Free Tools for Congregations - Cordial Conference

Revival meetings, without the paper shuffle

When visiting ministers come for a week of meetings, somebody local carries the whole load: two meals a day in member homes, counseling visits, young people's days, lodging every night, and rides to the airport. Today that lives on paper, phone calls, and a calendar photographed onto the group chat.

Cordial puts all of it on one shared itinerary. Your scheduler stays in charge of every time slot; the system does the bookkeeping.

A white country church at dusk with warm light in the windows

For your scheduler

Set up once: dates, evening service time, protected quiet hours before each service, and each minister's own needs. A nearby minister who sleeps at home is never asked about lodging.
Evening services fill in automatically for every day. Sundays get both a morning and an evening service, with no visits scheduled over them.
Visit requests come in as tentative. The scheduler sets the final times and publishes; every booking page tells families times may be adjusted.
Young people's days: paste in the names, drag them into calling order, and the day builds itself in 20-minute sessions with breaks. The chaperoning couple shows on the schedule.
Airport pickup and return recorded with the driver's name and flight details.
Past revivals stay on file and can be reused as the starting point for next year.

For your families

One link opens the published calendar with three buttons: host a meal, request a visit, offer lodging.
Families can ask for their visit over a meal in their home, or after the evening service.
Lodging works by the night: one family hosts the whole stay, or different homes take individual nights.
Everyone sees the same published schedule, so families with nearby times can ride together.
A print view for the foyer wall, matching what everyone sees online.

For the visiting ministers

A mobile schedule where every stop shows who, where, and when.
Every address opens straight into the phone's map app. No searching, no calling for directions.

Church meals, signed up in the pew

A modern sign-up sheet for the ~30 meals a congregation organizes in a year. It replaces the ad-covered potluck sites, and it is built for a phone first.

Handwritten recipe cards and a covered casserole dish on a farmhouse kitchen counter

Potlucks

Fellowship meals, school lunches, workdays

Category counts: 4 mains, 3 sides, 2 salads, 4 desserts, plus an open row for something else.
An instructions block for the theme: bring anything, or this month is haystacks.
Prescribed recipes: attach a photo of the recipe card so five families bring the same dish.

Meal trains

A new baby, a surgery, a family in a hard season

Pick the date range and how many meals a day the family needs.
Delivery notes for drop-off times and directions.
The family's details stay off the public page.

Both work the same way: share the link by text or WhatsApp, volunteers tap a slot and type their name. If someone has to bow out, they tap their own row and the slot opens for the next person. And because the whole congregation shares one account, you can look back at previous potlucks and the recipes attached to them.

Getting started takes an evening

There is nothing to install and no committee meeting required to adopt it. It is not as wide open as Perfect Potluck: the people who organize meals sign in, while volunteers only ever need the share link.

We set up your congregation. You get your own site and your own data; no other congregation can see it.
You add your potluck people. Each one gets a link by email where they set their own password. Add as many as will use it; there is no per-person charge.
They create the first sheet and share the link. From there, the congregation signs up from their phones.

What a volunteer actually does

Open the link

It arrives in the group chat or a text. No account to create, no app to install, nothing to remember.

Tap a slot

Pick a dish, a meal to host, or a night of lodging. Type a name, tap confirm. It works on the phone in your pocket.

Show up

The sheet shows what is covered and what still needs someone, so nothing falls through the cracks.

Free means free

No charge for congregation use. No ads over your sign-up sheet, no per-meal or per-event fees, and no limit on how many members you add.

It can be free because the paid part of Cordial is hosting: when a congregation hosts a girls' or boys' class, an area school meeting, or a ministers and deacons meeting, upgrades unlock that level of features. Your everyday tools cost nothing.

Fair warning: it is new. It was designed mobile first, it is ready for real use, and not every corner is finished. Pilot congregations shape what gets built next, and the one question we need answered is simple: would your congregation switch?

When it's your turn to host

Sooner or later the rotation comes around, and your congregation hosts the area school meeting, a girls' or boys' class, or a ministers and deacons meeting. That is when coordination gets heavy: registration for every school, lodging for hundreds of guests, meals for a week, name tags, payments, reminders.

With Cordial, you don't start over. The account your food committee already uses simply grows. Registration opens on your own web page. Your meal sheets connect to the live roster, so headcount and dietary needs fill in on their own. Lodging volunteers sign up through the same kind of link your congregation has used all year, and email and text reminders go out from the system instead of somebody's evening phone list.

Your people already know how it works, because they have been tapping the same sign-up sheets all along. Hosting a big meeting becomes the next size up of something familiar, not a new system learned under pressure.

Ask about a pilot site

Your revival on one calendar. Your meals on one sheet.