Trellis

Overview

Trellis is a church management platform built by Oak Street Solutions around a core conviction: people over metrics. There are no donor analytics, no engagement scoring, no automated visitor pipelines. It focuses on the things church staff and volunteers actually need every week: knowing who is in the building, keeping groups organized, scheduling volunteers, and communicating with members.

Development started March 23, 2026. The pilot deployment is TVC Denton in Denton, TX. After pilot validation, Trellis will be offered to other small and mid-size churches as a paid hosted platform. It is built by people who are also active members of the churches they are building it for, not a software company that studied churches from the outside.

Who It's For

Small to mid-size churches that need real tools without enterprise complexity or enterprise pricing. Trellis is designed for church staff and volunteers, not IT departments. If the current process involves spreadsheets, group texts, and manual coordination, Trellis is meant to replace that.

• Right-sized: No features that require a dedicated administrator to maintain
• No lock-in pricing: Flat hosted pricing, not per-member or per-module billing
• Built by church members: Every feature decision is validated against real weekly ministry use
• Philosophy-driven: The roadmap explicitly excludes features that reduce people to data points

Features

• Member Directory: Profiles with privacy controls and a staff-facing directory
• Group Management: Hierarchical groups with geographic zone support for auto-assigning members by neighborhood
• Role & Permission System: Tiered roles for members, staff, and admins with granular access controls
• Ministry Management: Organize ministries, assign volunteers, and manage service rotations
• Volunteer Scheduling: Schedule generation with the ability for members to request swaps
• Children's Check-In: Secure check-in flow with household lookup and per-room capacity management
• Event Calendar: Church-wide calendar with RSVP support and recurring events
• Mailing Lists: Static lists and dynamic lists that resolve based on member criteria
• Family Relationships: Connect member profiles across a household

What's Coming

Trellis is in active development with a target of a polished, broader release by end of 2026. Upcoming work includes deeper children's ministry tooling with dynamic capacity and attendance history, a more robust permissions system with full audit logging, and member-facing QR code flows for quick self-service actions.

Payment handling and a phased migration path for churches moving off legacy platforms are also on the horizon.

What We Won't Build

These are not features that haven't been gotten to yet. They are explicit decisions, regardless of demand.

• Giving dashboards or donor analytics
• Engagement scoring or "church health" metrics
• Social media features: no feeds, no messaging, no reactions
• Automated visitor pipelines that treat people like sales leads
• Any feature that reduces a person to a data point

The Name

A trellis does not grow. It supports what grows. It provides the structure that lets something organic, living, and relational climb and flourish. That is what this platform is meant to do: get out of the way of real ministry while quietly holding everything together underneath.

The name references John 15 without being overtly religious, making it accessible across denominations.