Questions church leaders ask.

SanctuaryIQ was founded and is engineered by Michael Mikhjian, a software engineer and parishioner at St. John Armenian Church in Detroit, Michigan. He built the platform for his own parish after evaluating the major vendors and finding the same three problems everywhere: pricing that charged separately for giving, accounting, and texting; missing or half-built features; and dated platforms that were clumsy on a phone. The goal was a system simple enough for staff and volunteers to just use, yet complete enough to run the entire church and its member operations.

St. John was the first customer and still runs the platform every week. The story is on the Our Story page. When you contact us, you talk to the people who wrote the code.

Yes. The application core was written from scratch in-house, with no external libraries or frameworks. Most software vendors ship hundreds of open-source dependencies they have never read; we ship none.

For your board, that means no supply-chain exposure, no inherited framework vulnerabilities, and no waiting on upstream patches. It also means the platform is fast, because there is no framework overhead. Details are on the Security & Stewardship page.

Churches of every size and tradition, from parishes and church plants to multi-site congregations. The people who evaluate it are typically pastors and priests, church administrators, parish councils and elder boards, treasurers, and whoever helps with IT review.

If your church currently runs on spreadsheets, paper connect cards, an aging legacy system, or a giving processor that doesn't talk to your member database, this was built for you.

A standard onboarding takes 2–4 weeks end to end: tenant provisioning, campuses and ministries, staff and volunteer accounts, people and family imports, giving history import, and online giving page setup. Pilots can be running in days.

You don't need to migrate everything before going live. Most churches start with their highest-pain area, usually guest followup or online giving, and expand from there.

Yes. Most churches start with one area, prove out the workflow in a few weeks, then bring on the rest. Ministries and campuses are first-class objects in the platform: each gets its own categories, journeys, staff, and dashboards.

There is no penalty for adding more later. The data model was designed for it.

Yes, and it's included in the platform price rather than sold as an add-on. Online giving is native: tithes, designated funds, recurring gifts, pledges, ACH and card. Donors manage their own accounts, and refunds, statements, and the audit trail are built in.

Payment processing runs on a PCI-DSS compliant gateway. The platform never touches a card number: tokenized at the form, charged via the gateway. Year-end giving statements generate automatically.

Yes. The platform installs as a web app on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac, with no app store involved.

Staff and volunteers can take attendance, check kids in and out, confirm volunteer slots by SMS, log a pastoral visit, photograph a guest card, and update statuses from a phone. Members see their own profile, family, giving history, and statements through the same app.

Yes. There are three import paths:

CSV import: a guided importer with field mapping and validation. Common shapes (people, families, attendance, giving history, pledges, group rosters) are supported out of the box.
Direct from your current system: we've migrated churches off the major legacy platforms; ask us about yours.
API: a documented REST API and inbound webhooks for programmatic onboarding.

AI calls are scoped to your church, rate-limited per user, and logged for audit. The Pastoral Assistant is read-only: it analyzes ministry data, it does not modify it. Only the context required for the task is sent to the model, never your whole database.

Pastoral notes and confidential prayer requests are excluded from generic AI prompts. Individual giving amounts stay out of drafting prompts unless explicitly required. Your data is not used to train third-party models.

You can configure your church's own model API key or use ours, and AI features can be disabled entirely if your board requires it. Full detail is on the Security & Stewardship page.

The integrations churches use most are in the box:

Email: drop-in SMTP and transactional providers.
SMS: Twilio for guest journeys, volunteer confirmations, and prayer chains.
Payments: a PCI-DSS compliant processor for online giving, recurring gifts, and ACH.
Calendar: Google Calendar, iCal feeds, Outlook.
Accounting: QuickBooks export, with fund accounting native to the platform.
Notifications: web push, email, daily digest.
Custom: a public REST API and inbound webhooks, API-key authenticated, for everything else.

One price per church, with every module included. No per-seat pricing and no per-module fees; paying separately for giving, texting, and accounting is one of the reasons this platform was built. Annual or monthly billing, discounted tiers for church plants and small congregations, and no-cost pilots for qualifying churches.

Reach out and we'll send numbers for your size and ministry mix.

Yes. Pastoral notes are role-gated and visible only to the care roles you authorize. Each read of a sensitive record is access-logged with user, time, and source, and pastoral notes are excluded from generic AI prompts unless explicitly requested by an authorized role.

Confidential prayer requests can be marked private or anonymous at submission. The platform was designed with a working priest's input, under the assumption that some things really are sacred.

Yes, starting with our first customer: St. John Armenian Church in Detroit, Michigan, where the platform was built and still runs every week. Ask us and we'll connect you with the closest comparable church in size, region, and tradition.