You can now reply privately to the sender of a message in Church Social! Whether you’re sharing a personal detail, asking a question, or letting an organizer know you can help, private replies let you respond without sharing your reply with everyone else.

When writing a reply, select the option to make it visible only to the sender, then click Reply privately. This starts a private discussion where you and the sender can continue the conversation. Only the two of you can see it.

Website and email addresses now automatically become clickable links in more places in the web app, including calendar events, schedules, prayer requests, groups, file folders, sermons, and family bios.

For example, you can include a registration link in an event description, a link to volunteer instructions in a schedule, or a meal signup link in a prayer request. Members can click straight through without having to copy and paste the address.

Sharing your weekly service livestreams used to mean finding an embed code, pasting it into Church Social, and hoping it displayed properly on both web and mobile. Often, it didn't. We've just made this a lot better.

We've rebuilt the Livestream page to simplify that setup. You now choose your streaming service, enter your channel details, and Church Social handles how your stream is displayed.

To get started, go to the Livestream page, open the three-dot menu, and choose Edit. Select your streaming service and enter your channel details:

• YouTube: your channel ID or channel URL
• SermonAudio: your broadcaster ID or a link to your SermonAudio page
• BoxCast: your channel's embed link
• Vimeo: the link to your recurring event
• Castr: your stream ID or embed link

For churches streaming on YouTube, keeping the page up to date also meant replacing the embed code for each service. Now, you only need to add your channel once. Church Social automatically shows your live stream when you're broadcasting and your most recent service the rest of the time. About 30 minutes before a scheduled service, members will see YouTube's countdown, and playback will begin when you go live.

The page also updates automatically, so members who already have it open will see your stream without needing to refresh.

You can now also add a short help message with details like who to contact if the stream isn't working. Members can view it using the new Need help? button on the Livestream page.

If your church already had a livestream set up, we've moved it over for you. Take a quick look to make sure everything looks right. If you haven't set one up yet, ask your administrator to enable the livestream feature in church settings.

Sometimes you want to acknowledge a message or show your support, but writing a reply feels like a bit much — so you end up saying nothing. Reactions give you a simple way to respond in those moments.

You can now add a reaction to messages and their replies — a 👍 to say “sounds good,” a 🎉 to celebrate good news, or a 🙏 to let someone know you’re praying for them.

Just click the smiley face below a message or reply to choose a reaction. You’ll also see reactions from others, and you can choose “View reactions” from the three-dot menu to see who left each one.

Reactions are available now in the web app and are coming to our iOS and Android apps in version 3.0.0. Once it’s available, update through the App Store or Google Play to use reactions on your phone.

We’ve released version 2.0.8 of the Church Social app for iOS and Android, which focuses on fixing bugs and improving the reliability of the app. This includes fixes for known issues on Android when tapping addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses on the family screen.

We’ve also improved how message dates are displayed, matching the recent changes in the web app. Messages now show the time for messages sent today, “Yesterday” for yesterday’s messages, the weekday for messages from earlier this week, and dates like “Jul 13” for older messages.

Finally, we’ve improved the design of the two-factor authentication screen to make entering your verification code easier when needed.

We recommend updating to the latest version of the app to get these improvements. You can download or update the app from the App Store or Google Play.

We just fixed a bug in the transfer documents that caused the place of baptism or profession of faith to be missing in some cases. This was a regression introduced with the new federation directory and occurred when the church was selected from the directory instead of entered as plain text.

You can now schedule events for the fifth Sunday—or any fifth weekday—of the month. If a month doesn’t have one, the event is simply skipped.

We’ve made a few subtle but helpful improvements to the new message page.

File attachments now begin uploading as soon as you add them, rather than waiting until you press “Send.” You can monitor the progress of each upload and retry any that fail. You can also drag and drop attachments anywhere onto the page.

We also now preserve your draft for the current browser tab, so you won’t lose your message if you refresh the page or navigate away and return.

Not every visit recorded in Church Social is something the person being visited knows about ahead of time. A pastor may be planning an informal elderly check-in, a sensitive spiritual-care visit, or a hospital visit that hasn’t yet been arranged with the member. Showing these visits in a member’s calendar — or emailing them a reminder — could be confusing or reveal plans prematurely.

Members will now only see and receive reminders for home visits, which are typically arranged with the family ahead of time. Clicking a home visit in the calendar shows the date, time, and which office-bearers are coming.

All other visit types will now stay within the office-bearer visit tools. Office-bearers will continue to see all visits they are making and receive reminders as usual.

This change applies to the web calendar, mobile app, iCal subscriptions, and email reminders.

We've completely refreshed the file upload experience in the Files area. Files are now uploaded directly to secure cloud storage, reducing timeouts and supporting uploads of up to 1 GB. You can select multiple files or simply drag and drop them onto the page, then track each upload’s progress in the new upload panel.

You can also replace an existing file without deleting it first. Any shared links to the file will continue to work, and previous versions are preserved so you can view or download them later.

You can now filter messages by date range on the Messages page, making it easier to find messages sent during a specific period of time.

We’ve also improved how message dates are displayed. Recent messages now show clearer labels, such as the time for messages sent today, “Yesterday” for yesterday’s messages, the weekday for messages from earlier this week, and actual dates like “Jul 13” for older messages.

We’ve added a new detailed print style for visits, making it easier to print or export a complete view of all visit details for churches that keep offline copies. This includes an option to start each visit on a new page.

Be aware that visit notes are only included when the person printing the report has permission to view them.

You’ll find this new option in the three-dot dropdown menu on the visit search page, under Print. In the print dialog, select the Detailed option in the Style input.

The Annual URCNA Statistics report has been updated to reflect the changes approved by the 2026 URCNA Synod.

The biggest change is around profession of faith reporting. Instead of one broad “Professions of faith without adult baptism” statistic, the report now includes a total count along with more specific categories:

• Total professions of faith
• Professions of faith with adult baptism
• Professions of faith by baptized members
• Reaffirmations of faith
• Readmissions of disciplined baptized members

Synod also approved removing the family transfer statistics from the annual statistics. Since this change was anticipated, those family transfer statistics were never added to this report.

Search results in church fields now prioritize congregations that are most relevant to your own church. When searching for a congregation, your current church will appear first if it matches the search, followed by other churches in the same federation, and then congregations from other federations.

Minister suggestions now also use past entries to determine the most helpful order. Ministers used most often in baptism and profession of faith records will appear first, with names sorted alphabetically when usage counts are tied.

Together, these changes should make entering data into Church Social a little faster.

You can now choose how prayer requests are sorted when printing them. In addition to the default date-posted order, prayer requests can be sorted and grouped by category, making printed prayer lists easier to scan and share.

When sorting by category, you can also choose whether each category should start on a new page.

We’ve also added a new quick actions dropdown on the prayers page, which includes options to edit, archive, or delete a prayer request, saving you a few steps when making changes to existing prayers.