Tim Turner and the value of a small congregation

The church could use an iPhone app. It could not pay for one. For Tim Turner, who had been designing software for companies with rather more room in their budgets, this was an unpromising sales conversation. He and his wife Kristy went ahead anyway. They built the app for their Seattle congregation for free.

That decision is easier to admire from the far end of an $800 million acquisition. In the middle of the 2008 downturn, with consulting projects on hold and less income coming in, it was a decision about savings, work and faith. A customer without a budget had presented the Turners with a problem they knew how to solve. They chose to spend their own resources solving it.

Today Turner remains CEO of Subsplash, the company the couple founded in 2005. Its customers include more than 20,000 churches and ministries. Its software handles an expanding assortment of congregational life: sermons, giving, messages, events, groups and the administrative work that keeps the whole arrangement moving. The original proposition was narrower. Let someone hear a sermon without first becoming an expert in transferring files.

The customer who could not pay

Turner had grown up around teaching that traveled beyond the church building. His grandfather was a pastor. At home, radio, tapes and CDs carried Bible teaching into the week. Long before he built a platform, he had experienced its underlying purpose: something heard on Sunday could remain part of ordinary life afterward.

The early smartphone introduced a peculiar inconvenience. The device in your pocket was becoming more capable, while getting church media onto it still involved downloading, importing and syncing. Each step was another small invitation to abandon the project. Listening to a sermon had acquired homework.

In 2009, Turner heard a sermon encouraging members of his church to use their abilities for the Gospel. Software was an ability the couple could offer. Their business had already worked on projects for brands including Xbox, Samsung and T-Mobile. They could make complicated things usable. Here was a complicated thing remarkably close to home.

Their first church app drew more than 10,000 downloads in its opening week. Other congregations became interested. What began as a gift became a direction for the business. There is a difference between guessing that a market exists and watching people arrive asking for what you have just made. Subsplash had a customer it understood, and then discovered that customer had company.

The designer before the CEO

Turner’s route into software passed through design. His reported education at the University of Washington includes visual communication design and interdisciplinary fine art. He later worked as a software product designer at Microsoft, focusing on touchscreen interactions. Those are useful beginnings for someone whose eventual customers would include people with sermons to prepare and little appetite for puzzling out an interface.

Design asks what happens between a person and an object. A chief executive has to ask what happens between an organization and its customers. In Turner’s career, the questions sit unusually close together. A church app succeeds only if somebody can find the thing they came to hear. The sophistication underneath earns its keep by making the surface easier.

The company’s odd little name carries some of this thinking. Turner connects “sub” with humility and “splash” with innovation. The values preceded the church software business; they were part of what the founders wanted to build before they settled on the product that would define it. Excellence became another stated commitment. A name like Subsplash at least saves a company from sounding like a committee’s third choice.

In 2014, Turner was working at a desk facing a window and standing for much of the day. He was also involved in a C3 Leaders forum, introduced through Jon Sharpe. The detail suggests a founder building routines and relationships around the job. Later chapters would involve larger ownership decisions, but learning alongside other business leaders was already part of the work.

A business measured between Sundays

Subsplash gradually followed the congregation into more places. Android and iPad apps arrived in 2010. Apple TV followed in 2015. Giving joined in 2016. Websites, publishing tools and messaging widened the brief. By 2021 and 2022, the company was assembling church management and engagement into Subsplash One. An app had become the entrance to a collection of connected services.

These are less glamorous subjects than the phrase “technology company” sometimes promises. Someone must organize volunteers. Someone must make an event registration work. Someone must publish the recording after the service. The weekly repetition gives those tasks their significance. A small inconvenience, encountered often enough by enough people, becomes a substantial amount of work.

Turner’s argument for connected software concerns that accumulated effort. If a church must keep moving information between vendors, the advertised price of a tool captures only part of its cost. There is also the time spent making the tools cooperate. He wants the platform to reduce that administrative burden, leaving church staff more time for the people they serve.

His stated audience includes small congregations. He has spoken about churches of 15 or 50 people using the platform. That matters to the portrait of the business: a congregation’s size changes its purchasing power without making its practical needs disappear. Ease of use becomes particularly consequential when the same person is responsible for several jobs.

Turner has described a wish to create “quiet spaces” online. In a medium organized around competing for attention, that is an interesting design brief. A church’s own digital space can give its teaching and community room to exist without the next unrelated attraction jostling for a turn. The ambition is both technical and editorial: decide what belongs in the room.

The price of staying the course

In 2018, Subsplash announced an office in Wenatchee, Washington. Kristy had grown up in East Wenatchee. The business had more than 90 employees at its Seattle headquarters and intended to hire locally. The geography made a small connection between the company’s expansion and the family behind it. Growth acquired an address with some personal history attached.

K1 Investment Management invested in 2019. Its later account of the partnership describes annual recurring revenue growing organically by roughly seven times from the fiscal year before the investment. The product expanded, existing customers adopted more of it, and payments became more closely attached to the platform. A church app was now part of a broader software business with recurring commercial relationships.

Roper announced its agreement to acquire Subsplash in July 2025. The transaction closed on July 25 at a net purchase price of $800 million. Roper placed the business in its Network Software segment. For Turner, a company started with Kristy in a garage had become part of a publicly traded technology group while he continued to lead it.

A transaction gives a founder’s story a convenient punctuation mark. The customer’s calendar continues regardless. The next service needs its recording, the next event needs its registration, and the next person trying the software needs it to make sense. Remaining CEO means Turner stays responsible for what comes after the announcement, when the work resumes its usual scale.

He has described the Roper relationship as a way to invest and grow while retaining the company’s mission focus. The stated ambition remains to equip every church. That is a wide horizon for a business whose decisive early project served a single congregation. It also gives continuity to a career that now includes both donated development work and a substantial acquisition.

A founder with other things to tend

The next set of tools includes Pulpit AI, which Subsplash acquired in 2024. It turns sermon material into transcripts, study guides and shorter pieces for sharing. Turner has discussed the technology as a way to extend work a pastor has already done. The recurring interest is recognizable: take teaching that already exists and make it easier to use elsewhere.

In May 2026, Subsplash announced that Vistage had recognized Turner with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He had been a member since 2014. A lifetime award arriving during an active career has a mildly comic quality: congratulations on finishing, please return to your desk. Turner’s public response credited colleagues, customers, advisers and investors, and pointed toward more work ahead.

“Keep learning and staying curious.”

Tim Turner, on a leader’s willingness to grow, 2026

There are other claims on his attention. Tim and Kristy have three daughters. His interests include paddle boarding, guitar and working on the family farm. These details give the executive biography some air. Software can be revised and shipped; a family, a piece of music and a farm each have their own demands on a person’s time.

Turner’s story returns, finally, to attention: noticing a familiar difficulty and deciding it deserves work. He knew what it meant to hear teaching at home. He knew how to design software. He belonged to a congregation that needed a better way to connect the two. The business grew from the care he and Kristy gave that particular problem. Even after the deal, one person opening an app still meets the result.