Church Care Central is a WordPress plugin that gives your church one private place to receive, assign and follow up on care requests. Every request gets an owner, a contact log and a reminder if it goes quiet.
Coming soon. Church Care Central is in early testing. If your church would like to try it before release, ask about early access.
How it works
- Someone asks. A member fills in a short form on your website, for themselves or for someone else. You can also add a request yourself after a phone call or a hallway conversation.
- You assign it. Choose the pastor, deacon or volunteer who will follow up. They get an email telling them a request is waiting, with nothing private in it.
- Care gets written down. The caregiver logs each visit, call, card or meal. Notes can be marked confidential.
- Nothing goes quiet. If a request has had no contact within the number of days you set, the caregiver gets a reminder. Urgent requests have a shorter clock.
An example request, followed from the day it arrives to the day it is closed.
For your congregation
- A short request form you can place on any page
- Ask for yourself or on behalf of someone else
- Mark a request urgent so it moves to the top
- Categories your church chooses: hospital, grief, homebound, meals, counseling and more
For pastors and care teams
- A dashboard of what is new, in progress and waiting on a follow-up
- Assign each request to a pastor, deacon or volunteer
- A contact log for visits, calls, messages, cards and meals
- Confidential notes that only care admins and the author can read
- Daily follow-up reminders by email
- Open requests counted by category and by caregiver
- Sign in with Google or Microsoft, so there is no extra password to lose
- Export the list to a spreadsheet
Who sees what
Care requests are some of the most personal things a church holds. The plugin was designed around who should be able to read them.
| Care admins | Every request and every note. They assign requests, add new ones and can export the list. |
| Care team members | Only the requests assigned to them. They cannot read another caregiver’s confidential notes. |
| Anyone reading the emails | No names and no details. Emails give the category and a link to sign in. |
| Website visitors and search engines | Nothing. Requests are stored apart from your pages and posts, so they never show up in site search or feeds. |
Your data stays on your site
Every care request and note is kept in your own website’s database, not on someone else’s service. Removing the plugin does not delete your records unless you tick the box that says to.
Requirements
| WordPress | 6.2 or newer, self-hosted |
| PHP | 7.4 or newer |
| Google or Microsoft sign-in (optional) | A free app registration with Google Cloud or Microsoft Entra. The plugin’s readme lists the steps. |
Questions
We already use a church management system. Do we need this?
Maybe not. Church Care Central is for churches that do not have one, or that want their care records kept on their own website and visible only to the care team.
Our volunteers are not technical. Will they manage?
A caregiver gets an email with a link, signs in, and sees a short list of the people assigned to them, with a box to write down what they did.
Do caregivers have to use Google or Microsoft?
No. It is optional. The plugin also works with ordinary WordPress accounts, and you can require Google or Microsoft sign-in if you prefer.
Does it connect to Planning Center or other church software?
No. It stands alone and needs nothing else.
What if we stop using it?
Export everything to a spreadsheet first. Your records stay in the database after the plugin is removed unless you choose to delete them.