Image ModifiedChurches are not just Sunday affairs, as Chris Ekins, founding pastor of Coast Evangelical Church (CoastEC) in Forster, will attest. On the business side there needs to be tracking of formal policies, employee contracts, pay and super, AGMs and Admin Committee meetings, budgets, details of insurance, office and building rental, equipment, notes about websites and third-party services. Then there are church programs, events and initiatives, Sunday services to plan and teams to organise. Then all this needs to be put into action – bills need paying, insurance policies and rental agreements need renewing on time, plans need to be actioned and delegated.

CoastEC's IT systems in 2012 consisted of a Dropbox folder full of MS Word documents, a spreadsheet of church member details, and a very full paper diary. All these systems were showing strain.

Over the next few years, we put in place various low-cost IT systems:

• Confluence for documenting business processes and planning future steps
• JIRA for delegating and actioning tasks, and tracking them to completion
• Jethro - a church management system for tracking member details and rosters

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Church administrative areas are now documented in a giant tree in Confluence (see right), with pages linked to JIRA issues. For example, the "Insurance" Confluence page contains policy PDFs, contact details, and links to JIRA issues for renewing the policy, with due dates set a month before the policy expires.

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Each high-level node in the tree contains a list of issues linked to any page in the sub-tree. This means, for instance, that one can see all 'Admin' issues due in the next month at a glance:

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Responsibility for running the church is delegated (e.g. "Equipment"), and the delegate can see all relevant documentation and tasks due relating to their area of responsibility.