Soaring High Ministries

The brief

Soaring High Ministries is a non-denominational, spirit-filled church on Longley Lane in south Reno. Soaring High needed a website that could carry the weight of a real congregation: new visitors planning their first Sunday, members watching the live stream and pulling up scripture mid-sermon, the worship and prayer teams promoting Friday Prayer & Worship and Elevation, the youth ministry pushing events, and a remote-friendly tithes flow that didn’t drag people into a third-party processor with high fees.

They didn’t want a generic church template, and they didn’t want a stack the staff couldn’t actually run. What they needed was an editorial site, a sermon archive that filled itself, and a giving page that respected donor intent.

What we built

• A Next.js 15 site on the App Router with React 19, deployed to Vercel, fronted by a custom Tailwind v4 design system (cream, ink, primary, accent) with a display, serif-italic, and mono type stack tuned for editorial reading.
• A full Sanity v4 Studio so staff edit posts, authors, sermons, events, team members, community businesses, and site settings inline, with real-time collaboration, draft-mode previews, and webhook-triggered ISR so a published change is live in seconds instead of waiting on a rebuild.
• A YouTube-driven sermons module: every livestream from the church’s channel is pulled in by a typed import script, written into Sanity as a sermon document with title, slug, YouTube ID, thumbnail, date, duration, speaker reference, and series tag.
• A Take Action giving page that puts Zelle first (no fees, fast, tax-deductible), with a one-click copy of the church’s Zelle email, plus mailed check instructions and a designated family fundraiser callout that routes to Venmo with a clear memo line. No third-party donation widgets, no minimum suggested amounts, no upsell screens.
• A typed contact form with a custom email template, a mailing list footer signup with duplicate prevention and source tracking, dynamic Open Graph images generated on the fly with, and a small but disciplined component library (Section, SectionHeading, Eyebrow, Quote, EditorialCard, LiteYouTube, Navbar, Footer, plus the Bible component family) so future page work stays on-brand without one-off design.

What we kept off the page

No popups. No “subscribe before you can read” gates. No autoplay video. No third-party giving widget skimming a percentage off every gift. A first-time visitor should be able to land on the site, see when Sunday service starts, watch the latest message, find directions, and give without ever feeling sold to. That’s the whole job.