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1-844-PUSHPAY The people behind ParishStaq
Is Pushpay a Catholic company? Meet the dedicated Catholic team behind ParishStaq—from former friars to religious ed teachers—building software for the Church.
There’s a question parishes ask, usually early in a sales conversation: Is Pushpay actually a Catholic company?
It’s fair to ask. Pushpay didn’t start in the Catholic space. The company built its reputation serving Protestant churches, and ParishStaq came later. So the skepticism is reasonable. Plenty of software vendors have tried to serve the Church by slapping sacramental terminology on a product built for someone else entirely.
The honest answer to that question is: it depends on what you mean. If you mean whether Pushpay was founded by Catholics with a mission rooted in Catholic tradition, no. If you mean whether the people building the product, supporting your parish, and making roadmap decisions actually know what it means to sit in a pew, teach OCIA, prepare a diocese for its annual appeal, or lose sleep over a stewardship campaign, yes. Emphatically.
Here are four of them.
First assignment: the sacrament tracker
Sara Anderson is the Senior Director of Product at Pushpay. She oversees ParishStaq’s product development, which means she’s ultimately accountable for what gets built, what doesn’t, and whether the priorities reflect what parishes actually need.
Before she joined Pushpay, her parish needed a second-grade religious ed teacher. She stepped in. That second-grade year is first communion, one of the most significant moments in a Catholic child’s formation, and she taught it for about ten years.
Her first product assignment at Pushpay was to build the SacramentTracker.
“My first assignment at Pushpay was to build our sacrament tracker,” she said. “That’s a wonderful practical application of how my personal life and faith got to be brought into this company.”
That’s not a coincidence the company engineered for a press release. It’s what happens when someone who has spent a decade preparing children for their first Eucharist is the one deciding how sacramental records should work in software. She understood, at a practical level, what a faith formation director actually needs to see, what data matters, and where parish systems tend to lose the thread on a family’s sacramental journey.
That decade of tracking which kids had received which sacraments, and where families tended to fall through the cracks, shaped how she thought about data at scale.
“I’m really proud of being able to bring that to market,” Anderson said, “and to have that whole picture of a person across an entire diocese from their ministry involvement to their generosity. To have that whole picture of a person, I think is just beautiful.”
The friar who fields sales calls
Anthony Welch is a Strategic Account Executive. In that role, he works with parishes and dioceses evaluating ParishStaq, walking them through the product, understanding their needs, making the case. What’s on his resume before Pushpay is not typical sales background.
Welch served as a focused missionary and then as a Franciscan friar of renewal before discerning his way into a different kind of service.
“Being a Catholic is at the core of who I am,” he said. “It’s not just a part of my life, something that’s compartmentalized on the side.”
That’s a different kind of credibility than knowing your product cold. When Welch talks to a parish administrator about the weight of managing ministry on a skeleton staff, or to a pastor about the friction between administrative burden and actual pastoral work, he’s drawing on something most account executives can’t. He’s been the one doing the ministry. He knows what it costs when the tools get in the way.
“The church has always embraced new means and new methods,” he said. “Paul would use whatever means were available to him to proclaim the gospel.”
A crisis, and then clarity
BJ Ball grew up Catholic in Colorado. His baptism. His first confession at a small church just outside Cripple Creek. First communion at the parish where his grandfather laid the cornerstone. His mother helped lead the capital campaign that built the first church in Conifer, moving a congregation from a Mexican restaurant into an actual sanctuary. Faith was ambient in his upbringing.
Then it became urgent.
A few years ago, his son was in a serious car accident. Medical professionals came with confident projections that turned out to be false. What remained, what Ball leaned into during the recovery, was faith.
“Faith seemed to play a bigger role in his recovery,” he said, “and that really made us trust and believe that following him and doing what was right, and listening to the church and taking its teachings and making it a part of our everyday, was the right thing.”
Pushpay came across his radar shortly after. “It felt like the right match of passion and profession,” he said, “where I got to take that same faith and put it into everything I do on a day-to-day basis.”
Ball is now the General Manager of the Catholic line of business. He’s accountable for where ParishStaq goes as a product and as a market presence. Under his leadership, the Catholic team has grown to over 800 parish customers and four diocesan relationships.
He’s also clear-eyed about the gap. “We have a lot of work to do,” he said, “and to do that we have to communicate effectively about the value that we’re bringing.”
The metric he comes back to: “How do we keep the Church central in all we do, take the teachings of our new Pope Leo XIV and make sure that we’re keeping humans at the center of their interactions with technology?”
Envelope numbers aren’t the point
Jonathan Baca came to Pushpay through a different route than most people in church tech. He studied at Franciscan University and the University of Dallas, taught Catholic theology, and worked in a diocese stewardship office before eventually joining Pushpay as a Strategic Customer Success Manager.
That background informs how he talks about what the software is actually supposed to do.
“It’s not just software for the sake of tracking envelope numbers,” he said. “It’s software for the sake of engaging people and bringing them closer to Jesus.”
He said that in the context of onboarding, the moment when a parish is transitioning onto a new platform and everyone has opinions about features and workflows. His job is partly to remind them of the larger frame. The admin functions matter. The reporting matters. And the point of all of it is what happens when a parish can actually see its people, not just manage them.
That was also his answer when asked about the greatest opportunity facing the Church right now: “For people to be seen by the church.”
In an era when social media has wired everyone to perform visibility, he thinks the Church’s actual advantage is the capacity for genuine, personal recognition. The technology should make that easier, not more abstract.
When Baca started at Pushpay, parishes were regularly asking whether the company was truly invested in Catholic ministry. He was part of answering it, one customer success call at a time.
“Now that we have Catholics helping to build the product, I feel we can confidently say this is a Catholic product that can serve the Catholic Church.”
And the answer is…
So: is Pushpay a Catholic company? The product was built by a woman who teaches first communion. The account executive who walks your diocese through a demo spent years in religious life, and the general manager running the Catholic business decided, after a family crisis, that his faith and his work couldn’t stay separate. The customer success manager who helps your parish through implementation spent years in a diocesan stewardship office before any of this.
That’s what “built for Catholics by Catholics” means in practice. It’s not a tagline. It’s a description of who picks up the phone when you call.
