Spreadsheet to Radar: Mission Control for Pastoral Care

I didn't build the Care Action Center because I wanted a prettier dashboard.
I built it because of a conversation with Becky.

Becky is a care ministry director who lives in what she calls "the tyranny of the urgent." Needs come at her from every direction—phone calls, hallway conversations, emails forwarded from pastors, prayer requests from the website. She triages everything herself and tracks it all in a carefully-crafted Google Sheet.

She walked me through her world: funerals, crisis counseling, prayer requests, hospital visits, benevolence, repairs, weddings, referrals. Every one of those stories reduced to a row on a spreadsheet with a dropdown for "type of care" and a little note that said "follow up in two weeks."

What she wanted wasn't more data. She already had data.
What she wanted was a system she could trust.

As she talked, I realized something: every tool she'd tried—including my own—was still asking her to be the "spreadsheet brain" of the whole ministry. Planning Center notes, Notebird, Google Sheets—they're all ways of writing things down.

But here's what I know as a pastor: care isn't information. Care is movement.

Requests come in. Assignments go out. Visits happen. Reports come back. Follow-ups get created. And somewhere in all that motion, if you're not careful, people fall through the cracks.

The Door Is Where It Happens

I've been a pastor for twenty-five years in one congregation. In that time, I've learned something about how people actually ask for care.

They don't call the church office. They don't fill out a form. They tell you at the door.

The door of the church is where people share their disclosures. You're saying hello or goodbye, and someone mentions: "This week's my twelfth anniversary at work." Or: "My husband is retiring." Or: "My mom is transitioning—she's going into hospice this week."

They're not specifically asking for care. But they are asking for care. What they're hoping is that there's some kind of exchange: I share this information, you retain it, you follow up, and I feel seen. Because when I feel seen, I know I am loved.

How do you manage all of that when you have tens, dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people passing through your door sharing these quiet disclosures?

That's the question I've been trying to answer for fifteen years.

What I've Learned From Failure

We started with an analog solution. Little blue prayer cards in the seat pockets. We'd collect them, pass them around in staff meeting, assign someone to each card. That all went well in the meeting.

But there was no ability to follow up. Did you actually make the call? What did the person say? Is there something else we need to do?

So we moved to email. The administrator would type up the cards, and we'd assign people via email. You can imagine how quickly that became unmanageable.

Then I built a database. Then a web app. Then a web app with logins.

And here's where the failure became clear: our senior pastor had a dedicated admin who would log in, print out the day's needs, and tape them to his door. He'd take the list, make his calls—and then nothing came back to the system. Whatever he learned was locked in his mind. If he didn't follow up, nothing happened.

That's the pain that broke us open. We needed a system where information streamed to us and allowed us to enter the stream by adding our information—so we could create a complete picture of care for the people who matter most.

"What Are We Supposed to Do With This?"

Just the other day, my assistant pastor pulled up our care request table and asked me a simple question: "What are we supposed to do with this?"

Everything was there. Requests we'd received but hadn't assigned. Assignments awaiting reports. Group blasts that no one had picked up. All the data, all in one place.

But it didn't tell her a story. So she was lost.
The information existed. It just wasn't speaking.

From Activity Feed to Air Traffic Control

After my call with Becky, I pulled up CareNote's dashboard—the one I'd lived with for years. It was a good dashboard. It showed you what had happened recently: new care requests, new reports, new tasks. A newsfeed for care.

But it suddenly hit me: this is like giving an air traffic controller a chronological list of every flight that ever took off and landed.

What an air traffic controller actually needs is a radar screen.

They need to see which planes are inbound and need a runway. Which planes are circling in a holding pattern. Which planes are late. Which parts of the sky have gone quiet.

That's the moment the idea for the Care Action Center was born.

I didn't want to just show "what happened." I wanted to show "what needs to happen now"—and "who might be quietly drifting away."

Making the Invisible Visible

One small example from my own church:

We had a care request assigned to a group. Nobody picked it up.

Technically, the information was there. If you navigated to Care → Requests and applied the right filters, you could find it. But practically? It was invisible. Unless you went looking for it, that need just sat there.

In real terms, that could be a grieving congregant who never receives a visit. Not because anyone decided not to care—but because no one realized the assignment never got accepted.

That's the pain I hear over and over again from care leaders: "We care deeply. We're just terrified that people are slipping through the cracks."

What the Care Action Center Shows You

Instead of a feed of past events, you now see:

System Pulse — immediate counts of unassigned requests, pending group acceptances, overdue care, and care delivered this week. Four numbers that tell you, at a glance, how your airspace is doing.

Inbox: Needs Assignment — every request waiting for someone to take ownership. No hunting. No filtering. If it's unassigned, it's here.

Waiting Room: Group Blasts — every request you pushed out to a group that hasn't been accepted yet. They sit there until someone lands them.

Chaser List: Missing Reports — care that was supposed to have happened by now, but doesn't have a visit report. A gentle way to ask, "Hey, how did that visit go?"

Risk Radar — it quietly scans your people and surfaces those who haven't had any contact in over 90 days. The "we haven't seen Sarah in a while" moment shows up as a gentle nudge to reach out—not six months later.

All of this information already existed in CareNote. What's new is where it lives: front and center, on the first screen you see.

The Smallest Threshold of Care

I was using CareNote just this week with a milestone—birthdays. Every day, it sends me a notification of whose birthday is that day. I reached out via text: "I'm thinking about you. It's your birthday. You're a gift to me. You're a gift to your church community. I'm glad you were born, and I'm praying for you."

The congregant was on vacation at the beach. She showed the message to her friend, her husband, her daughter. On Sunday, she walked in and said to the other ushers, "My pastor sent me a birthday greeting!"

It's such a small threshold of care. But in that moment, she felt very seen.

That's what this is about. Not data management. Helping people feel seen.

More Than a Tool

I'm a developer, but I'm also a pastor. I carry the same ache Becky carries: the fear that someone in my congregation might feel forgotten—not because we didn't love them, but because we couldn't see them.

Designing the Care Action Center was, for me, a theological act.

It's a way of saying: The vulnerable should not depend on someone's memory of a hallway conversation. The grieving should not be at the mercy of whoever happens to see an email. Volunteers should not carry the whole administrative burden of care on their backs.

One care administrator told me recently, "You've thought of everything." That's because I actually use this software with my team. Every feature exists because I needed it—or because someone like Becky showed me what was missing.

For Becky—and for You

When Becky told me she'd been living inside a hand-built Google Sheet, I heard both her creativity and her exhaustion. She was doing what thousands of care leaders do: hacking together systems that almost work, because the tools on the market weren't designed for the actual flow of pastoral care.

The Care Action Center is my answer.

Your work deserves better than a spreadsheet. Your people deserve better than "I hope I remember." And your ministry deserves tools that are intelligent, purposeful, and genuinely transformative.

I'm still tweaking. I always will be. Every conversation like the one I had with Becky sharpens the vision.

But this is the first time I feel like the dashboard is truly aligned with the heart of care ministry: not just tracking what happened, but helping you see who needs you right now, before they slip through the cracks.

This is what I've built.
This is why it matters.
And this is only the beginning.