St John's Church App

Overview

St John's Coptic Orthodox Church runs a parish of a few hundred people, two food counters, a hall that gets booked most weekends, and a Sunday school. The app is the members' side of all of it: a verse of the day and church news on the home screen, ordering from Shepherd's Table and Chapter 6 Cafe, requesting a venue or a confession time, and a library of Sunday school material. It ships on iOS and Android.

The Ask

The parish wanted one place members would actually open. Announcements were going out over group chats, the cafe took payments through Square, hall requests came in by message, and none of it was written down anywhere a volunteer could look it up next week. The app had to hold all of that without asking members to learn a system, since most of them use it a handful of times a month.

The Solution

I built it in Expo with Expo Router, on the same NestJS and Postgres backend that serves the staff dashboard and the counter POS, so an order placed in the app and one rung up at the till are the same record. Payments run through Stripe with Apple Pay and Google Pay, bookings lock their dates on the server before they are ever shown as confirmed, and push notifications carry announcements and order updates. Staff roles unlock admin screens inside the same build, which lets the social team post an announcement from their phone. Releases go out over EAS, so a copy fix does not need a store review.

The platform behind it, and why the parish went this way at all, is a longer story: read the case study↗

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