WA Nexus all started in 2006 when my worship leader asked me (a Technology Director and Developer) to develop a worship management system where all the band members could access setlists, charts and lyrics to upcoming services and events which we were hosting for our services.
At the time after I created this system many told me to jump on the band wagon and make this thing public, but I didn't listen and just left it alone. Over the 9 years my church has been using this system and I have added many features which became very useful to us.
Since then I have had many requests from other churches who have asked me to allow them to use the same system I developed. Now after realizing that similar systems have come about I am now kicking myself realizing I should have listened a long time ago.
The one thing I have learned in my experience in the technology world with ministry is that it is not cheap to keep up with technology in the church when you are small. Since 90% of all churches are small churches, this means that 90% of all churches have about 117 members in their congregation. Most can hardly keep their church alive and pay the bills let alone worry about adding more expenses to their budget. Being in the people business is not cheap, especially when you rely soley on the donations of those people.
But at the same time when church member attendance reaches that growth larger than 117+ members they seem to be in a grey area where they are starting to expand faster than they realize and at the same time do not know how to handle that growth. Pastors and staff start having meetings trying to understand their changes and start asking each other..."What do we do now? They know they need to do something, but have no idea what that is.
If I have learned anything over the 13 years in ministry and Technology is that you have to have it. We live in a digital world and if you want to keep your members attention span you are going to have to embrace it and try to implement it as much as possible. Currently anyone 40 years of age or younger are pretty much engulfed in Technology and use it to run almost every aspect of their life. Anyone younger than 40 do not know any difference. To them Technology at the capacity that it is available to us is the "norm"...there is no difference.
I am not telling you that using my system is going to solve all your problems, but I do know that at the time when we first began embracing technology this was one of those steps we used to start that journey.
After talking to many different people, members and pastors who used my system for many years the one thing they all say is the reason they like my system is the cost. It will cost you a fraction of the price of other similar sites and almost do the same. When I created this system cost was the driving factor, so it was an obvious choice for me to develop the system in the first place.