We are so pleased to share one of our biggest updates yet. Hubb now has Messaging and Safe Messaging, built right into your church app. It is a new way for your whole church to stay connected through the week, with safety and care at its heart.
Church life does not stop on a Sunday. People plan, chat and encourage one another every day. And our young people especially need to know that their church family is thinking of them all week long, not just for an hour on a Sunday.
Until now, many churches have used apps like WhatsApp for this. Those apps were never made for churches. They need a personal mobile number, they are run by big companies, and they leave your church with no real control over what happens inside them.
We wanted to do something better. So we built it.
Messaging lets your teams, groups and leaders talk to one another easily, all week long.
It works much like the chat apps people already know, so it feels familiar from the very first message. The difference is simple: it belongs to your church, not to anyone else. All those scattered church chats can finally come back into one safe place.
A few smaller touches that churches have asked for are in there too. You can make a group announcement-only, so leaders post and members read, which suits a large group where a full conversation would be too noisy. You can set quiet hours, so a group chat stops pinging people at midnight. And you can switch chat on with an end date, which is useful for an event team or a term-time course that will not need it forever.
This is the part we are most excited about.
Safe Messaging helps your children's and youth leaders stay in touch with young people through the week, always with a parent's approval.
Picture this. A child mentions at church that they have a big test coming up. Later that week, their leader sends a short message: "I'll be praying for you. It was great to see you on Sunday." It is a small thing. But it tells that young person they are known, they are cared for, and they belong to the church family.
Parents stay in control, your Safeguarding Lead has oversight, and leaders get to encourage. Young people feel cared for, safely.
A few ways your church might use it:
Notice the pattern. These are warm, caring moments, the kind any parent is glad to approve. Safe Messaging is not about constant messaging. There is even a weekly limit on how many messages a leader can send a child, so it stays occasional by design. It is about letting young people know, again and again, that their church family cares.
Some of us have seen the pattern. A child grows up in church, then the teenage years arrive, life gets busy, and the connection can quietly fade. Not every child grows up with a strong faith, and not all of them lose touch. But some do. What matters is that, whatever happens, they know people at church took a real interest in them and were glad to see them.
We want to help with that.
Safe Messaging gives leaders a careful way to keep that connection alive through the week, and right through the growing-up years. A birthday remembered. A "good luck" before a big exam. A friendly invite to the next youth event. Small messages, over time, that quietly say: you matter, you belong, and you are not forgotten.
This is pastoral care that reaches beyond Sundays. It is about helping our young people stay rooted in their church family for the long run, with parents walking alongside every step of the way.
We built Safe Messaging to solve a real problem, and we have tried to do it carefully. From the very start, parents and safeguarding have been at the centre of the design, not added on afterwards. Every message is approved by a parent. Messages to children are one-way as standard. An appointed Safeguarding Lead at your church has oversight of the messages leaders send, and a dashboard that tells them what needs their attention.
It is built to sit alongside your church's own safeguarding policy and the guidance of your denomination, not to replace the trained people and good practice that keep children safe. No tool can do that on its own, and we would never claim otherwise.
"I serve in the children's ministry at my own church, and I am a parent of four. I would value a safe, controlled way to encourage our young people during the week: to wish them well before an exam, celebrate a birthday, or simply let them know their church family is glad to see them. That is what Safe Messaging makes possible, a meaningful connection, with safeguarding and parental oversight at its core."
Adam, CEO of Hubb, a parent of four and a children's worker
To make messaging work, we first had to build Push Notifications, and they are now switched on. They let your messages arrive on people's phones straight away, just like any other app. They also make Broadcasts possible, so your church can send important news and updates from the Hubb web office, a little like sending a text, but delivered right to your app.
Push Notifications are the foundation that makes all of this possible. We are glad to have them ready for you.
Everything you have read about lives inside your own church app: your name, your logo, your colours, your branding. People install it straight from your website, with no app store to search through. To them, it is simply your church, in their pocket. That is exactly how it should be.
If your church already uses Hubb, this is wonderful news. Messaging and Safe Messaging are part of the app you already have. Same app, same login, just more ways to stay connected and care for your people. Our support team can switch Safe Messaging on for your site whenever you are ready, and our guides will walk you through the rest.
If you are not with Hubb yet, this is a lovely time to join us. With Hubb, you get your own church app, your own website and a friendly support team who understand church life, with all of this built in. You can start with a free trial whenever you are ready.
Each answer is tagged to show whether it applies to Messaging, Safe Messaging, or both.
Yes. Messaging lets you send a one-to-one message, or message a whole team, ministry or leadership group at once, all inside your church app. Group members can message the whole group, or individuals within the group, and church administrators can enable each of those separately.
Conversations between adults are private to the people taking part. Nobody at your church can read them from the web office, including your administrators. A group chat is visible to the group's leaders in the ordinary way, because they are in the conversation. Messages to and from children are different: those all go through Safe Messaging and are permanently recorded for your church's Safeguarding Lead.
Yes. You can set the hours during which members are able to post to a group chat, so nobody is woken by a notification. Leaders can always send, whatever the time.
No. Messages are sent through your church app using people's own accounts, so no one needs to share a personal mobile number.
Yes, and chat history is never deleted. Messages are stored securely within your church's Hubb account. For Safe Messaging, the record also shows who sent each message, what it said, when it was sent, and which parent approved or rejected it. Your church's Safeguarding Lead can review this at any time. If your church ever faces a formal safeguarding case, we can extract the relevant conversation data for you on request.
No. Messaging and Safe Messaging are built into your church's own Hubb app, the one you already use. There is nothing extra to install.
That is your church's decision, and replies are switched off as standard. Where a church does allow them, a child can only reply to a message that has already been approved and delivered to them, so a child can never start a conversation. Every reply goes to their parent or guardian for approval in exactly the same way. Churches can allow replies from all children, or from children over 13 only.
No, and that is deliberate. Children are never part of group chats, because a group conversation cannot be approved message by message. A leader who wants to reach the children in their group messages them individually, and each of those messages goes to that child's parent for approval.
Yes. As well as the parent approving every message, your church names a Safeguarding Lead who can see every message leaders send, along with a dashboard flagging anything that needs attention: messages a parent rejected, children with no contactable guardian, and leaders approaching the weekly limit. So no message reaches a child without both a parent and your church's safeguarding oversight.
No. We are not asking children to have their own phones. Younger children do not have a login of their own at all, and a parent reads them their approved messages from the parent's own account. Older children have their own account, and we expect a parent or guardian to help them log in on the family computer, one kept in a family room rather than on a device tucked away where it cannot be seen. Safe Messaging is designed to work happily that way.
No. Every message a leader writes to your child comes to you first, and it is delivered only once you have approved it. If you reject it, or simply do nothing, it is never delivered. There is no way around this.
Yes. Every message a leader sends comes to you first. You read it in full, alongside the last few messages of the conversation so you have the context, and you approve it before it ever reaches your child.
Your church does. Church administrators choose exactly which leaders are allowed to use Safe Messaging, and those leaders can only reach the children they already work with through their group. No one else can use the Safe Messaging feature.
No. Messaging and Safe Messaging are not social media platforms. They are tools for quick and safe communication between everyone connected with a church.
Messaging, Safe Messaging and Broadcasts are all part of Hubb now. If you would like to talk it through with someone, or you are not sure where to start, fill in the form below and we will be in touch.
We are so glad to be able to share this with you. Thank you for being part of the Hubb family.
Adam