We built Pewbook to help parish offices: the people who keep the paper book, the tin of envelopes and a newsletter that has to be ready by Friday.
If you’ve worked in a parish office, you’ll know the job. Someone rings, or stops you after Mass, or pushes a note through the presbytery door: could they have a Mass said for their mother on the anniversary of her death? You find the book. You look for a free Mass near the date. You write in the intention, take the offering (usually cash, in an envelope with a name scribbled on it) and promise to put it in the newsletter. Later in the week you copy the intentions from the book into the newsletter, retype the Mass times, find last week’s notices, change the ones that have changed and send it all to print.
None of that is hard. But it’s constant, it’s manual, and it relies on one or two people who know where everything is. When the secretary is on holiday, or the parish has just been joined with the one down the road, it gets harder.
What we wanted to build
We wanted one place where a parish keeps its diary, takes requests from parishioners and puts out its newsletter, and that anyone in the office could use without training. Every decision comes back to a few rules.
It has to be simpler than the paper book. Most people running a parish office aren’t technical, and they shouldn’t need to be. Pewbook uses plain English, big buttons and as few steps as we can manage, and it works on an old laptop or a phone. Parishioners never need an account or an app. They open your parish’s page and use it.
Cash comes first. Online card payment is where most church software starts, and it doesn’t fit most UK parishes, where offerings still come in envelopes. In Pewbook, a request waits as pending until the office has the offering in hand. Then someone confirms it. If your parish adds its bank details, parishioners can pay by bank transfer with a reference, but Pewbook never holds or moves money. We explain the whole flow in How to take Mass intention requests online.
The record has to be right. The Mass intentions register isn’t just a convenience. Church law asks every parish that receives offerings to keep one. So Pewbook never quietly changes or deletes a confirmed intention, and it keeps a note of who confirmed, moved or cancelled what, and when. There’s more on that in Keeping the Mass intentions register right.
People’s intentions are private. A Mass for someone who has died, or for someone who is ill, says something about a family’s faith and sometimes their health. UK data protection law treats that as special category data. Pewbook collects as little as it can, keeps it in the UK or EU and shows parishioners only whether a Mass is available or taken. We’ve written that up in Mass intentions and UK GDPR.
Every parish does things its own way. How many intentions a Mass can take, how much notice you need, how far ahead people can book, what the suggested offering is: each of these is a setting your parish chooses, not a rule we’ve decided for you.
Not only for one tradition
Pewbook’s core is the same for every church: churches and their service times, a public page, staff and their roles, requests that the office approves, a weekly newsletter and a record of changes. Anything that belongs to one tradition is a module your parish switches on. Mass intentions is the first of these, for Catholic parishes. The liturgical calendar that fills in the week’s title and feast days is another.
That matters because parishes increasingly share a priest and an office. One organisation in Pewbook can have several churches, each with its own service times, so a group of parishes or a benefice can keep everything in one place.
What it does today
- A public page for your parish, with your service times, a map and directions for each church, and a QR code and poster for the porch.
- Service times for each church, with one-off changes for cancelled and extra services, and groups and activities alongside them. If your times are already written down, Pewbook can read them from your website, a PDF or a photo of the noticeboard.
- Mass intention requests online for Catholic parishes, with an email check to stop spam, a reference for each offering, and the register kept for you.
- The weekly newsletter, built from your diary and your notices, so you only type what’s new. Print it, copy it into an email or publish it on your page.
- The Assistant, which makes changes to your service times when you type them as you’d say them: “Father is away next week, so cancel the weekday Masses.”
What it isn’t
Pewbook isn’t a membership database, a giving platform or an app your parishioners have to download. It doesn’t send marketing emails to anyone, and it doesn’t track the people who visit your parish’s page. It’s for the practical work of a parish office: what’s on, who’s asked for what, and getting the week’s sheet out.
If that sounds like your office, you can set your parish up yourself. It takes a few minutes, and there’s no card needed.