Proof of work · Early concept

sabbath-circle

A church communications app for congregations across Southern Africa: pick your local church and get its weekly announcements, upcoming calendar, location and contact details, and a public message board scoped to your own congregation — sitting on top of a region-wide church directory that members can help keep accurate. This is a brief only, nothing designed or built yet, shown here as an idea worth building.

Why it's worth building

Church communication currently lives scattered across general-purpose social apps. The draw of sabbath-circle is that it would be theirs — one place, shared with fellow congregants, for the announcements and calendar that already matter to them every week.

sabbath-circle

No screenshots or mockups here — there's no design yet to show honestly.

What's already decided

PWA, not native

One installable web app rather than separate iOS/Android builds — low-data and Android-first, with the current week readable offline after one sync.

A directory, not a cold start

Church records are ingested region-wide up front rather than waiting for congregations to sign themselves up one at a time; members can submit corrections and additions.

Every change reviewed

Both the ingest crawler and member submissions produce proposed revisions, never direct writes — a human approves every addition or edit before it goes live.

What's still open

Identity (email vs. phone sign-in), who's allowed to post to a congregation's board, whether this stays an unofficial community tool or seeks formal endorsement, moderation policy, and the advertising approach — direct-sold, vetted sponsorship is the preferred route over open programmatic inventory next to a church bulletin. Because the directory gathers named individuals' contact details without their direct involvement, the data-protection position has to be settled before any of it goes live.