Church Tech Today shares "Your Church Website Has One Door. It Needs a Second One." (5-minute read), on visitors who arrive carrying grief, anxiety, a rough marriage or a move, and find one way in: Plan Your Visit. That asks a stranger to name a Sunday and walk into a room. The piece argues for a porch first — what it calls a Connection Resource, something practical offered in return for a name and an email. FrontDoor.church is free, with no paid tiers.

Editor's note: One thing to know before acting on it: Kenny Jahng, the article’s author, co-founded FrontDoor.church, and that connection appears nowhere in the piece. The porch idea still stands on its own. Lifeway Research found that churches with strong guest follow-up make three points of contact in the week after a visit.

REACHRIGHT shares "Your Church is Bleeding Members (Here's How to Fix It)" (10-minute watch), on the back door rather than the front: four quiet leaks that drain the people a church already has. No clear step past Sunday, faithful people who feel unseen, no belonging beyond the service, vision gone fuzzy. Churches that are not growing keep about 9% of their first-time visitors; growing ones keep about 21%. Their growth review is free.

Editor's note: The friend count is the one to act on. Those who stayed active: 90% had six or more friends at church; of those who left, 98% had fewer than six. Ask how many your people actually have. He closes with five fixes for the four leaks, none of which cost anything.

The Pro Church Tools Show shares "The State Of Church Social Media In 2026" (38-minute watch), on what the hosts call peak content — supply has outrun demand, so quality alone no longer earns a view. Metricool's 2026 studies clocked TikTok publishing up 72% in video while average views fell 31% and reach fell 29%; Instagram Reels reach dropped 35%. The metric they now watch is views per day, against posts per month.

Editor's note: The most freeing idea here for a small church is that follower count no longer sets a ceiling — a church with 300 followers and one with 300,000 have the same upside on any given post. Every statistic they quote is linked in the description. Their newsletter is free.

Planning Center Blog shares "Church Center announcements: A new way to answer “What’s happening?”" (3-minute read), on the announcements page that turns Church Center into a digital bulletin. Each item takes a title, plus an optional image, summary and link out. You set when an announcement appears and disappears, and assign it to campuses and categories. It is free to create and live in every Publishing account, including the free Essential tier.

Editor's note: A rare church-tech upgrade with no budget conversation attached. If your bulletin is a PDF somebody rebuilds every Saturday, this replaces it in an afternoon. The campus and category filters matter most to multi-site churches; everyone else can ignore them and still end up with a working page.

Church Production shares "The Compression Mistakes That Can Kill a Worship Mix" (7-minute read), by Andy McMillan, lead pastor of Oasis Church in Ulysses, Kansas, on the five controls every compressor has and the two most volunteers leave alone. A lifeless mix is usually attack and release left at their defaults. He lands at three to six decibels of gain reduction on a solid vocal, eight to ten when a singer's range is wide. Free to read.

Editor's note: The line to keep: use your ears, not Google. Settings you copy off a search result cannot account for your room, your band or your volume. Solo one vocal, watch the gain reduction meter, and adjust until it sounds natural. Costs nothing to try this Sunday.

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In the interest of “shunning the appearance of evil” resulting from undisclosed relationships and/or potential conflicts of interest, we disclose our relationship(s) with the providers mentioned.

We also disclose our own use of AI. This newsletter is researched and drafted with Claude, an Anthropic product. Every issue — the summaries and the editor's notes alike — is reviewed, edited and approved by a human editor before it is sent, and the selections are made by a person, not a model. We are stating this plainly because a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in August ran without such a note and the omission became the story.