In February of last year, Emmanuel Church came to me with a vision. They wanted their Subsplash app to do something it had never done before; deliver a personalized daily devotion experience to every member, tailored to them as an individual.
It was an ambitious idea. And honestly, it was exactly the kind of problem I love.
Like every Sideways engagement, we started by listening. Emmanuel didn't just want a devotion feed. They wanted something that felt personal. Something that knew where a person was in their journey, met them there, and helped them take the next step with God.
That meant connecting their Subsplash app to their people management platform; pulling in person-specific data to drive a truly individualized experience. It also meant building something that hadn't been built on Subsplash before; a custom rendering layer that could generate dynamic, branded imagery on the fly, cached for performance and delivered natively inside the app.
No templates. No workarounds. Just a clean, purpose-built solution that felt like it had always been there.
We spent most of the year building, refining, and testing. By fall, Emmanuel's custom daily quiet time experience was live inside their app. Members could open it each day and find a devotion experience that felt personal to them; their name, their pace, their journey with God.
The response was exactly what you hope for when you've spent months building something. Engagement was real. People were actually using it. And the team at Emmanuel could see it working.
That fall, Subsplash held their first-ever annual Product Event and introduced the 2025 Subsplash Awards; a new program recognizing outstanding creativity and impact across their platform of over 20,000 churches.
Emmanuel Church was selected as the Innovation Award winner.
The award recognized churches demonstrating exceptional creativity on the Subsplash platform to propel ministry forward. What we built together; the custom daily quiet time experience, the people platform integration, and the rendering layer underneath it all; proved what's possible when a church brings a bold ministry idea and the right technical partner to the table.
It was humbling. And it confirmed something I've believed since starting Sideways; the best church tech work doesn't come from selling churches something new. It comes from listening deeply to what a church is trying to accomplish, and then building the thing that gets them there.
What we built for Emmanuel proved something important; a personalized daily devotion experience inside a Subsplash app is possible. Not just for a large church with a big budget, but for any church willing to start with a conversation about what they're trying to accomplish.
Every church is different. Every build starts with listening. But if Emmanuel's story resonates; if your church has ever wanted your app to feel more personal, more intentional, more like your ministry; that's exactly where we start.
We'd love to help you get there.
