I like surprises. Whether it is my birthday, Father’s Day, or any day, I like surprises. When I discovered Outreach by Lancaster Baptist Church, I was surprised. Why? Well, it’s not often you find independent Baptist churches developing an app for iOS devices. It’s exciting to see a church making an effort to develop useful evangelistic and visitation tools for those in ministry.
Outreach is a visitation/soulwinning contact management app. With it you can record your visits, phone calls, and followups on your iPhone or iPad. The app is not fancy, but it’s simple UI makes it easy to use. You can add in a prospect as an individual or couple. There are a number of lists including Sunday School prospects, Church Prospects, Members, Salvation Prospects, and more. You can also create your own custom lists. The app features an activity log that allows you to record just about any visit not just evangelistic visits. You could record church member visits or phone calls and make notes, so that the next time you visit or call, you’ll remember details about the visit.
You can also view a simple stats page that details the number of visits, phone calls, saved, baptized in total and over the last 30 days. Now numbers shouldn’t be the be-all-end-all, but it does give a good idea of our effectiveness and faithfulness.
I like the app and glad to see something like this available. Hopefully, LBC will continue to develop this app. I’d like to see a way to import a contact from my address book rather than typing in all the information. Also the activity log is great, but you cannot delete an activity, nor do the activities organize themselves by date. It would also be good to see an export or another way to backup your data. A few tweaks like these could make this app even better. It’s a great start and was a good surprise for me in the App Store. At $.99 and a universal app, it’s a good buy.
Outreach app description below.
“We all desire to be more effective reaching others with the gospel, seeing them baptized and added to a local church. Striving Together is happy to announce a new tool that can help you follow up on your prospects more effectively. The Outreach mobile app has been developed by the technical team of Lancaster Baptist Church under the direction of Pastor Paul Chappell.
Once installed you can track the progress of each of your soulwinning prospects— you can quickly view a map to their home, make a phone call, and record each contact and spiritual decision. You can also view and organize your prospects into custom lists.”