Administrators and statisticians can now turn two-factor authentication on or off for any member of their congregation. Open the Edit account access dialog from a member's profile and you'll find a new Two-factor authentication tab where you can flip the setting. If 2FA is already required for that person by your church's security settings, the toggle will be locked.

You can now see every phone or tablet currently signed into your Church Social account through the iOS or Android app, and sign any of them out remotely.

Visit your Account → Security page and look for the new Trusted devices section. It lists each device signed into your account, along with the platform (iOS or Android), app version, and when it was last used. If you see a device you no longer use — or don't recognize — click Revoke to sign it out. That device will need to log in again the next time it's opened.

Administrators and statisticians can also manage trusted devices on behalf of other members. When you open the Edit account access dialog for a member of your congregation, you'll find a new Trusted devices tab showing the same list for that person, with the option to revoke any device on their behalf — handy for helping someone who's lost a phone or noticed an unfamiliar sign-in.

Push notifications have finally arrived in the Church Social iOS and Android apps.

This has been one of our most requested improvements for a long time, and something we've wanted to add for just as long. Email notifications still work well, but push notifications feel much more natural in a mobile app. They're lighter weight, more immediate, and bring you straight into the app when you tap them. And when something isn't important, they're just as easy to swipe away and move on.

To start, we've added push notifications for the following activities:

• New messages
• Message replies
• New bulletins

Message replies

Message replies are especially exciting. Historically, replies could be easy to miss, since we only sent email notifications to the original sender in order to avoid flooding everyone's inbox. With push notifications, replies are much more visible, making it easier for conversations to actually continue instead of quietly getting lost.

We've also updated the message emails sent by Church Social to include a prominent Reply to message button. Instead of simply replying to the sender by email, members are encouraged to reply within Church Social itself. This helps foster better discussion within the congregation, while also making it easier for others to see responses as they come in—whether that's someone volunteering for a task, claiming a free concert ticket, or joining in on a conversation.

Along with these email improvements, members can now also reply to messages directly from the iOS and Android apps. Combined with push notifications for replies, this makes discussions in Church Social feel much more natural and much easier to follow.

How to receive push notifications

To receive push notifications, members will need to update to version 2.0.0 or newer of the Church Social iOS or Android app. They'll also need to allow notifications on their device. In the app, this can be checked under More → My Account → Notifications. On that screen, there is a Push notifications section that shows whether push notifications are enabled, along with a button that takes members directly to their device settings if needed.

Avoiding duplicate notifications

We've also added a bit of automation to prevent members from being notified about new messages twice — once via email and once via a push notification. Once a member is consistently receiving push notifications for new messages on their phone, we'll automatically turn off the matching email notifications for messages and replies. We send a friendly email letting them know about the change, along with simple instructions for turning email notifications back on if they'd still like to receive both.

Other mobile app improvements

This update also includes a number of other improvements to the iOS and Android apps, including:

• Refreshed and modernized app design
• Improved the login flow
• Added the ability to search past messages
• Added support for new/unread message indicators
• Added the option to mute messages
• Simplified account settings
• Added new notification settings
• Added two-factor authentication settings
• Fixed numerous bugs and performance issues

We're really excited about this release and believe it will have a positive impact on how churches use Church Social day to day.

We've added a new Security log to help you keep track of important account activity within your church.

Available on the Reports page, this log includes key security-related events such as logins, password changes, email updates, two-factor authentication changes, and when important roles (like administrators and statisticians) change.

It's a simple way to gain better visibility into account activity and strengthen your church's overall security.

You can now create calendar events that repeat each year on the same date.

This is especially helpful for things like church institution dates, anniversaries, or other important yearly milestones that you don’t want to recreate manually each year.

When creating or editing an event, simply choose the "Every year" repeat option to have it automatically appear on your calendar each year going forward.

As part of our ongoing efforts to keep Church Social as safe and secure as possible, we’ve added a new security feature that gives you more control over your account.

You can now log out of all other active sessions from the account Security page. This can be especially helpful if you ever suspect that your account may have been accessed from another device, or if you simply want to ensure that you’re the only one currently signed in. When used, this feature will immediately sign you out of any other browser sessions where your account is logged in, and will also revoke any API tokens used by the Church Social iOS and Android apps.

Treasurers can now email contribution statements directly to members from within Church Social. Statements can be sent in bulk or individually, making it much easier to distribute quarterly or year-end summaries without manually downloading and emailing PDFs.

Each emailed statement is recorded so treasurers can see exactly who has received a statement and when. Statements can also be previewed before sending, and they always reflect the most up-to-date contribution data for the selected period — meaning if contributions are added later and a statement is resent, the updated totals will automatically be included.

You can access this feature on the giving Statements page by clicking the three-dot menu in the top right and selecting “Email statements.”

To help keep church data more secure, we have now enabled two-factor authentication by default for users with roles that have access to more sensitive information. These users will now be asked to enter a one-time security code (sent to their email) when logging in.

This change currently applies to the following roles: Administrators, Statisticians, Report Managers, and Treasurers.

Two-factor authentication has been available in Church Social for a couple of years already, but many churches had not yet enabled it. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve security across the platform, we are now enabling it by default for these higher-access roles.

We also plan to extend this requirement to Deacons, Elders, and Pastors on March 31, 2026. Administrators can enable this setting earlier at any time on the Security Settings page.

Members born on February 29th will now have their birthdays appear in the Church Social calendar on March 1st during non-leap years. A small but important tweak to make sure we don’t accidentally forget about them three out of every four years 😅

We’ve made several improvements to searching in Church Social to make it more powerful, more consistent, and faster.

First, the global search now uses the same search logic as the Families and Manage People pages. This means you can now search for secondary information like email addresses, phone numbers, and maiden names directly from the global search. As a bonus, the global search dialog now opens immediately instead of first loading all data in the background, so it should feel noticeably quicker.

Second, multi-word family searches are now much smarter. Previously, if you searched for something like “John Beth Calvin,” no families would appear because the search required all words to match a single individual. In this example, no one person matched both “John” and “Beth,” so no results were returned. Now, each word is evaluated independently — as long as each word matches at least one member within a family, that family will be included in the results.

Finally, family searches now support the use of the ampersand (&) and the word “and” when searching specifically for couples. For example, searching for “John & Beth” or “John and Beth” will return families where John and Beth are spouses.

We’ve fixed an issue where generating PDF versions of tax receipts could fail when printing a large number of receipts at once. Treasurers can now generate tax receipt PDFs reliably, even for larger batches.

We've added support for a secondary email address on people profiles.

This optional email is shown alongside a person's primary email in the member directory and can be managed on the new Contact page, together with phone numbers.

The secondary email is informational only — it isn't used for signing in and doesn't receive email notifications. This makes it ideal for sharing a church-specific or business email address without affecting account access or notifications.

We’ve improved the fuzzy searching used throughout Church Social, including in search inputs across the app and in the global search (available via Command + K on macOS and Ctrl + K on Windows).

Previously, we relied on a third-party fuzzy search library that often returned too many results, making it harder to find exactly what you were looking for. We’ve replaced this with a new custom search matcher that behaves in a much more predictable and intuitive way.

The new search matches from the beginning of each word, while allowing name parts to be entered in any order. This means you can type the first few letters of any part of a name, however you naturally think of it. For example, when searching for “John & Beth Calvin”:

• jc or cj — first initials, in any order
• bc or cb — matching Beth instead of John
• beth calvin — full second name + last name
• calvinj — last name first
• jocalvin — partial first name + full last name
• cal — just the start of one name

This approach avoids matches from the middle of words, reduces false positives, and better reflects how people actually search.

Overall, searching in Church Social should now feel faster, smarter, and easier to use.

In churches with a long membership history, people search inputs could become cluttered with past members, making it harder to quickly find the correct person.

To address this, we’ve updated these search inputs to support grouped results. Active members are now shown by default, while past members and other records remain available in clearly separated groups. This keeps lists focused on current members, while still allowing you to select past members or other records when needed — for example, when entering historical data.

You’ll see this improvement on the edit deposit page when selecting who a contribution was made by, as well as on the create and edit visit pages when selecting who was visited and who made the visit.

We hope this change makes selecting people a little easier in your day-to-day use!

We're actively working on adding mobile notification support to the Church Social iOS and Android apps. Mobile notifications provide a better experience than email — you can tap a notification and be taken directly to the related content within the app.

To start, we plan to add mobile notifications for new messages sent from Church Social, as well as new bulletins that have been posted.

While mobile notifications aren't quite live yet, we've updated Church Social to prepare the notification settings now, so everything is ready when the updated mobile apps are released.

On the account notifications page (found in your profile), you'll now see a new "Enable mobile notifications" option. You can also control mobile notifications for:

• New messages (disabled by default)
• New bulletins (enabled by default)

Users must have the Church Social iOS or Android app installed to receive mobile notifications.

Administrators and statisticians can also manage notification preferences from the edit person page using a new "Edit notification settings" dialog, found in the contact section under the email address.

This new dialog includes mobile notification preferences, email notification preferences, and email unsubscribe options. Previously, these settings were managed through the "Edit email" dialog. Since notification preferences are no longer limited to email, we've moved everything into a dedicated notification settings dialog for better clarity and future flexibility.

We're really looking forward to getting mobile notifications into your hands and are hoping to have them live within the next couple of weeks — stay tuned!