling you who have come today to celebrate and honor him by singing about the living Jesus. He is going to send you from this place as his witnesses that Jesus, like the angel said, is risen, that he is alive.

    For Paul, in places like the passage in Colossians 3 I was reading, that witness sometimes comes in very simple things, really normal things. It’s not in giving fancy speeches about Jesus or things like that, but in simply laying down some of the death stuff. Paul says things like, Put to death whatever is earthly: sexual immortality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed. Lay down things like anger and wrath, and malice and slander and abusive language. Right after he talks about being raised with Christ, he calls us to lay down all those things that were dead.

    New life for Paul is the stuff like: as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness and humility, and meekness and patience. Bear with one another, forgive each other. For Paul, the witness to Jesus’ life sometimes is not in any dramatic turn. It’s in the simple trading of malice for kindness, bitterness for peace, deceit for truthfulness. And in all those things, all of those little decisions, we bear witness to Jesus.

    Today, some of you have come into this place and maybe you just got dragged here by your grandma. That’s fine. Maybe you came because that religious friend of yours finally persuaded you: “OK, I’ll go and give it a crack.” Man, I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I know who’s looking for you, and Jesus is welcoming you into his people. He wants to give you life, the same life that God demonstrated in raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus wants to give that life to you. Come, come join in this group of witnesses. Join in the story of what the living Jesus is doing in the world. Stop looking for death. Stop chasing the dead things. Start chasing after Jesus.