Church Center

Review by eFreeware

Church Center is a free app from Planning Center that pulls a congregation's weekly life into one place: the event calendar, sermons, giving, family check-in, the member directory, groups and event registration. The idea is straightforward. Rather than chasing announcements across email, bulletins and social posts, you open one app and find what your church has made available there.

The reason to consider it is convenience for people who are already part of a church that runs on Planning Center's software. Everything the app shows is drawn from the products that church has subscribed to, so the app becomes a single front door to the parts of church life you actually use during the week.

Built for regular attenders, not visitors

This is an app for people who are settled into a congregation and want the practical side of belonging in one place. If you give regularly, serve in a group, have children who need checking in on Sunday, or keep an eye on what is coming up, the app is designed around those routines.

It is also built for churches rather than individuals. The features you see depend on what your church has subscribed to within Planning Center, so two people at different churches may open the same app and find different things inside. That is worth understanding before you install it: this is not a general-purpose church directory or a devotional app you use on your own terms.

The content rating is Everyone, and the app is free, which lowers the barrier for a whole household to install it on their own phones.

Events, sermons and giving

The calendar is the core of the app. You can look at what is scheduled at your church and keep track of it through the week, which covers everything from services to one-off gatherings. Alongside that, the app gives you access to sermons, so teaching you missed or want to revisit stays within reach rather than being scattered across a website and a podcast feed.

Giving is handled inside the app as well. For anyone who already gives to their church electronically, having that in the same place as the calendar and sermons removes one more separate login from the routine.

The latest version reworked how you move around the app and how pop-ups behave, refined the media player, and gave calendar events and group tools more attention. Those are maintenance-style improvements rather than new headline features, but they suggest the app is being kept in step with the rest of Planning Center's tools.

Check-in, groups and the directory

For families, pre-checking is the feature that will matter most. You can complete check-in details before you arrive, which is the kind of small task that saves a queue at the door on a busy morning. Whether that is available to you depends on your church using the relevant Planning Center product.

You can also look up members in the directory, sign up for events, and join groups. Together these cover the two directions of church life: finding people and finding things to take part in. A directory is only as useful as the church's willingness to maintain it, but where it is kept current it is a quick way to put names to faces.

Because each feature is powered by a separate Planning Center product, the app's usefulness scales with how much of that suite your church has adopted. A church using only the calendar will offer a much thinner app than one using the full set.

Free, with no ads or purchases

Church Center costs nothing to download, carries no advertising, and offers no in-app purchases. That is a clean arrangement: there is no upsell to work around and nothing inside the app trying to sell you something.

The trade-off is not financial but structural. The app is free to congregants. Your experience is therefore tied to decisions your church makes about which tools it subscribes to, and features can differ from one congregation to the next.

How it compares with the alternatives

Most churches cobble together a website, a mailing list, a social media page and a separate giving service. Church Center's argument is consolidation: one app covering the calendar, sermons, giving, check-in, groups and registration, rather than five places to look.

A dedicated giving platform will still handle donations well, and a podcast app will still play sermons. What Church Center offers instead is the connection between those things and the rest of church life, which is harder to replicate by stitching separate services together.

The other comparison is with a church's own custom app. A bespoke app can be tailored more precisely, but it also tends to lag behind on maintenance. Church Center benefits from being part of a larger product family, and the recent update is evidence of that ongoing work.

A straightforward choice for Planning Center congregations

If your church uses Planning Center, Church Center is an easy recommendation. It is free, it carries no ads, and it puts the calendar, sermons, giving, check-in, groups, registration and directory in one place. With more than a million installs and a 4.4 average rating from roughly 4,850 ratings, plenty of congregations have already made that call.

If your church does not use Planning Center's products, the app has little to offer you, because the features are drawn from what your church has subscribed to. That is the deciding factor, and it is worth confirming with your church office before you install.

For everyone else, this is a practical, unglamorous tool that does a specific job well: keeping the week-to-week business of belonging to a church in one place on your phone.

What's new in version 2026.9.30

This release brings smoother navigation and modal behavior, improved media controls, and better support for calendar events and group workflows.