Support

Last updated: 2026-05-12

A Pastor App is built by a small team that answers our own support email. If you write to us, a person reads it.

Email: support@operating.church Response time: Replies within 24 hours, Monday – Friday. We're a small team.

Getting started

Create your church account

Open A Pastor App and tap Get started on the welcome screen, or visit operating.church and tap Sign up.
Enter your name, email, church name, and a strong password. You'll receive a verification email within a minute.
After verifying, A Pastor App opens to a clean briefing screen — empty until you add your first members.

Import your members

You have three ways to add members. Pick whichever fits the data you have today; you can mix them as you grow.

CSV upload. From the web dashboard at operating.church, go to Members → Import. Drop a CSV with columns for name, email, phone, and date of birth. We accept exports from most church-management systems unchanged.
One at a time. From the app, tap + Add member on the Members tab. This is the fastest way to add the five or ten people you remember by heart.
Chat. Ask the Assistant Pastor: "Add Marcus Patel, marcus@example.com, stage 3." It will create the member with the stage you specified.

The app starts working as soon as you have your first ten members in. The Assistant Pastor's recommendations get better as the roster grows — by fifty members, drift scoring becomes meaningful; by two hundred, the soul pipeline visualizations start telling you things you didn't already know.

How key features work

Drift scoring

Every member has a drift score updated nightly. The score combines: weeks since last attendance, weeks since last pastoral contact, change in giving cadence (if your church uses A Pastor App for giving), and stage-specific signals (a Stage 6 member who stops leading their group drifts faster than a Stage 1 visitor who simply hasn't returned). The Assistant Pastor surfaces members above the "warning" threshold every Monday morning.

Drift is not a judgment of someone's salvation or spiritual state. It is a pastoral early-warning system — a reminder to reach out before disengagement becomes departure.

Devotional generation from sermons

Paste a YouTube URL into the chat and say "upload this Sunday's sermon." A Pastor App:

Fetches the audio (typically takes 60–90 seconds).
Transcribes via Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (3–6 minutes for a 40-minute sermon).
Pulls 5–8 distinct lessons from the transcript using Claude.
Generates a devotional adapted for each of the 8 soul-pipeline stages, for each lesson — typically 35–50 devotionals total.
Surfaces a mobile-friendly review screen where you approve, edit, or reject each one.

The pastor remains in the loop. Nothing publishes without your tap. We see this as AI drafts, pastor approves — the same principle a senior pastor applies to a sermon written by a youth pastor.

Connecting YouTube

You don't need to "connect" YouTube. We do not access your YouTube account or read private videos. We only fetch the audio from public or unlisted URLs you paste in. If a sermon is set to private, change it to unlisted before uploading — the URL still hides it from search, but our processor can fetch the audio.

Member giving (Stripe)

If your church has Stripe Connect enabled, donations move directly from donor to your church's bank account; A Pastor App never holds funds. To turn on giving, write to support@operating.church and we'll provision your Stripe Connect account — typically same-day for churches incorporated in the US.

Push notifications

A Pastor App sends push notifications for:

Time-sensitive drift alerts (a long-engaged member missing two weeks)
Sermon processing completion ("Sunday's sermon is ready to review")
Giving milestones (first-time donor, recurring-gift declined)
Direct replies from a member you have a thread with

You can mute any of these in Settings → Notifications. We never send marketing pushes.

Troubleshooting

"Sermon processing seems stuck"

Sermon processing takes 6–12 minutes end-to-end for a typical sermon. If you see no progress after fifteen minutes:

Open the sermon in the dashboard and check the Processing status chip at the top.
If status is "phase_1_processing" past fifteen minutes, transcription is slow but not stuck — Google occasionally queues large audio jobs. Wait another ten.
If status is "failed," tap Retry. Most failures are transient (Google rate limit, YouTube blocked the audio fetch behind a region restriction).
If retry fails twice, email us with the sermon URL. We have logs that show us what happened.

"Drafts not appearing"

When you tap a Draft chip on a drift card and the sheet opens empty:

"Type a message — I don't know which member yet" means the AI didn't resolve who the message is for. Type freely; the sheet still works.
"AI couldn't draft" means our AI partner returned an empty response. Try again, or type your own — usually transient.

"Push notifications aren't arriving"

Settings → Notifications: confirm push is enabled for the notification class you expect.
iOS Settings → A Pastor App → Notifications: confirm Allow Notifications is on at the OS level.
Force-quit the app and reopen. Push tokens refresh on launch.
Still nothing? Email us. We can check whether your device's push token landed on our server.

"My chat history says 'Just now' for everything"

This was a bug in builds 26–28 — fixed in build 29. If your TestFlight still shows it, install the latest build from TestFlight.

"The AI says 'I don't have that data'"

Two possibilities:

The member isn't currently in the AI's working roster. We send Claude the top 50 members by drift risk plus any explicitly named member. If the AI says "they're not in my current view," ask for them by full name — that pulls them in.
You're on a build that pre-dates the prose/card consistency rule. Update via TestFlight; that rule shipped in build 27.

Pricing and billing

Starter ($50/mo): up to 200 active members, 1,000 AI agent queries/month
Growth ($100/mo): up to 1,000 active members, 10,000 queries
Scale ($200/mo): unlimited members, unlimited queries within fair-use
Enterprise ($350/mo): multi-campus, custom integrations, dedicated success contact

Billing is monthly through Stripe. You can downgrade or cancel any time. We retain your data for thirty days after cancellation so you can come back without re-importing.

Founding Pastor program

Pastors who joined before the public launch get founding pricing under coupon 153COMEBACK: locked at $99/month for 24 months, then renews at the prevailing rate with 60-day notice. If you signed up through a partner pastor or a Founding Cohort referral, the coupon is already applied to your subscription — check Settings → Billing.

The first hundred founding pastors also get our published roadmap and direct access to our team.

Theology and naming

We chose 153 Comeback as our company name in reference to John 21. After the resurrection, Peter and six other disciples return to fishing — back to what they knew before they followed Jesus. They catch nothing. At dawn, Jesus stands on the beach unrecognized and tells them to cast on the right side of the boat. They haul in 153 fish. Jesus has breakfast ready. Then He restores Peter with three questions: "Do you love me?"

The number 153 is unusually specific. Augustine read it as the sum of integers from 1 to 17, where 17 is 10 (Law) plus 7 (Spirit) — every kind of person reached by Law and Spirit alike. Jerome read it as the count of every known species of fish in the ancient world — totality. We don't claim either reading is final. We claim that 153 is what a pastor's caseload looks like when shepherding is done with intention: every fish accounted for, named, brought to shore.

We are also re-digging Isaac's wells (Genesis 26). Isaac's father Abraham dug wells in famine; the Philistines stopped them with dirt. Isaac re-opened each one and called it by its old name. That's what church-tech can do — re-open the wells of evangelism, discipleship, and pastoral care that have been buried under decades of bureaucratic CMS software.

Our app — A Pastor App — is the field tool. The platform — Operating.Church — is the well system. The company — 153 Comeback Inc. — is the crew.