Take Root, in your hands

Everything on these pages was made from your own sermons. Nobody typed a devotional. Take the tour on your own phone, tick what you tried, and write on it. The margins are the point.

Built by Scott Adams for Motor City Church · September 2026 · About twenty minutes

Before you start, you need the app. Point your camera at the square, or open takeroot.church/install. Four steps, three minutes, once.

When it asks for a church code:

CE0CACB4

takeroot.church/install

One · A member’s week

Stop 1

Today

Open Take Root. You are on the Today tab.

Look at the painting. It was chosen to fit today’s reading, and tapping the caption tells you where it hangs.Read the day’s title under it. That title was written from Sunday’s sermon.Tap Open Day.

Worth noticing. The message on this screen is whichever Sunday is most recent. Nobody chose it; it moved on its own when the video went up.

Your take

Stop 2

Inside a day

You are now on one day of five.

Scroll to Where this lands and find a sentence you actually said on Sunday. It is in quotes.Keep going to Today’s step. Write one line in the box under it. Only you can see it.Tap Done for today at the bottom.

Worth noticing. Nothing in the reflection is invented. It is written from the transcript of the sermon you preached, which is why it sounds like you and not like a devotional off a shelf.

Your take

Stop 3

Every verse opens

Scroll back up to Reading.

Tap the green reference chip. The passage opens right there.Tap Open in YouVersion. It opens in the Bible app people already have, in their own translation.Come back. Anywhere in the app that a verse is green, this works.

Worth noticing. The text inside the app is the public-domain World English Bible, so nobody is asked to switch translations.

Your take

Stop 4

Notes

Library tab, open the latest sermon, tap Notes.

Type one thing that stood out and tap Save note.Tap the camera and photograph any handwritten page. Watch the words become text.Notice the note is dated and can be edited or deleted.

Worth noticing. Notes, answers, and progress are private to the person who wrote them. Not to the church, not to other members, not to Scott. That is enforced in the database, not just hidden.

Your take

Stop 5

Memory verses

You tab, then Memory verses.

A verse comes up with the answer hidden. Guess it.Tap Show answer, then tell it how you did.Try two or three. The ones you miss come back sooner than the ones you know.

Worth noticing. The verses are the ones the sermon leaned on, so the deck is Motor City Church’s, not a generic one.

Your take

Two · Leading a Connect Group

Stop 6

The Connect Group guide

Church tab. Tap This month’s Connect Group guide.

Read The thread this month. It names every sermon since the group last met.Scroll to the questions. Find question 8 and read where it says it came from.Tap Export as PDF and see what a leader would print.

Worth noticing. A guide is written for each group before it meets, once the last Sunday before that meeting is in. A group that meets on Monday has its guide Monday morning. Each leader sets their own night and rhythm, once.

Your take

Three · What staff see

Stop 7

Manage church

Church tab. Tap the gear in the top right.

Read the rows top to bottom. Everything the app does for the church is on this one screen.Notice Review before publishing is on.Notice Names your church uses says Connect Groups and Midweek Meetup. That is why the app says them everywhere.

Worth noticing. Only admins and leaders ever see this screen. Members never do.

Your take

Stop 8

One calendar, kept in one place

From Manage church, tap Calendar.

See what is there. Every event was typed in by hand, and the last one is September 30.Open Church Center on your phone: Calendar, then Subscribe, and copy the link it gives you.Back here, tap Set feed, paste it, and tap Import now. From then on it reads Church Center every hour and nobody types an event again.

Worth noticing. It can only show what is on the Church Center calendar, and right now that calendar has about as much on it as this list. That is worth fixing on its own: the church website can read from the same place, so keeping Church Center current once fills the website and the app together.

Your take

Stop 9

Nothing publishes until you have read it

From Manage church, tap Waiting for review, then open a sermon.

Tap the pencil next to any line and change a word. Then change it back, or leave it.Find a day and tap Hide this day. Then unhide it.See Regenerate and Publish to members. Publish is the whole gate.

Worth noticing. Every line can be edited, any day hidden, a whole week rewritten. This is where you would catch anything you do not want said in your name. Until one of you taps Publish, members see nothing.

Your take

Stop 10

Members and roles

From Manage church, tap Members and roles.

Tap a name and see the roles.Make one more person a leader, so Monday never depends on one person.Notice you can take a role back in two taps.

Worth noticing. Leaders can publish. Admins can do everything, including this screen.

Your take

Stop 11

The leadership report

From Manage church, scroll down, tap Leadership report.

Read the numbers: members, active this week, days completed.Find the attendance section. It comes from one question a member gets on a Sunday.Look for a name. There are none.

Worth noticing. Counts only, never who. Attendance is not shown at all until five people have answered. That is the deal Scott would want kept with members, and it is enforced in the database.

Your take

Stop 12

Connect the YouTube channel

From Manage church, tap YouTube channel.

Read what it is doing now: watching the public channel, pulling new uploads within fifteen minutes.See the Connect button. It is one Google sign-in by whoever owns the channel.Do not press it today unless you are ready. It is the one thing on this list only you can do.

Worth noticing. Once connected, every sermon is transcribed from YouTube’s own captions instead of pulled audio, and everything runs through YouTube’s official tools the way they intend. One sign-in, once.

Your take

Stop 13

Connect Groups

From Manage church, tap Connect Groups.

See the official groups, the ones every member sees, with their leaders and next meetings.Anyone can start an informal group of their own. Only they see it, and it still gets a guide. When a leader asks to make one official, it shows up here with two buttons: Make it official, or Not now.Members not yet in a group still see this month’s questions on their Church tab, with a button to find one.

Worth noticing. Which groups are the church’s is your call, not the app’s. The Find a Connect Group button opens your Church Center list. Take Root sits beside Church Center; giving goes there too, and the app never touches money.

Your take