Hi there!

We’re Jeff and Aaron, co-founders of Planning Center. This week marks the 20th anniversary of Planning Center, and we’re deeply grateful for what this occasion represents.

For our churches, that’s 20 years of Sundays and the moments in between: baptisms, friendships made through small groups, and all the ministry moments big and small, seen and behind the scenes. 

For us, it means two decades of choosing churches over investors, the long game over the easy exit: building and shipping one feature at a time, listening carefully to your needs, growing at a deliberate pace, and staying true to who we are.

These are the reasons we're still here, still independent, and still building for the future.

2006 was a different world

Before there was Planning Center, there was just a problem.

I (Jeff) was working at a church, overseeing graphics, web, and the internet (yes, all three). Every week I’d update spreadsheets and manually retype run times every time the order changed. At a big church like that, it was a massive headache. So I thought, “There has to be a better way.”

I (Aaron) was on staff at the same church, burning CDs and uploading MP3s for people to learn music, which was its own challenge. We both felt the same pain, and that intersection was where Planning Center started.

The first version was just a drag-and-drop order of service with timing. It was simple, but it solved our problem.

Then we added the accept and decline buttons—a single click that let a volunteer confirm or decline without logging in. That little feature changed everything.

We quickly learned other churches had the same challenges and wanted the tool we’d made, but sharing software was a lot harder in 2006 than it is now.

So we did what we could and worked with what we had: showing people at conferences and visiting churches to help them get set up. If someone suggested a feature, we’d even try to code it that same day. 

Little did we know, we were building the DNA of our company that would follow us 20 years later: ship fast, serve well, and keep pushing forward.

A commitment to our customers: never being acquired 

Two years ago I (Jeff) wrote a letter outlining our commitment to independence. The short version? Planning Center is not for sale, and we never will be.

Although this was a stance and commitment we had already made to ourselves, this was my first time putting it out into the open. And honestly, we were afraid people wouldn't believe it.

We watched other companies make similar promises and then slowly back away. Each one had good reasons. Each one probably meant it at the time. But once the circumstances changed—once they took an investment, or a number got big enough, or things got hard enough—the promise went out the door.

Our customers love our products in a rare way. They trust us with their ministry work, and we never want to lose that. 

I don't think any other company would ever see the value that I see in Planning Center.

I wrote that letter to make it harder to go back on my word, to raise the stakes. Two years later, I have no regrets. 

Being independent is a value, not a status

We're people who like to solve problems. And one of the hardest parts of staying independent is learning how to say no (to features, to markets, to opportunities) so that the yes-es actually mean something.

In order to have a good yes, you have to have a whole bunch of hard no's as well.

In our early days, we launched a product called Smart Events. It wasn’t church-specific, but it allowed anyone to handle registration for their events. It worked…kind of. But it wasn't right. So we tore it down and rebuilt it specifically for churches as Planning Center Registrations. That was the moment we finally had words for what we were actually doing: Help churches help people.

Staying independent has given us the freedom to pivot, to make calls that need to be made, and to ensure we realign to the right things.

20 years with churches, and what we’ve learned

We now serve tens of thousands of churches and have the pleasure of hearing from them often—at conferences, through social media, in emails.

What strikes us is that what they say isn’t only about specific features (though it often is). Instead, our customers praise our software as a whole and see that we’re not trying to squeeze them for every cent. That might sound simple, but we believe it’s the result of a conscious choice we’ve made over and over again. 

We like to think about Planning Center as a building: We provide the infrastructure, a place for people to come, but we’re not the ministry. You’re doing the ministry. Our goal is to stay out of your way so you can get to the most important work.

Twenty years of serving churches has also taught us how genuinely different churches are from each other. We’re still surprised by it: the range of contexts, styles, and sizes, the number of creative ways people use our products. We want every church to be able to use Planning Center according to their own needs, and they've taught us how to make that possible.

What they've also shown us is that they value how we build, not just what we build. No sales team. No outside investors. No exploitative pricing. They're not just bought into the software; they're bought into the way we operate. That kind of trust isn't something we take for granted.

Looking ahead: we’re not stopping

In some ways, we're more in our groove than we've ever been. The systems, the people, the company infrastructure, it’s all here. Our team is doing the best work we’ve ever seen, and our core values aren't just words we’ve passed around to make ourselves feel good. They actually permeate how our team makes decisions, how we treat each other, how we treat our customers. That's hard to build and maintain, but we’re still up for the challenge. 

So to every admin, pastor, worship leader, children’s director, and beyond who has ever logged into Planning Center and will log on today and again tomorrow, we want to say this directly:

Thank you.

Thank you for trusting us. For using our products and, in doing so, giving us the freedom to build Planning Center the way we've always believed it should be built. 

There's not a day we’re not in awe that this is the work we get to do, and you’re the whole point of it all.

Thank you for being on this journey with us: 20 years of Sundays. Now here’s to all the ones still ahead.

Jeff Berg & Aaron Stewart

Planning Center Co-Founders