What's New: Week of September 23, 2026

This note covers September 14 to 23. The biggest news is that iPhone version 1.19.19 reached the App Store on September 16, so several things the last note called "on the way" are now in your hands. Behind it, ten days of work landed on giving, the Catalog, privacy and the Bible text itself. Where something is merged but not yet in the app on your phone, this note says so.

On your iPhone now: version 1.19.19

• Join right away. Anyone can join a church, ministry or group the moment it is set up. Approval now only unlocks giving, so a pastor can share the invite code the same day, and a pending community shows a banner rather than locked tabs.
• Give with MTN MoMo in eleven countries. Benin, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d'Ivoire, Eswatini, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia. The gift goes straight to the church's own MoMo merchant account. SoapBox never touches it.
• Password reset by code. A 6-digit code arrives by email, and you are back in.
• Events that hold up at the door. An event stays under Upcoming until it ends, so the check-in QR is still there after the service starts, and you get one notification per event, not two.

Giving: statements, funds, and gifts you control

Gifts remain a 0% fee passthrough to the church. Everything below is about making them easier to run and easier to trust.

• Funds and campaigns. A church can name funds and run campaigns, and a giver can pick one when they give. The public give page carries a campaign link with a goal bar.
• Year-end giving statements. The pastor console builds a statement for each donor, with the church's legal details on it, and emails it with a sent status you can check. A partial refund is netted out, and a lost chargeback stays off the statement. The giving export now shows the same figures, with a Refunded Amount column.
• Cancel a recurring gift yourself. Donors can see their recurring gifts and stop one without emailing the church. Gifts already made stay with the church. This is live on the web app and on Android now, and reaches iPhone in the next update.
• Exports for staff. Giving and member CSV exports, available only to roles with export permission.
• No double charges. A checkout that loses its connection mid-payment can no longer charge twice, and a church payout is checked before it is sent.

Catalog and the Bible

• Three ways to price. A sermon, series or book in the Catalog can be free, a fixed price, or pay what you want. The seller sets it, the server enforces it, and every page says which one applies. Live on the web app and Android; iPhone gets it in the next update.
• Browse by ministry, a cover on every item. Merged this week across the backend, both apps and the website: thirteen ministry areas to browse, a designed cover for the 92% of items that had none, and one detail page for every kind of item, with related items from the same area. It is rolling out now, and reaches iPhone with its next update.
• Ten chapters of the King James text, corrected. The public dataset our KJV came from was missing six verses and split four others, so in ten chapters, mostly in Matthew and Mark, a verse number pointed at the wrong words. Matthew 22:37 is one of them. All ten are repaired, and every chapter's verse count is now pinned so it cannot slip again.
• Audio Bible voices, honestly labeled. Your chosen voice now syncs across your devices, Grace is the default, and a voice above your tier shows its tier instead of quietly playing someone else. On Android and the web now; iPhone in the next update.

Privacy and language

• Profile Visible is enforced. Turn it off and people outside your communities and conversations can no longer see your profile; members of your own communities still can. Contact matching skips hidden profiles entirely.
• Your phone number, your call. A new switch decides whether members of your church can see your phone number, and staff read it only through a gated path. On the web now; in both apps with their next update.
• Less to analytics. On iPhone, your display name and search text no longer go to analytics, Explorers are fully opted out, and there is no IP geolocation. Next update.
• The privacy page says what the code does. Every sentence on soapboxsuperapp.com/privacy was checked against what actually ships, including what stays after you delete your account.
• Farsi, and every language. On Android, Faith, Prayer, Sermons and reading plans now read in your language, and the reader opens your own Bible translation. In six Ugandan languages we removed about 3,300 machine translations that native speakers found wrong; those strings read in English until a native speaker approves them, because a wrong word on the giving screen is worse than an English one.
• ORA Assistant. ORA was described in a few places as a "study companion". It is a study assistant, grounded in Scripture, and it is now called that everywhere. ORA itself is unchanged.

For church and ministry leaders

• A real people database. Tags, interests and saved segments for your members, and a CSV import that previews the exact result, dedupes against your roster, and can be undone for seven days. An email opt-in is recorded per person. SoapBox sends no campaigns on your behalf. In the web console now.
• How-to videos. Set up giving, Groups, Ministries, Events and Team are live at soapboxsuperapp.com/tutorials, easier to find on the site, and linked from Help & Support in the apps with their next update.
• Connect your AI agent. The setup screen now says where to paste the token and what each token allows, shows Connected, Waiting or Expired for each connection, and lets you remove a saved card. Revoking a token means revoked, the giving caps hold, and every gift an agent makes sends you a notification.
• On the way. A church that already runs Stripe will be able to connect that account instead of creating a new one. The public give page will show amounts in the church's own currency. And a weekly sermon-prep kit for pastors is built, with a one-tap unsubscribe; the first kit is planned for early October.

Thank you for the reports that drove these. Keep them coming.