My wife had this idea for church announcements and I can’t believe the difference it’s made.

I’m a technophile. You name an online service — I’ve probably tried it. I pride myself in using lots and lots of tech stuff and learning lots and lots of tech stuff. As you can imagine, I’ve probably gotten on the nerves of my small church with this more than once.

That’s why when my wife came to me last year and we had this conversation, I was super skeptical:

Wife: “Honey, we have to set the church up with this online service I found.”

Me: “We do too many online services and most of the time they fall by the wayside, let’s give them a break.”

Wife: “Please”

Me: “Ok, but you have to do it and I warned you.”

The service she found was called remind.com.

It’s not meant for churches, it’s meant for schools and classes — but it works perfectly for churches. What it allows us to do is to send group text messages to lists of people and let’s them reply without entering group message purgatory.

And it’s free.

So we have several groups:

• We have a church wide announcement group.
• We have a group for prayer requests.
• We have a group for our service team.
• We have a group for our kids club parents.
• etc.

And the difference it’s made is AMAZING!

People have been much, much more responsive to this than any other kind of announcements we’ve made. We can send out quick announcements as they come in and we can do things like remind parents about a special thing we are doing at Patch Clubs a couple hours before, when they are most likely to do something about it.

I’m glad I listened to my wife.