The Body - Christian Management System

We are just getting started. If you find the idea interesting and want to be part of the design and implimentation discussions please join our mailing list at:
http://lists.redeeming.us/mailman/listinfo/thebody

The following is a synopsis of what we are hoping to build:

Church Management -
Donation Tracking
Membership management (IE: Information on all members including the ability to understand relationships between family members such as mother/son, husband/wife)
The system should be smart enough to have several types of reporting. Such as understanding goals and notifying the appropriate people if giving is far below the goals (it could be a sign of trouble in the family such as a job loss), recognizing upcoming birthdays, and such.

Christian Tools -
The system should allow users to:
read the bible (in a reasonably robust form) and make private or public commentaries on it
allow a private/public journal
have a dedicated testimonial feature so everyone can share with other people on the system, online, and/or church leadership their personal stories.

Syncronization:
The system should intelligently allow users to sync/share some content between churches and this should be in a decentralized fashion.
One way for this to work would be for the system to allow other systems to make remote queries when information is requested.
In essence giving each church the ability to network with other churches in a distributed fashion. Peer to peer.
Lists of churches willing to work could publish the needed connection information in a centralized list that we could provide or on their own amongst other organizations related to them.

Robust:
The system should be reasonably robust such that the size of any given church will not be a limiting factor. To these ends it will utilize an SQL database (MySQL will be my development choice) that supports some level of clustering and the system will allow users to have a "read" and a "write" server such that a site would be able to have several read/only front end databases shared.
It should also be completely file-independent so that the front end web server can also be clustered with information being shared through the database backend.
While doing this it should also be possible to run on very low end hardware such as a Pentium II w/128MB running Linux for smaller churches. (FYI: PII is what I am using for redeeming.us)

Ease of use:
Simple installations for small-midsized churches (1-1000 people, single server installations) should be rather easy assuming the users use a reasonably inclusive OS that includes PHP, MySQL, Apache. (Most Linux computers due. Certainly Novel, the BSDs would work too)
To this end we will provide some simple shell scripts to open and close file permissions during configuration and a straight forward setup/install PHP script.

Customizable:
The system needs to be easy to custimize into an existing framework such that it will blend nicely. All graphics and color schemes must be customizable. To this end it must allow templates, headers, and footers.

What else? Comments? Input?

Feel free to email me: chris at redeeming d0t us