How our church is organizing care ministry — and why I built the software to do it

I built Acts2Track because I’ve stood on both sides of care

I’ve spent a long time caring for people I love. In the late 1990s I met Margie. Both of her parents had cancer, and by the time I came into her life they were already deep in a long health journey. Margie and I walked through it with them — listening, helping, learning what it really takes to support someone who is very sick. I thought I understood care.

Then in 2014 I was in a motorcycle accident. Doctors gave me a 30% chance to live. For a long stretch of my recovery, Margie and I were the ones being cared for, and we saw the care giving experience from the other side. People showed up and they were helpful. But from the receiving end, I could see something I’d never quite seen as a caregiver: they were flying blind. They didn’t know what the last person to stop by had talked about, and they didn’t know our full story. They were piecing the picture together one conversation at a time, every time. After I recovered, I started serving in our church’s widow and homebound care ministry — and that’s where I saw the same pattern again, this time at the scale of a whole congregation.

That’s the moment Acts2Track started. Not as a product. As a need.

Before: hallway updates, then spreadsheets, then more spreadsheets

Care at our church started the way it starts at most churches — word of mouth, and then some meetings. A deacon or leader would mention a situation needing attention, and the rest of us would try to remember who did what, when. We cross-checked against the church office records when something serious came up and the bookkeeper handled reporting, and financials.

When that stopped scaling, we did the obvious thing: we moved to Google Sheets and Forms. Forms made it a little easier to enter visit information. Sheets gave us a place to look at the list. But the moment you have more than one sheet — or you need to onboard a new volunteer or remove someone who’s left the team — you’re managing permissions across folders and teams, and you’re still staring at a spreadsheet that doesn’t tell you anything. Month to month, we didn’t know what we’d spent. No insights. No oversight. No way to see who hadn’t been touched in months.

We looked at the per-user-priced options on the market. We realized fast we were priced out. Care ministry depends on volunteers, and most teams need to grow as the work grows. Software that charges per person taxes that growth — every new volunteer adds to the recurring bill before they’ve even logged their first visit.

The miss: a black hole

The clearest sign that the spreadsheet system was failing wasn’t a dramatic moment. It was every monthly Deacon and leadership meeting.

We’d spend so much time at the top of those meetings refreshing everybody and bringing everybody up to speed. Someone hadn’t been at the last meeting, so we’d have to say, “Well, what we’re talking about here is this…” and walk back through it. It was cumbersome. And it was every month.

The handful of spreadsheets we were trying to manage from just weren’t current. They were outdated. There were people on the lists we weren’t even sure were still attending our church. The gaps in the sheets and forms manifested themselves the same way every time: the data disappeared into a black hole. We didn’t know who was getting missed. We couldn’t tell whether our sheets were current. One volunteer might log every visit; another might log none. The same sheet held fresh entries next to entries that hadn’t been touched in months. For our servants, just getting a log entered was a fight with the tools — and many visits never made it in. If you can’t see whether visits are happening at all, you definitely can’t tell who’s receiving poor care because of it.

Care ministry runs on attention. The system we had was eating attention, not producing it.

What we needed wasn’t simpler. It was purpose-built.

When I looked at what was on the market, I didn’t see anything that fit. The general church management platforms treated care like a sub-feature of attendance. The dedicated care apps charged per user and assumed a small paid staff would do most of the work. Nobody was building for the actual shape of care ministry: a small group of pastors and deacons leading a much larger group of volunteer caregivers, all needing to see the same picture at the same time.

So I built Acts2Track. Flat rate. Unlimited users. Purpose-built for care ministry — which means the information you need to do care well (who you’re caring for, what was said last time, what’s pending, what the team has flagged) is upfront and accessible by default. Not buried in a tab someone forgot to update.

What changed when we went live

We’re two days into the rollout at our own church as I write this, so I’m not going to tell you a dramatic war story. The honest version is simpler and, I think, more useful.

The change isn’t about any single visit. It’s about the structure of how we work together now.

There are no more spreadsheets to sort, no pivot tables to build, no charts and graphs to assemble, no extra cross-checking against other systems just to get a basic picture of who needs what. Everything is in one place. When we want a report, we click. The information is already there.

Everybody can pull it up on their phones. So now when we’re in a meeting, we’re all looking at the same information — current, in our hands, at the same time. The leadership meeting that used to start with thirty minutes of catch-up doesn’t anymore. The person who missed the last meeting walks in already up to speed. Even our volunteers aren’t left behind, because they have current information too.

Same meeting, same room, same people. The thirty minutes we used to spend catching everyone up now go to talking about who needs care and what resources we can pool to help them.

What’s been harder than expected

I want to be honest about this part, because case studies that pretend rollout is frictionless aren’t useful to anyone.

Two things have been harder than I expected.

Onboarding non-technical leaders and servants took real time. We spent a thirty-minute session walking the group through the core features and through why we were leaving Google Sheets and Forms behind. The why matters. Sheets-and-Forms had been sold to us, and to a lot of churches, as a perfectly good “free” solution. On paper it was. In practice it carried a large operational cost. The team needed to hear that honestly. Acts2Track is a real step up rather than a sideways move. Once they understood the why, the how made sense.

The single most effective format was live demonstration. Reading instructions wasn’t going to do it. And here’s what I most want to emphasize: the non-technical leaders and servants — the ones I was most worried about — got past the barrier. They’re using the app. The logs are going in. We’re building how-to videos now so the next church doesn’t have to rely on me being in the room.

Cleaning up the old spreadsheet for import was its own project — separate from the migration itself. The data should have been easy to move. However, it wasn’t reliable enough to move as-is. People who’d left the church were still on the list. Fields were inconsistent. We had to get it accurate — before any of it was worth bringing into the new system. That’s just a part of the hidden cost of the spreadsheet era that nobody talks about: you spend years accumulating data that you can’t actually trust.

Both of these obstacles point at the same lesson. The spreadsheet system wasn’t failing because spreadsheets are hard. It was failing because the data inside them had quietly become unreliable, and the people trying to use them had no good way to fix that from inside the tool.

What we’re tracking

It’s too early for me to give you numbers I trust. Two days isn’t a story. What I can tell you is what we’ll be tracking and reporting back on at 30 and 90 days: visits logged, recipients under active care, prayer requests captured and closed, briefings generated, and volunteers onboarded.

I’d rather give you real numbers in a month than fabricated ones today.

If you’re running care ministry on spreadsheets, talk to me

Acts2Track is live at acts2track.online. Flat rate. Unlimited users. Built by someone who has been the caregiver and the care recipient, and who deploys his own software at his own church.

If your care team is stuck in the same loop ours was — monthly meetings spent catching everyone up, sheets nobody is sure are current, volunteers locked out of the picture — I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

The fastest way to reach me directly is joe@giddyupgenie.com. A note on the address: Acts2Track is the product. GiddyUp Genie is the husband-and-wife dev team my wife and I run together — our work is mending the world within our reach, and Acts2Track is the project we built for care ministry. So acts2track.com is the right place to learn about the product, and joe@giddyupgenie.com is the right address if you want a reply from me, not a support queue.