I'm Paul, a software engineer by day and a worship leader on Sundays. For a long time, those two parts of my life ran in parallel, one paid the bills, the other fed something deeper.
Then my own church came to me with a problem, not knowing I could actually solve it. They needed a way to know when someone had quietly stopped showing up. Not the people who leave loudly, the quiet ones. The person who used to serve on a team, then didn't. The family that used to be in a group, then wasn't. Nobody decides to disappear, most of the time they just drift, a week becomes a month, a month becomes "I wonder whatever happened to them."By the time anyone notices, it's often too late for a simple conversation to matter.
So I built them a solution. What started as a favor for the church I love turned into Astray, because it turned out this wasn't just our problem. It was every church's problem.
Astray watches for the quiet kind of leaving, not the dramatic kind, and makes sure someone knows to reach out before the silence becomes permanent. It's grown since that first conversation. But the heart of it hasn't changed: Astray exists so that no one has to disappear from a community that would have gone looking for them, if only someone had known to look.