CareNote and The Church Cares Are Partnering to Help Every Church Care Well
The Church Cares trains everyday believers to listen, pray, and stay present with people in pain. CareNote now sets up their model in one click, free for every team.
Every week I talk with church leaders who ask the same question: "What are other churches doing for care?" They have people who are willing to help. What they lack is a shared way to train those people and a simple way to organize the care that follows.
Today I am glad to announce that CareNote is partnering with The Church Cares to answer both halves of that question.
Who The Church Cares are
The Church Cares is a free, grant-funded ministry of Regent University's Charis Institute, led by co-directors Dr. Jennifer Ripley and Dr. Jim Sells. They train everyday believers in the most basic and most needed care skills: joining, listening, prayer, and presence. Their conviction is simple. Everybody hurts, and almost everybody can help.
Their model pictures care as two triangles. On one side is the need: people with everyday pain, people who are struggling but functional, and people facing serious issues. On the other side is the church's response: lay listeners, trained helpers, and pastors who refer to licensed professionals when a need is clinical. A coordinator in the middle sends each need to the right level, so pastors are not asked to carry everything.
They give their training away. The six-session LISTEN course is free on YouTube, the listener kit and workbook are free to download, and the training is ecumenical and available in Spanish.
How we found each other
We met because churches introduced us. Congregations using The Church Cares had started telling each other that CareNote made their care ministry easier to run, and churches using CareNote kept asking me how to train their listeners. When Dr. Ripley reached out, it was clear our work fits together: they train the people, and CareNote organizes the care.
"You signed up to pray and sit with people. You didn't sign up to organize spreadsheets."
Dr. Jennifer Ripley, co-director, The Church Cares
What the partnership includes
The Church Cares Toolkit, free in CareNote
One click sets up a CareNote team the way The Church Cares trains a church:
- Three care groups: Lay Listeners, Trained Helpers, and Pastors.
- Six care request categories that match their training: Emotional Concerns, Grief, Trauma, Marriage & Family, Adolescents, and Addictions & Habits.
- Listener focus areas, so the listener whose lived experience matches a need appears first when you assign.
- A "Refer to a professional" action with a follow-up task, so the church refers with, not out, and stays connected to the person.
- Training links and a setup checklist that point your team to the free kit and the LISTEN course.
Teams on CareNote Plus also get a public intake form built from The Church Cares approach. It explains that this is spiritual care, not counseling, offers the six areas of care, and includes a brief two-question screener that routes serious needs straight to your Pastors group.
The toolkit is free for every CareNote team, and uninstalling it later deletes nothing.
Shared training
The Church Cares training is now linked from inside CareNote and from training.carenote.app, so the people you assign care to can learn how to listen well.
More to come
The Church Cares and CareNote are listening to churches that already use both, and we plan a joint webinar where they walk through the model and I show how CareNote supports it.
See it in five minutes
Ready to set it up? The walkthrough installs the toolkit, adds listeners, matches a grief need to the right listener, and refers a serious need to a pastor and a professional, all in one shared record.
Get started
- Train your people. Visit thechurchcares.com, download the free kit, and watch the LISTEN course with your listeners.
- Install the toolkit. In CareNote, sign in as the owner and go to Settings, Optional Add-ons, The Church Cares Toolkit, then choose "Install the toolkit."
- Start matching. Add your people to the three groups, mark each listener's focus areas, and assign your next care request.
New to CareNote? Start at carenote.app. Volunteers are free on every plan, so your listeners can receive assignments and file care reports from an email link without a paid login.
I am grateful to Dr. Ripley, Dr. Sells, and their team for the work they give away to the church. Together we hope more people in pain find someone in their church who will sit with them, listen, and pray.
Peace to you and yours,
Donnell