I am Adam. I founded Hubb, and I also serve in the children's ministry at my own church. I want to tell you why we built Safe Messaging. Not the features, but the heart behind it. For me, this one is personal, and I want to be honest from the start about why.
I am a parent of four. One is about to start school, two are in primary, and one is in secondary. As they grow up, I find myself hoping for one thing: that they stay connected to church, and to the people there who take a genuine interest in them: people serving with their faith and their gifts, who can be good role models and walk alongside them as they grow.
I would love the wonderful volunteers in our children's ministry to be able to encourage my children through the week, not only on the one or two Sundays a month they happen to be serving.
I also serve on the children's team at my own church. I signed up because I want to help encourage and care for these young people as they navigate school, friendships and growing up.
But life is busy. With four children of my own, and serving only about once a month, weeks can slip by without me speaking to the children I would love to support. By the time I see them again, the moment to encourage them has often already passed.
When I am serving, I get to know the children a little. One will mention a holiday they are excited about, another that they support a particular football team, or that their family is moving house, or that they have a big cricket match coming up. I often come away thinking how good it would be to follow up: to say it was great to see them, that I hope the cricket match goes well, the house move goes smoothly, or that their team has a good game next weekend. Small things, but the kind of small things that tell a child someone noticed, remembered, and thought of them.
Some of us have seen the pattern. A child grows up in church, 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 to me is this: that whatever happens, they know people at church paid attention to them, kept in touch, and were genuinely glad to see them. For many, that steady thread of connection is exactly what helps them stay close as they grow. And if some do move on, they do so knowing the church was a place where people cared, and they can look back and recognise the positive influence those people had.
The honest reason a tool like this has not existed before is simple. Connecting adults with children is something the church rightly takes incredibly seriously, and any solution that did not put safeguarding first would not be worth building. So that is where we started.
Messages to children are one-to-one and one-way. A leader writes a short word of encouragement, the child's parent reads the whole message, and nothing reaches the child until the parent approves it. There is no private back-and-forth for a child to be drawn into. Your church decides which leaders may use it and which children they may contact, and every message is stored securely, is fully auditable and actively reviewed by the church Safeguarding Lead.
Safe Messaging is designed to sit under your church's existing safeguarding policy and your denomination's guidance, 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. What it does do is give parents full oversight and put them in control, with your Safeguarding Lead reviewing alongside them. And it brings contact that can otherwise happen informally (a quick message here, a text there) into one trusted place: inside your church's own app, where the records belong to the church rather than being scattered across personal phones and other apps. Far from limiting the vision, that is what makes it possible.
My hope is simple. I want young people to grow up knowing that the people at church genuinely knew them and were glad of them, not only on a Sunday but through the week as they grow up. And I want the faithful volunteers in our churches to be able to do what they signed up to do: encourage and care for the next generation, with the right protections in place.
Safe Messaging is about people far more than technology. It is about helping young people stay connected to their church family, and giving the adults who care about them a safe, accountable way to stay in touch.
That is the heart behind it, and I could not be more glad to share it with you.
Adam Johannes Founder & CEO, Hubb, and a children's ministry volunteer