The Bridge App and COVID-19

The Bridge App is working to help churches respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with resources for connecting, giving, and streaming worship services.

Available to churches across Canada and beyond, The Bridge App allows church communities to remain active even while church buildings are closed and members must follow physical distancing guidelines.

Launched by the Christian Reformed Church in North America three years ago, in partnership with Extreme Technology, the Bridge App was originally designed to give churches new ways to connect, allowing them to safely provide congregational directories, announcements, and other functions to help church families stay in touch during the week — to ‘bridge’ communications — between Sunday gatherings. And now, with the COVID-19 pandemic creating the need to maintain physical distancing, the app has become helpful in ways that weren’t expected earlier. Especially popular now are the ‘WATCH’ capability that allows churches to stream services, and the ‘GIVE’ function by which members can give online.

The Bridge App rolled out first as a pilot project in a few classes (regional groups of churches), and then across Canada. It’s now more widely available and is making its way into churches in the United States and beyond. Churches in each classis can opt in together and share costs so that the app is easily available to any church within the classis.

Calvin Christian Reformed Church in Dundas, Ont., signed up for the app in mid-March as it became clear that COVID-19 was going to bring big changes to the way churches worship and function. The Bridge App offered a way to keep the congregation connected, and to enable online giving while church members cannot meet for worship.

“I’m not really sure why we didn’t do it before. I think there wasn’t anything to just kind of push us into it,” said Calvin CRC’s bookkeeper, Brenda deGroot. COVID-19 provided the push they needed to sign up, she said. The church canceled their March 15 service a few days before that Sunday, she explained, and “the deacons started receiving calls almost immediately from members of the congregation, saying, ‘How do you want us to keep giving? There are good causes that we should be giving funds toward. And we still need general funds to continue operating. What can we do?’”

Calvin CRC had heard about The Bridge App through their classis connection, and the church then reached out to staff at The Bridge App for help getting started. Ken Bosveld set up deGroot and several other church leaders as administrators for the app at Calvin CRC. Different administrators can access different functions of the app, to allow for confidentiality, especially in giving, said deGroot.

DeGroot said it took her about a day to enter and upload the church’s information to get the app set up for members to access and use. “That was probably the biggest task. Once it was uploaded . . . everything was smooth sailing,” she said.

Calvin CRC has been using email and social media to get the word out to members about the app, and to encourage them to sign up. Within two weeks, about 10 percent of members had downloaded the app, said deGroot. “It’s very easy for members to sign up,” she added. “You download the app, you put in your email address, you create a password — and, congratulations, you’re in. It’s that simple for a member of the congregation to join.”

Because the app allows online giving through a public URL, members do not need to sign up for the app to use the ‘GIVE ’ function. Within 10 days of Calvin CRC’s beginning to use the app, members had donated over $4,700 to the church and its supported causes.

Dorothy Vandersteen, program manager for The Bridge App, noted that for the month of March 2020 the total donations processed by way of the app were slightly over $120,000. In comparison, the app processed a total of $302,000 throughout all of 2019. So, on average, the monthly intake has increased nearly fivefold .The month of April so far is seeing even larger donation totals.

As a bookkeeper, deGroot appreciates how the app “normalizes” the financial function of a church. She pointed to World Renew’s Refugee Sunday as an example. “The app gave us an opportunity to continue to promote Refugee Sunday even though we didn’t meet face to face, and to still show that we care about that cause in the congregation.”

Considering the current global pandemic, deGroot also appreciates the social aspect of the app. “It’s another mechanism that allows people to feel connected to their church family — which is very important when you don’t get to physically see your church family.”

DeGroot expects that members of Calvin CRC will continue to use the app even after restrictions caused by COVID-19 are relaxed and lifted. “I don’t think what was normal on January 15 is ever going to be normal again. . . . I think the world has changed. So I think that that’ll be true for this as well. I think people’s behavior will change over the next few weeks and months, and that that will remain.”

Churches interested in getting on board with The Bridge App can email the team at [email protected]. Churches that already use The Bridge App and want to activate and utilize the ‘GIVE’ function can follow these directions sent to church administrators in Canada in late March.