The City: A Game Changer

I think it was close to two years ago I first got wind that Mars Hill Church was creating a “social networking” tool.
Had it not been for my great respect for the mission and vision of Mars Hill Church I probably would have thought that it was just another “Facebook” for churches.  I have seen a lot of those.  Its not that they are bad, its just that we already have Facebook, we dont need one for our church and especially not one for Christians to hide away in.

With the respect for Mars Hill in mind, we as a church decided to look into On The City when Zondervan aquired the tool from Mars Hill in late 2008.  We loved it, but then we saw the intial pricing model and our love turned into a middle school crush where the girl checked “no”.  But the folks at On the City knew they had a game changer and they went to work to make this an affordable product for churches of all sizes.  My respect went even higher.

Six months later my new friend Eric called and reported that they had changed the pricing model, Zach continued to get smarter (if possible) and make the tool better and better and our vision for a super ninja ChMS/Social Networking tool got even bigger.  These two things helped bring us togther at last.  Middle School crush over.  Marriage (or at least courtship) started.

We are now about 5 months into our intial phase of populating and adoption.  On April 4/5 2010 we officially launched to our entire church body and we currently have about 3500 people already in The City and living even more in community.

We are in the process of transferring all of our database operations over, working on children’s check-in launch, volunteer check-in, membership process and other growth tools as well as all of our donation management being migrated to be handled through The City.  Here is what our senior pastor, Greg Surratt, recently had to say about the city.

Pastor Greg talks about The City from Seacoast Church on Vimeo.

We are probably still in the honeymoon but man she gets better looking everyday.

It may not be for you.  It’s not for every church.  But it is at least worth you checking out The City