New: Direct messages are now available in Church Center. Members of your groups and teams can now connect directly—one-on-one or in small groups. Learn how to get started.

Have you ever been in a group chat that started as a small fun thread and slowly became...everything? Prayer requests, memes, event planning, Netflix chatter, someone’s random musings about life. 

The chaos wasn't the people; it was the tool. Using a general-purpose messaging app for your church has always been a bit of a compromise—not just for your community, but for safety too.

For a lot of churches, GroupMe or WhatsApp has become the default for communication. They're familiar and pretty easy to spin up. But there's a real downside: your church conversations live outside your church tools.

Church Center changes that.

Everything in one place

When your small groups and teams communicate through Church Center, your conversations are connected to the people and structures you've already built in Planning Center.

New group members get added to the right chats automatically, and when someone leaves, they're removed just as seamlessly. No more awkward "can someone remove Amy since she moved" moments. No more starting another text thread because your new guitar player has an Android (we love you Android users).

Conversations also live right next to everything else your people are already using. Group members can chat and browse group resources in the same place they sign up for events. Worship team members can chat and pull up chord charts without switching apps. It's all there, together.

And with DMs now available, your members can connect one-on-one without bouncing to another app.

Built with safety in mind

Church Center is genuinely different from GroupMe and WhatsApp. And we’re proud of that.

Neither of those apps knows anything about your congregation. They don't know who's a minor, who's a group leader, or who just showed up for the first time. They can't. They're general apps built for general audiences.

Church Center is built for churches.

That means safety isn't an add-on or “nice to have” for us. It's built into how communication works from the start. Here's what that looks like in practice:

  • Two adults, always. Any conversation that includes a teenager requires at least two adults to be in the chat. (That's by default, too. 💪)

  • Teens can't initiate DMs. If a teenager wants to reach out to their group leader, an adult has to start that conversation. This keeps conversations between adults and minors visible.

  • Age verification built in. Users without a birthdate on file have to verify their age before accessing chat. Anyone under 13 is completely blocked from chatting.

  • Admins are in control. As an admin, you decide whether DMs are enabled. You can turn it on completely, or keep it off entirely.

  • Members can opt out. Anyone who doesn't want to receive DMs can turn them off for themselves. 

GroupMe and WhatsApp don’t do this because they're not designed for the relationships and rhythms that come with church communities. Church Center is.

Conversations stay in context

GroupMe and WhatsApp can easily turn into the Wild West. In Church Center, people can only message other people they share a group or team with. That's an intentional—and additional—layer of safety. It keeps conversations grounded in real, existing relationships, without giving access to the whole community or opening people up to conversations they might not welcome.

Your people are already in Church Center. Their giving, event signups, and volunteer schedules are all there. Why not have conversations there too?

💙 Planning Center