Koinonia
Koinonia
Pastoral care is personal. Koinonia helps you remember people, follow up well, pray, and keep pastoral notes private, without turning people into a church database.
Free for up to 10 people. Unlimited covers a whole congregation. iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
For pastors and pastoral carers
If you lead a church, share care as an elder, or walk with people in a growth group, the work is the same: remember, follow up, and pray.
Pastors & ministers
Keep track of members, newcomers, the bereaved, and people who are drifting.
Elders & care teams
Keep your own pastoral list private while sharing the load of visiting and checking in.
Lay pastoral carers
Small group leaders, chaplains, and ministry volunteers who care for people.
Remembering is most of the job
Someone mentions their mum's surgery after church. You promise to pray and follow up. Three Sundays later you realise you never did. Not because you don't care, but because a hundred other things filled the week.
Pastoral care is often the small things: the follow-up call, the grief anniversary, asking how the job interview went. Koinonia holds those details so you can focus on the person in front of you.
How it fits pastoral work
Circles
Your relationships often overlap across congregations, small groups, teams, families, and communities. Circles let you group people by those contexts.
Use Circles to:
- Group people by congregation, ministry, team, or small group
- Place someone in more than one circle (shown with colour on the friends list)
- Filter quickly to the people in a particular circle
Keep pastoral care organised without turning people into a database.
Catch-up Rhythms
Catch-up rhythms help you stay in touch without relying on memory alone. Set how often you want to connect with each person, then see who you have seen recently and who is due soon.
You can:
- Set different rhythms for different people
- See who is overdue for a catch-up
- Log conversations quickly
- Plan future catch-ups and reminders
- Keep pastoral follow-up from depending only on memory
Plan visits, then log what mattered
When someone is due, plan the catch-up. After the visit or hard conversation, log what you discussed, what to pray for, and what needs follow-up, so their history is ready next time.
- One-tap “caught up today” when a simple check-in is enough
- Quick date and mode selection for fuller visit notes
- Agenda items queue what to raise next time
- Flag follow-ups and save discussion topics as prayer points
- Optional calendar events for planned visits
Prayer Guide
The Prayer guide helps you keep prayer points for the people in your care. Add points for each person, then return to them when you pray.
With Koinonia, you can:
- Keep prayer points connected to each person in your circles
- See who you have prayed for recently
- Work through prayer needs with a clean, distraction-free prayer guide
- Update prayer points as conversations and circumstances change
A timeline for the week ahead
See what's overdue, happening today, this week, and later: catch-ups, birthdays, important dates, planned visits, and reminders, colour-coded by person.
- Tap any row to open that person's profile
- Quick actions to log, plan, or reschedule
- Snooze overdue items when the week is already full
- Optional calendar events appear alongside pastoral items
Details that help next time
Pastoral care is rarely just “call them sometime.” Keep the notes that help next time.
- Profiles with contact details, circles, and catch-up history
- Important dates: grief anniversaries, baptisms, milestones
- Post-it notes, quotes, and gift ideas for thoughtful follow-up
- Works on iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the same library
Also built in
Small features that matter when pastoral care is part of a full week.
Import from Contacts
Import from Apple Contacts, then set circles and catch-up rhythm for each person. Or add someone manually if they're not in Contacts.
Notification timing you control
Choose how far ahead catch-up reminders arrive, how long after overdue before you're nudged, and what time of day they land.
App lock
Require Face ID, Touch ID, or your device passcode before opening Koinonia, useful when pastoral notes live on a shared family iPad or unlocked desk Mac.
Offline by design
Core pastoral work works without the internet. Optional iCloud sync keeps your own devices updated through your Apple account.
What a week might look like
Monday morning
Coffee, Bible, then the timeline. Three people due this week: a newcomer from two Sundays ago, a member recovering from surgery, and an elder you meet monthly. You plan all three before nine.
After the hospital visit
In the car park you log the visit. She's anxious about biopsy results due Thursday. You set a follow-up reminder for Friday and add something to pray for. Friday morning the app surfaces it again.
Sunday, between services
Someone mentions a baptism anniversary. Someone else asks prayer for a job interview. Two quick taps for an agenda item and a prayer point. Neither gets lost in the after-church blur.
The anniversary nobody else remembers
Twelve months after the funeral, the timeline reminds you. You call the widower that afternoon. He says you're the only one who remembered.
Confidentiality
Pastoral notes are sensitive. People tell you things they haven't told anyone else. Koinonia keeps that data under your control:
- Stored on your device: not on Koinonia servers
- Works offline for everyday pastoral use
- Optional app lock with Face ID, Touch ID, or passcode
- iCloud sync is optional, through your own Apple account
- No analytics, no tracking, nothing sold
- Contacts access is read-only, and only if you allow it
Record what helps you care for people, not a counselling case file. Keep your device passcode-protected like any pastoral notebook. See the privacy policy for detail.
What Koinonia isn't
Koinonia is not a church management system. It won't do rosters, run your giving, or replace Elvanto or Planning Center. It doesn't share data between staff, because pastoral trust doesn't work that way.
It's a personal tool for one carer and the people in their care. Your assistant, elders, pastoral care team, and growth group leaders can each run their own copy with their own people. That's usually how pastoral care is shared anyway.
Start with ten people
Free for up to ten people, enough for your elders, this term's newcomers, or the handful you visit regularly. If it earns a place in your week, Koinonia Unlimited is a small yearly subscription for everyone you're caring for, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Built in Australia. The team reads every email.