Doubling Down During COVID-19

Six years ago, my friend Reagan and I (Kurt Libby) sat down and hammered out the rough sketches and initial designs for a youth ministry database app. We really had no idea what we were getting our selves into, how to handle customer support, the inevitable bugs that would need to be fixed, or how to build a company that could last through all of it.

Two years ago, I found myself coming undone in a toxic church environment where I had been on staff for a decade ministering to youth and then later as an equipping and executive pastor. The boiling temperature had gone beyond what was bearable, but the slow burn wasn’t so evident to me at the time as it is now, two years and one thousand nine hundred miles removed.

Since leaving that role and California, MinHub became something that I could focus on more, but climbing out of the tech debt and the upset customer hole that had developed from years of near neglect was a long process that I started last summer.

Over the course of last fall and winter I started to preach more, tried my hand at writing resources for people that want to follow Jesus and explored the new found freedom of being in a tentmaking season. In February, I felt like I was finally settling into a nice groove of preaching and writing and booking speaking gigs.

I had a plan for this year. Most of us did. Then it all started to fall apart.

The NBA season got cancelled.

My speaking gigs started to get cancelled.

When I preached at a friend’s church to a camera, I knew that this traveling preacher passion would need to take a backseat for awhile while the world dealt with the pandemic.

I remember sitting in my early-morning-prayer-chair, talking to Jesus about feeling very lost and not knowing what to do next.

I have been praying through a prayer liturgy in the morning, so as I started to pray one of the prayers out of the book of common prayer, this one line fell on me like grace:

…in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of Your purpose…

I had all of the hustle and strategy to get my speaking career into full swing. I had a great purpose for myself. I had dreams and so much passion.

But that wasn’t God’s purpose for this season for my life.

Because of the nature of COVID-19 and most churches not being able to meet in person, I realized how essential communication is.

Text messaging is ok. Email is difficult because of spam filters, promotion tabs, and open rates.

What I wanted was something like slack with push notifications within the app where pastors could post announcements and get a chat thread going with their students and parents.

This was the moment of doubling down during COVID-19.

Instead of binging a new show or deep cleaning my garage, I decided to learn React Native and build an app.

MinHub Portal took about 3 months to build and get into the hands of youth pastors.

But this is where the story took a very unexpected turn.

My good friend Jason had been helping out as a contracted developer for MinHub with bug fixes and feature requests as he was able. Because of a lot of extenuating circumstances in his life, he needed to stop helping with MinHub

I instantly felt very confused and lost and unsure. It was an odd, disorienting feeling. But it also didn’t make any sense logically.

Jason had been helping out in a very limited capacity–just a few hours a month.

I had just committed to learning to code and had successfully shipped my first app and modified the code of our MinHub Youth app to work with this new Portal app.

God had actually been preparing me for this moment all along.

The truth was that God had given me all of the skills I needed and enough humility to ask for help and keep learning along the way to become the developer that I thought I needed to find in someone else.

So I did what any person would do that recently figured out that they were a developer.

I worked through nights and weekends, and I made three more apps!

MinHub Groups for managing small group attendance, communicating with small group leaders and creating systems for small group sign ups, all in a mobile app.

MinHub Kids with a check-in kiosk that prints name tags for kids, tracks family info, and allows children’s pastors to communicate with the parents of their kids in their ministry.

MinHub College to help campus ministers as well as college/young adult pastors track all of their data and communicate with their people.

AND! I went back into Portal and made it work with all of these apps so that a member of the congregation can install MinHub Portal for free, enter the pertinent portal codes to connect to the ministries they need to, manage their own data, receive push notifications about announcements and messages, and reach out directly to their ministry leaders.

These apps have been in my mind and on my heart for almost five years.

I had no idea at the beginning of 2020 that I would learn to code, troubleshoot and fix bugs on my own, create 4 new apps, essentially creating an entirely mobile church management system and all before the fall semester starts.

But trusting God and praying that we would fulfill His purpose rather than whatever we have dreamed up for ourselves can lead to some absolutely amazing results.