This week the blog is sponsored by Church Social and is written by Jonathan Reinink.
I am currently serving as an elder in my church. In my church, elders and deacons serve three-year terms. Between meetings, pastoral visits, and being in tune with what’s happening both locally and in our denomination, there’s lots of work to do. Life is busy.
Sometimes it can even be a little overwhelming. And yet, God instructs elders in 1 Peter 5:2 to “willingly” and “eagerly” shepherd the flock. I find this a helpful reminder to be diligent and faithful in my work.
Professionally, I run a software platform for reformed churches called Church Social, and a key goal of the software is to help elders, deacons, and pastors in their roles. Church Social simplifies the administrative side of the office so that church leaders can better focus on the spiritual side of their work.
Let me walk you through some of the features in Church Social that specifically help church leaders.
Member Directory
Probably one of the most useful tools in Church Social for church leaders is the member directory. This lists all the families within your church, with photos, contact information, special dates like birthdays and anniversaries, and more.

I’m constantly going to this part of the app to grab a member’s phone number, or to get directions to their home when going on a visit, or even just to put a name to a face when a new member joins our congregation.
If you’d like to learn more about the member directory, see my previous article here on Challies.com which covers this feature in detail.
Shepherding Groups
My church organises the families in our congregation into shepherding groups, which we call wards (sometimes also called districts). Each elder and deacon is then assigned a shepherding group that they are responsible for. This is a practical way to ensure that each member in our flock is properly cared for.

Church Social has first-class support for shepherding groups, allowing you to easily see which group each family is assigned to, and which elders and deacons are responsible for that group. You can even send messages specifically to certain groups, and generate reports for these groups.
Member Insights
When you’re assigned the elder, deacon, or pastor role within Church Social, you’re given access to sensitive data within the software that isn’t visible to everyone.
For example, there is a report that lists dates pertaining to deceased family members. It highlights sensitive dates for members who have lost loved-ones, such as a previous spouse’s birthday, or the anniversary of their passing. There are also reports for identifying joyful occasions, like milestone birthdays and anniversaries.
Church Social also generates statistics and reports based on your data, including membership trends, demographics like your average member age, and a plotted map showing where your members live relative to your church, useful for strategic planning.
Visit Tracking
A brand new feature that I’m really excited about is our upcoming visit tracking feature for elders, deacons, and pastors. If all goes well we hope to launch the visit tracking feature this week.
This feature lets church leaders track past and future member visits within the software, helping ensure that all members are visited regularly. It also helps elders, deacons and pastors better coordinate their visits, avoiding situations where a family doesn’t receive a visit for a year and then receives multiple in the same week.

Previously there was no easy way, at least in my church, for us as church leaders to know when a particular family was last visited. But now, with Church Social’s new visit tracking feature, you can easily see all the visits made to a particular family. There’s even a report that lists the families who have gone the longest without a visit — highlighting potentially higher priority visits that should be made.
There is also the option to include notes when creating visits, making it easy to reference these in the future if needed. In my church we always write short visit reports whenever we go on visits, so this is a natural place to store them.
Church Social will also send an email reminder the day before your scheduled visit — just in case you forgot (not that you would!).
File Storage
Between meeting minutes and agendas, incoming and outgoing mail, church policies and guidelines, churches end up with a lot of files. The files section in Church Social makes storing and sharing these documents safe and easy.
You can create folders that all members can access (great for things like policies), and also create private folders that are only accessible to the elders, deacons and pastors. This is great as it creates a centralised location for these church files, meaning you don’t need to email files around anymore.
Schedules
Every Sunday one of our elders takes a turn being the “serving elder”. This basically just means he’s responsible for caring for our pastor that day, shaking his hand at the start and end of the services, and he also leads our council in prayer at the start and end of that day. Naturally, we have a schedule in place to keep track of who’s up next, which we manage in Church Social.
Schedules in Church Social are really nice as they aren’t just static lists. When you’re assigned to a particular task on a particular day, that task appears in your personalised church calendar, and you also get an email notification reminding you about that task.
We create schedules in Church Social for a lot of things — weekly greeters, ushers, nursery lists, etc. — and the reminder emails are really helpful.
Term Management
As previously mentioned, elders and deacons in my church serve three-year terms. To help keep track of these terms, Church Social has a term management feature that lets you specify who has served as elders, deacons, and pastors in your church, including their term length.

Probably the most useful part of this feature is the “Office-bearer terms” report. This report will list all your active and past terms, grouped by the year that the term ends. This is really helpful information when nominating new elders and deacons, as you can quickly see who is currently serving and who has served more recently.
Give it a try
If you’re a church leader struggling to stay organised, or wishing you had more insight into the members in your care, I highly recommend taking a closer look at Church Social.
Church Social has been a huge help for the elders, deacons and pastor in my particular church, and we receive similar feedback from customers all the time. For example:
“Church Social allows our elders and deacons to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time shepherding the flock.”
— Dr. William den Hollander, Professor of New Testament at the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary
“Thanks for all you do. I cannot tell you how much of a game changer Church Social has been for us. It’s been an AMAZING help.”
— Rev. Michael Dixon, Senior Pastor of the Christ Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Mill, South Carolina
“Church Social is a great resource for pastors. It makes tasks that were time consuming, extremely easy. Church Social helps pastors focus on caring for their congregation by providing easy access to current membership details.”
— Rev. John van Popta, Pastor emeritus of the Fellowship Church in Burlington, Ontario
To learn more about Church Social, or to sign up for a free trial, visit our website at churchsocial.com.
If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

Masculinity has become complicated. At least, it has become difficult to be confident about what it means to be a man—to be a man as God has designed men to be. The culture has plenty to say about masculinity that is toxic, but far less to say about masculinity that is good and honoring. We hear more about women becoming men than men simply being men. And many wonder: What are men meant to be and what are men supposed to do?

Into the fray steps Brant Hansen with a wonderful new book titled The Men We Need: God’s Purpose for the Manly Man, the Avid Indoorsman, or Any Man Willing to Show Up. “This book is about a big vision for manhood,” he says. “We’ve lacked that vision, and all of us—men, women, and children—are hurting because of it. The vision is this: We men are at our best when we are ‘keepers of the garden.’ This means we are protectors and defenders and cultivators. We are at our best when we champion the weak and vulnerable. We are at our best when we use whatever strength we have to safeguard the innocent and provide a place for people to thrive. This is the job Adam was given: keeper of the garden.”
I need to say right away that this is not one of those books—those trite and cheesy books for men that focuses on a clichéd version of masculinity bound to a particular culture and a bygone century. Hansen isn’t advocating a form of masculinity that depends on swinging hammers, wrestling bears, or distributing swords. In fact, he says he’s not even capable of writing that book because “I don’t even hunt. I play the accordion. … I’m an avid indoorsman. I own puppets.”
The heart of masculinity, he says, is taking responsibility—responsibility for those things God has made men particularly responsible for. “God gave Adam the job of looking after the garden and the things within. He was to guard it, tend it, and help it flourish. He was responsible for it. I believe looking after our own ‘gardens’ remains our masculine purpose, and we all implicitly know it. Our culture is in chaos regarding what masculinity really is, so it’s dangerous to suggest there’s a distinct, wonderful thing called masculinity. … Masculinity is about taking responsibility.” Hence, true masculinity is not displayed in flexing muscles or fixing stuff or achieving sexual conquests. Rather, true masculinity is displayed in being humble, responsible, dedicated keepers of the gardens God has given us.
Once Hansen lays a foundation for masculinity, he leads readers through “Six Decisions that Will Set You Apart.” They are:

Forsake the fake and relish the real. His focus here is rejecting pornography and video games and other fake forms of virtuous longings. “The hurting world and our hurting communities need us to solve real-world problems, protect real-world people, and fight real-world injustice. Actually, let me rephrase that a bit. The hurting world and your hurting community need you to solve real-world problems, protect real-world people, and fight real-world injustice. Please don’t waste your God-given desire for adventure and accomplishment by being a fake hero fighting fake injustices in fake worlds.”
Protect the vulnerable. Here he says that “The people in your neighborhood, at your school, or at your workplace should be safer because you’re there. Even if they don’t know it.” This means men must be willing to protect others and must be steadfastly unwilling to become a threat to others.
Be ambitious about the right things. “You will struggle with feeling meaningless when you choose to invest your time and energy in meaningless things,” he says. Hence, we must use our God-given ambition to pursue causes that actually matter.
Make women and children feel safe, not threatened. Here he calls upon men to invest themselves in helping the people around them grow and thrive. “I’m trying to be this kind of man, a man who makes his wife feel secure and protected. I know my wife is every bit my equal. I know she’s highly intelligent and strong and creative and funny. I know she can survive with or without me. But it’s my goal to see her thrive and flourish. I believe in her so strongly, I’m excited about what she can yet become.”
Choose today who you will become tomorrow. Quite simply, who we will be tomorrow is a direct result of what we pay attention to today. For this reason we must take great care when it comes to those things that earn our attention.
Take responsibility for your own spiritual life. This final chapter is dedicated to forming a real, open, honest relationship with the Lord—a loyalty to the God who is so very loyal to us.

At a time when masculinity is viewed as a liability more than an asset, as something that is more likely to harm the world than help it, Brant Hansen describes and celebrates a form of masculinity that is good, pure, and true—a form of masculinity that will serve families, serve the church, and serve the world. He calls men to embrace it and display it in their lives. It turns out that in this time of confusion, The Men We Need is exactly the book we need.

Buy from Amazon

I wanted to remind you, in case you missed it on the weekend, that ChristianBook.com has Seasons of Sorrow marked down by 40%.

Today’s Kindle deals include a number of commentaries published by Crossway.
(Yesterday on the blog: Not a Matter of Pitch or Tone)
All Souls Tribute to Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022)
This is a fitting tribute to the Queen on the day of her funeral.
Will You Be Good at Your Thing Today?
Here’s a good question: Will you be good at your thing today, whatever your thing is?
Why Difficult Conversations Are Getting More Difficult
“In this climate, to have what we may call a difficult conversation – where someone is challenged about their beliefs, choices, or actions – feels as if it is going to be majorly problematic.”
The Gospel of Cancel Culture
“‘Cancel culture’ is a recent social phenomenon. The term was first used in 2016 and it describes the increasingly popular practice of publicly rejecting, boycotting or withdrawing support for (‘cancelling’) particular people or groups because of their unacceptable social or moral views and actions.”
Student Debt and the Great Commission
“Much ink has been spilled in recent weeks over the US government plan to cancel (or reshuffle the responsibility of) some students’ educational debt. Whatever you may think of the proposal, here is one thing I know: Student debt is one of the greatest barriers to getting young people to the mission field.” Lisa LaGeorge explains.
When We Pray | Citizens
This is nice new song by Citizens.
Flashback: The Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation: An Infographic
Whatever you do, linger. Bunyan has a lot to teach us through this infographic.

The highest honour in heaven will be the reward of the greatest humility on earth. —Matthew Henry