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1-844-PUSHPAY What small churches need from church technology
The 2026 State of Church Tech report surveyed over 1,300 leaders. Here's what the findings mean for churches under 200.
Sunday’s giving report comes to you on Monday morning because there’s no one else to check it. You run the mental math: payroll, utilities, whatever else is due. Some weeks the numbers land where you need them. Other weeks you’re figuring out which bills can wait and which are due sooner rather than later.
Tracking giving, coordinating volunteers, and following up with visitors by hand takes more time than it should. You know that. But the idea of onboarding a new platform (figuring out the setup, migrating the data, getting everyone else up to speed) can feel like trading one problem for a bigger one.
That’s because most church tech decisions get made by the person who will also set it up, train the treasurer on it, and field the call when something breaks on a Saturday night. There’s no IT department to loop in, no pilot program to run alongside the current setup. The evaluation question isn’t “what’s the feature roadmap?” It’s “can I have this working by Sunday?”
The 2026 State of Church Technology report, produced by Pushpay in partnership with Barna Group from 1,300+ responses, has answers. The patterns it surfaces—what separates churches that get real ministry value from their technology from those that don’t—hold true regardless of whether your weekend attendance is 150 or 1,500. What changes is how you read the data.
What the numbers show
The finding that holds most clearly across church sizes: ease of use is the top factor when church leaders choose new software, topping every other factor cited by respondents. Price came second (66%), reputation third (61%), data security fourth (59%). Feature depth didn’t make the top four, and neither did integrations. When the person evaluating the software is also the one configuring it, training the church treasurer, and responsible for troubleshooting the technology, ease of use isn’t a preference. It’s the whole evaluation.
95% of church leaders say digital tools open new opportunities for ministry, and 78% say technology makes their ministry lives easier. For a church under 200, those numbers are directional—a signal of what’s possible when technology is working for the church rather than sitting beside it.
Three objections
Three concerns come up constantly in conversations with small church pastors.
“We can’t afford it.” Month-to-month budgets with unpredictable giving make multi-year software contracts feel risky. But the question isn’t whether the software costs money. It’s whether your current approach has hidden costs you haven’t totaled up. Volunteer hours chasing lapsed givers. Giving platforms with processing delays of two to three weeks that eat into cash flow, and communication tools scattered across personal accounts that go dark when someone leaves.
Those costs exist, but they don’t show up on a budget line. A giving platform with a two-week settlement window means carrying a monthly cash float to cover the gap between what you’ve spent and what’s actually cleared. The more useful ROI question: what are we already spending to avoid this?
“Our people won’t use it.” Long-tenured members resist change. They’ve watched initiatives land with a splash and sit unused six months later, and their skepticism is often earned. But the young adults joining your ministry now, particularly Gen Z members arriving at the edges of your community, expect digital access as a baseline. A church app or online giving platform isn’t a feature for them. It’s how they engage when they’re not in the building. If it doesn’t exist, many of them won’t stay.
“We’re too small to need software.” This objection misses the actual load. A pastor managing giving records, new visitor follow-up, communication lists, and volunteer scheduling simultaneously is running a complex administrative operation. The headcount determines how many people share the load, not whether the load exists. At 150 members, one person usually carries most of it, and that person is typically doing all of it on top of preaching, counseling, and shepherding the congregation.
A 140-year-old church’s pivot
Connect Christian Church in Carl Junction, Missouri has served its community since 1885. By 2020, they had about 200 active members filling their building for two Sunday services. In early 2020, they added a third service to meet demand.
And then, three weeks later, COVID shut everything down.
Their giving setup ran through a third-party processor and sometimes took two to three weeks to clear. As Kenan Klein, the church’s Worship and Student Minister, put it: “There are some weeks where we have money coming, but we really need to spend money now that we don’t have, because it’s in this nebulous transition period.”
They evaluated options the way a small church has to: on ROI first. “How is this product going to pay for itself? Because if it doesn’t, we can’t use it.” Kenan built a spreadsheet comparing pricing structures against the tools they actually used. The math pointed toward Pushpay, primarily because its pricing held steady as the church grew rather than scaling upward in tiers.
Three years after the switch, their congregation had grown to 400 active members. Transactions that had previously taken two to three weeks to clear were processing in a couple of days. Week-to-week planning stopped feeling like guesswork. The Monday morning calculation that had meant checking whether deposits had cleared before committing to any spending became a much shorter task, and Kenan could redirect that time toward the work he’d actually come into ministry to do.
The platform became more than a giving tool. When Connect Christian started planting a second campus in a neighborhood with limited church access, the app connected both communities. People who couldn’t make it to a Sunday service on a given week could still access sermon notes and devotionals, and their giving ran through the same platform as everyone else. According to Kenan, “The app helps us all stay on the same page, whether you’re in the room or not.”
Where to start
For most churches under 200 weekly attendees, giving infrastructure is where technology makes the most immediate difference. Whether Sunday’s offering has actually cleared shouldn’t be a question you’re still answering on Friday. A two-week lag between transaction and deposit creates a cash flow problem, and it sits quietly until Monday morning when it isn’t quiet anymore.
The goal isn’t to replicate what a megachurch is doing. It’s to get the Monday morning giving report to show you something current, cleared, and accurate, so you’re making decisions based on what’s actually there.
The full 2026 State of Church Technology report is a helpful starting point before any technology decision is made. Get the report here. When you’re ready to apply the findings to your specific situation, Pushpay’s Church Tech Check takes about 10 minutes and shows you where the gaps are for a church your size.
If you’re pre-launch, the church plant technology grant program covers 12 months of no-cost technology access for approved plants affiliated with recognized sending networks. Learn more today
