Software for the life of the parish.
Koinonia: Parish Life is a mobile app for Orthodox Christian parishes: the day's readings, fasting and the liturgical calendar, the parish directory, messaging, and pastoral care requests, in one place. It is being built for one parish at a time, with a pilot parish in Pennsylvania.
What is in the app.
The scope is deliberately narrow: the handful of things a parishioner opens the app to do, and nothing beyond them.
Daily readings
The day's scripture, the saints commemorated, and a set of prayers. Liturgical data comes from an authoritative Orthodox source rather than calculations we invented ourselves.
Fasting & the calendar
What the day asks of you, stated plainly, with the liturgical calendar behind it. Fasting status is never carried by color alone.
Services & events
Service times and parish events on one calendar the community can rely on, each with a detail page for the particulars.
Parish directory
Fellow parishioners and the contact details they chose to share, visible only to approved members of that parish.
Direct messaging
One-to-one conversation between parishioners. No group chats, no feeds, no reactions: those are excluded from the scope on purpose, not deferred.
Announcements & pastoral care
Parish-wide notices from clergy, and private requests for confession, counseling, or a blessing, visible to the requester and the assigned priest and to no one else.
Who sees what.
Community data is bounded to the parish it belongs to. Access is granted by the parish, never assumed.
Anyone with an account
The liturgical side is open: readings, saints, fasting, and the calendar. No parish affiliation required to use it.
Approved parishioners
The directory, messaging, announcements, the parish calendar, and pastoral care unlock after an invite code and an administrator’s approval. There is no open public registration.
Clergy
Priests and deacons see the other side of pastoral care: the requests directed to them. A companion web dashboard for approvals, announcements, and scheduling is in planning.
A parish app should feel like the parish, not like a feed.
No streaks, no reactions, no stories, no engagement metrics. Prayer and fasting are not achievements to unlock, and the app has nothing to gain from holding anyone longer than they meant to stay.
The people who will use it range widely in age and comfort with technology, so the least technical parishioner is the design target rather than an edge case: large type, large targets, plain labels. We measure the work by whether the parish is easier to be part of, never by time spent in the app.
Get in touch.
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Questions about Koinonia, the studio, or anything on this site. Write to us and one of us will reply.