I built this for my own church.
Then other churches asked for it.

What I found when I went shopping

My name is Michael Mikhjian. I'm a software engineer, and I'm a parishioner at St. John Armenian Church in Detroit, Michigan. A few years ago I sat down to evaluate church management software for our parish, the same way any church council member would: a spreadsheet of vendors, features, and prices.

Three problems showed up on every row of that spreadsheet.

The pricing punished you. The base subscription covered a member database and not much else. Online giving cost extra. Accounting cost extra. Text messaging cost extra. Check-in cost extra. By the time the quote covered what a church office actually does in a normal week, the annual number looked like a staffing decision.

The features weren't there. Things a church needs every single week, guest followup that actually happens, fund accounting a treasurer can close the month in, volunteer scheduling with text confirmations, statements that generate themselves, were missing, half-built, or sold as separate products.

The platforms felt old. Desktop-era screens, clumsy on a phone, and confusing enough that volunteers needed training sessions for tasks that should be obvious. Software our parishioners touched directly, giving, profiles, sign-ups, embarrassed us.

What I wanted for our parish didn't exist: a platform simple and easy enough that staff and volunteers just get it, yet complete enough to fully run the church, every member, every gift, every event, every followup, without bolting on other tools.

So I wrote it myself

I decided our parish would be better served by software built for it directly. I wrote SanctuaryIQ from scratch and deployed it at St. John, and then did the part that no amount of coding can substitute for: I sat with the people who had to use it.

The office staff told me where data entry was slow, and I reworked the screens. Our priest told me what he needed to see before a hospital visit and what should stay confidential, and the pastoral care module took its shape from those conversations. Parishioners used the giving and profile pages and told me, sometimes bluntly, what was confusing. Every one of those complaints became a fix.

That parish still runs on SanctuaryIQ every week. It is not a reference customer we signed; it is the church I attend, and the platform's first and toughest reviewer.

How it's engineered

I made one decision early that shapes everything else: SanctuaryIQ uses no third-party libraries or frameworks. Every line of the platform, from the data layer to the interface, was written in-house.

That choice costs more engineering time, and it buys three things churches should care about:

• Security. Most modern software inherits hundreds of dependencies its vendor has never read. We inherit none. There is no supply chain to attack and no framework vulnerability announcements to race against. Queries are parameterized, credentials are encrypted at rest, every endpoint is role-gated, and every change is audit-logged.
• Accountability. When something needs fixing or explaining, the person responsible for the code is the person you email. There is no "we're waiting on an upstream patch."
• Speed. With no framework overhead, the platform stays fast on an office desktop and on a volunteer's phone in the parish hall.

What we charge for

One price per church, with every module included: membership, giving, pledges, fund accounting, attendance, check-in, communications, volunteers, events, and reporting. No per-seat pricing and no per-module fees. A church shouldn't have to buy its own operations back one module at a time.

Who you'll deal with

SanctuaryIQ is built and operated by MKN Web Solutions, LLC. When you evaluate the platform, the demo is given by the engineer who built it. When you have a support question, it is answered by someone who can read the code, usually me. Churches told us for years that they missed talking to people who actually understand their systems. That is the standard here.