Free projects pause after about a week without activity. You have a few options:
- Pro plan: never pauses. $25 is the honest fix if people depend on it.
- Ask the church to cover it, $25/month for a tool 30 people use weekly is reasonable.
- Keep it active with real usage. Some people schedule a ping (e.g. GitHub Actions cron doing a small query every few days). That keeps it awake, but it's working around the policy and could stop working if they change what counts as activity.
I wouldn't bet a weekly Sunday service on the ping trick.