Church Software for Catholic Parishes: Running Renewal Groups, Choirs and Ministries in One Place
Most parishes do not have a technology problem. They have a fragmentation problem. The prayer group coordinates on WhatsApp, the schola keeps its repertoire in a shared drive, the altar server rota lives on a printed sheet in the sacristy, the parish website was built by someone who has since moved abroad, and the lyrics on the screen come from a laptop that only one volunteer knows how to operate. Nobody chose that arrangement. It accumulated.
Ekkli: The All-in-One Church Software for Running Your Parish or Group is built for exactly that situation — one login and one shared database behind worship display, member records, rotas, groups, events, giving and the parish website. This article looks at what that means in practice for the parts of parish life that involve the most people and the least administrative support: charismatic renewal communities, prayer groups, choirs and scholas, and the dozen small ministries that keep a parish running.
What Ekkli actually does
Ekkli is browser-based. There is no installer, no licence key tied to one machine, and no per-seat charge — a borrowed laptop, a parish office desktop and a volunteer's Chromebook all work the same way. In one platform you get:
- Worship display and presentation — song lyrics, scripture slides, teaching and announcement slides, a stage view for musicians, and remote control from a phone.
- A member database — self-service joining by link or QR code, email invitations, CSV import, and a GDPR double opt-in consent flow built in from the start.
- Rotas and volunteer scheduling — recurring patterns, confirm/decline/swap, availability and blockout dates, automatic reminders.
- Groups and forums — open or approval-gated groups, each with its own chat, plus moderated discussion boards.
- Events — registration with capacity limits, an automatic waitlist, and headcount attendance.
- A parish website — pages, a blog, galleries, a public events calendar with iCal export, embedded maps and video, a contact form, and search-engine basics set up properly.
- An installable congregation app with push notifications.
- Giving — one-off or recurring, paid into the parish's own connected payment account rather than routed through a third party.
- Audio hosting for talks, homilies and conference recordings.
Charismatic renewal groups and prayer communities
Renewal communities are among the most demanding users of parish infrastructure and among the least likely to have any. A weekly prayer meeting needs words on a screen. A Life in the Spirit seminar needs a registration list that does not turn into forty reply-all emails. An intercession team needs a way to share prayer requests that respects how sensitive some of them are.
Three things in Ekkli matter here more than anywhere else:
Praise and worship on screen without a technical operator. Lyrics are stored as labelled sections — verse, chorus, bridge — so a leader can reorder a song live rather than scrolling through a block of text. Song sets have an owner plus co-editors, so the music leader and the person on the laptop can both prepare. A set can be driven entirely from a phone, which means the person running the screen can stand at the back with everyone else instead of being trapped behind a keyboard.
Prayer requests with real audience control. Requests can be shared with four nested levels of audience, from the priest or leader alone, through the intercession team, up to the whole community. This is not a permissions detail — it is the difference between people asking for prayer honestly and people not asking at all.
Group life between meetings. Each group gets its own chat and, where the community wants it, moderated forum boards. Announcements reach people through push notifications, which arrive without anyone needing an email list.
For a renewal group that meets in a parish hall with unreliable Wi-Fi, there is one more feature worth knowing about: a whole slide set can be exported as a single self-contained file — fonts, images and all — that plays with no internet connection at all. The same applies to retreats, outdoor Masses and pilgrimage venues.
Parish choirs and scholas
A choir has two recurring administrative burdens: knowing what is being sung and knowing who is turning up. Both are handled by the same church software the parish already uses for everything else, which removes the usual step of exporting one list to paste into another.
The song library is shared and fully searchable, and an existing library can be imported wholesale from OpenLP — either its native database file or OpenLyrics XML — so a schola that has spent a decade building a repertoire does not start from zero. Sets can be copied with one click, which suits a liturgical year where the same seasonal material returns. A set can also be frozen as a snapshot, so what was actually sung on a given Sunday stays recorded exactly as it was, even if the underlying song is edited afterwards.
On the scheduling side, rotas run weekly, fortnightly or on monthly patterns like "first and third Sunday", with one-off extra dates for feast days and skipped dates for holidays. Singers confirm or decline, and — the part that saves a choir director the most time — they can open a swap for someone else to pick up without the director brokering it. Members mark themselves unavailable for a date range, which warns whoever is building the rota rather than silently removing them from consideration.
Choirs in CCLI-licensed parishes in the UK and Ireland can also generate a Copy Activity report from real display history, which speeds up the self-reporting churches submit themselves.
Rotas for every ministry, not just music
Lectors, altar servers, extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, sacristans, welcomers, counters, cleaners, flower arrangers, adoration slots, coffee after Mass. Most parishes run six to fifteen separate rotas, each maintained by a different person in a different format, and each generating the same Saturday-evening phone calls.
In Ekkli they are all the same object. Every person sees their own duties across every rota in one list, with automatic reminders grouped into a single message per person rather than one email per assignment. Where a role does not need a named individual attached to it, it can be scheduled as an anonymous role label with no personal data at all — useful for rotas that get printed and pinned to a noticeboard.
Small groups, movements and sacramental preparation
Parish life is largely small-group life: Bible study, youth ministry, First Communion and Confirmation catechesis, RCIA/OCIA, Legion of Mary, Domestic Church, Third Orders, men's and women's groups, bereavement support. Ekkli treats each as a group with its own membership, chat and, where useful, a private board. Some groups are open to join instantly; others require approval from a leader.
Because membership is one database rather than fifteen lists, someone joining the parish once is immediately eligible to be added to a group, put on a rota, and registered for an event — without being typed in again anywhere.
Retreats, pilgrimages and parish events
Event registration includes capacity limits and a genuine waitlist that promotes people automatically in order as places free up. Guests who are not parish members can sign up. Attendance is recorded as a headcount. Every public event appears on the parish website calendar, exportable to iCal so people can add it to their own phones.
Data protection, which European parishes cannot ignore
Consent is built into how people join, not bolted on. Each communication channel requires an explicit double opt-in — a real confirmation click, never a silent tracking pixel — and can be withdrawn at any time, with the record of that consent retained as evidence. Members control their own profile and what appears about them. Phone numbers are structurally absent from the member directory rather than hidden behind a setting that could default wrong. A full export of everything is available to the parish at any time.
Ekkli is available in English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese and Romanian, and pricing is banded by country rather than charged as one flat worldwide figure — which matters for parishes in Central and Eastern Europe more than for those in Dublin or Munich.
What Ekkli is not
Being straightforward about this saves everyone time. Ekkli does not hold sacramental registers — baptism, confirmation, marriage and death records stay in the canonical parish register and whatever diocesan system your bishop's office requires. It does not do fund accounting or the Mass intention book. Attendance is a headcount rather than a per-person check-in list. It is not a replacement for a diocesan administrative system; it is the layer that handles the people, the groups, the Sunday screen and the parish's public face.
For a great many parishes, that is precisely the layer that is missing.
Trying it in a parish
Every new church or group gets the full platform free for six months, up to fifty people, with no card required at signup. That is long enough to run a full season of a prayer group, prepare a Confirmation cohort, or take a choir through Advent and Christmas before deciding anything. There is no permanently free tier afterwards — at the end of six months you choose a paid plan — which is worth knowing up front rather than discovering in month five.
A realistic way to start is with one group rather than the whole parish: put the renewal meeting or the schola on it, see whether volunteers actually use it, and expand from there.
Frequently asked questions
Can Catholic parishes use Ekkli?
Yes. The tools are generic to running services, groups and volunteers rather than tied to one tradition's liturgy, so a parish, a renewal community or a single ministry can all use it. It complements the canonical parish register rather than replacing it.
Can a prayer group use it without the whole parish signing up?
Yes. A charismatic renewal community, a schola or a youth ministry can run its own account independently. One person's account can belong to more than one community at a time, so someone serving in two groups sees all their duties in one place.
Which Bible text is on the scripture slides?
Public-domain translations are bundled for each supported language for convenience. Where a parish uses its own approved translation, the slide tools accept any text you type or paste, so nothing restricts you to the bundled editions.
Do we need to install anything on the church laptop?
No. Everything runs in a browser, including the live display. There is no per-machine licence, so the auditorium laptop, the rehearsal machine and a volunteer's own computer all work without extra cost.
What happens if the hall has no internet?
A slide set can be exported as a single self-contained file that plays offline with no connection at all — built for exactly this situation.
What does it cost?
Six months free for up to fifty people, then a paid plan sized to the community, with prices banded by country. Current figures are on the Ekkli pricing page.
One platform instead of nine
The argument for consolidating is not that any single tool is bad. It is that the seams between them are where volunteer time disappears — retyping the same names, chasing the same confirmations, wondering which version of the rota is current. Ekkli removes the seams by keeping the parish's people, songs, rotas, groups, events and website behind one login.
If your parish is running its renewal group on a chat app, its choir on a spreadsheet and its Sunday screen on a decade-old installation, it is worth a look.