Every Product Imagines a Church
Every piece of software has an imagined user living inside it. Nobody writes this person down, but you can find them in the defaults. The form that asks for a ZIP code imagines someone with a ZIP code. The checkout that opens on a card field imagines someone with a card. The calendar that assumes Sunday morning in a single time zone imagines one congregation in one place. The defaults are where a product tells you who it thinks you are.
Church software has an imagined church, too, and for a long time it has been remarkably specific. It has a building with an office, a staff member who handles the tech, members who give by card or by check, and a mailing address in the United States. That church is real, and I have nothing against it. It is just not most of the church.
Where the church actually is
The center of gravity of Christianity moved a long time ago. Most of the world's Christians no longer live in Europe or North America. The church today is a congregation in Kampala or Nairobi as much as it is a suburban campus with a parking team. For a great many of those believers, the phone is not one device among several. It is the device. It is how they read Scripture, how they hear from their pastor, and, in places where mobile money is how ordinary life gets paid for, how they give.
Building SoapBox means deciding which of those churches is the default. Not which churches are welcome; every product says it welcomes everyone. Which church the defaults are written for. That decision is one of the few in a company that quietly governs all the others, because every later choice inherits it.
An edge case is a church you serve second
The usual way software goes global is through what the industry calls localization. You build the product for the imagined user, then translate the strings, swap the currency symbol, and add the other countries as configuration. It is a reasonable engineering approach and a revealing one, because it encodes a ranking. The first church is the real customer. Everyone else is an edge case.
I do not think the body of Christ has edge cases. A believer who gives through MTN MoMo is not a variant of a believer who gives by card. A pastor whose members give through M-Pesa in Kenya or Tanzania is not running a nonstandard church. If the gift from a phone is a special path bolted onto a system designed around a card, then somewhere in the code someone has decided whose offering is normal. I would rather nobody on our team ever make that decision. In SoapBox, a gift by mobile money is simply a gift.
The rule that does not change at the border
There is one thing that should be exactly the same in every country, and it is the money rule. In SoapBox, a gift goes to the church as a 0% fee passthrough. We take no cut of gifts, and we never hold the money. That is true whether the gift comes from a card or from a mobile wallet, from a large congregation or a small one, from a country with many SoapBox churches or a country with one.
I say this plainly because the border is exactly where the temptation to vary would show up. A product that treats some churches as the real market and others as the edge will, sooner or later, treat them differently in the one place it matters most. It will take a little more where fewer people are watching. The only protection I trust against that is a rule simple enough to say in one sentence and identical everywhere. The offering belongs to the church. It passes through, and we are not in the middle of it.
What the default changes
Taking the global church as the default changes ordinary decisions in ways that are easy to miss. It means asking, of every screen, whether it still makes sense to someone who has never owned a credit card. It means asking whether a feature needs a church office, a desktop computer or a paid staff member in order to work, and treating a yes as a defect rather than a requirement. It means writing for the believer who is holding the phone, not the one the industry pictured when it drew the wireframes.
It also asks for some humility from the people building. I have spent more than forty years building fintech, crypto, blockchain and AI companies, and I have opinions about payments. Many of those opinions were formed in markets where the card was king. Believers who give by phone have been living with digital money, for ordinary life, in ways much of the West is still catching up to. When the imagined church is theirs, the people building the product have to learn from it rather than lecture it.
The multitude
There is a picture near the end of the Bible that I think about whenever I think about defaults.
After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could count, out of every nation and of all tribes, peoples, and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands. (Revelation 7:9, WEB)
What strikes me is not only the size of the crowd. It is that nobody in it is a variant. No nation is the main one with the others attached as configuration. Every tribe and language stands in the same place, before the same throne. That is the church as God sees it, and it would be a strange thing for a team building for that church to have this picture in front of them and still write the defaults for one country.
Software cannot make anyone part of that multitude, and it should not pretend to. But it can stop quietly ranking the people in it. It can make the gift from a phone as ordinary as the gift from a card, keep its hands off every offering in every country, and design each screen for the believer who is actually there.
That is the church I want SoapBox's defaults to be written for. If you belong to it, wherever you are, the app is free, and we would be glad to have you and your church.