Administration
Keeping in touch with your group
To communicate with your homegroup to arrange meetings and share prayer requests, you’re likely going to want to use some sort of messaging service like WhatsApp or a Facebook messenger group. You might find it helpful to set some ground rules for members using the group. You could pin a message like this in your group:
Welcome to our WhatsApp group! This is a place where you can share prayer requests and expect to hear about when and where we’re meeting. To keep everyone safe, we thought it would be helpful to set some guidelines for using this group. We would be grateful if you could keep to these principles:
You are welcome to share prayer requests here, but please only share things that are yours to share
Please don’t take someone’s number from this group and message them separately unless you have asked their permission to do so
It’s best to try and keep messages to daytime hours, let’s respect everyone’s down-time overnight
Attendance Tracking
We ask that each homegroup keeps up to date records of which members attend. This is important because:
Helps keep track of people pastorally
Helps you as a Homegroup Leader to keep track of your members. Easily allows you to see if they have missed a few in a row so you know when to reach out to them.
Allows ministry leaders to check and ensure those serving are receiving the pastoral care and support that they need.
Changes to records
Helps keep track of who is in the church
Helps keep up-to-date contact information for those in the church
Helps with statistics and planning
Allows office staff to get a clear picture of the commitment to homegroups and an idea of the number of the congregation involved with homegroups.
It is really important to us that homegroup attendance is tracked - it really helps us as a team get an overview of who is connecting in and who is perhaps slipping through a gap and needs some extra support.
If you have someone new join your homegroup, please get them signed up to Churchsuite as soon as you’re able to! You can do that by sending them the link which is found in the footer of the website “register as new member”. Getting members onto Churchsuite is something we rely on homegroup leaders for and it is so helpful for us as a team to be able to communicate with those in the church. Thanks!
how to track attendance
For all of our church administration we use a programme called churchsuite. It is available as a web page (click here) and is also an app you can download to your phone. Below you’ll find a video showing you how to add attendance for your group.