Add members to a group

A group is just a label until someone is on the roster. This article covers the two ways to add people, how the leader's roster screen behaves once it fills up, and how to remove someone when their season in the group ends.

Open the group detail page

From Groups, click any card to open the group detail page. The header shows the group's icon, name, description, the member count badge, and (when set) the org-unit chip. Two buttons sit in the top-right: Edit for the name/description/org-unit, and Add member for the roster.

If the group is brand new, the Members card below the header shows an empty state with a call-to-action — clicking it opens the same add-member dialog that Add member does.

TIP

If what you're populating is really a team that serves — worship band, ushers, kids check-in — that belongs in Ministries, not Groups. Groups are for meetings people attend; ministries are for jobs people do. A single member can sit on both sides at once.

Add a single member

Click Add member. A small dialog opens with a single field — a searchable dropdown that queries your members table as you type.

Type any part of a first or last name. The dropdown shows photo, full name, and member-type badge for every match. Pick the right person and click Add.

A few things happen in quick succession:

• The dialog closes.
• A toast confirms: Member added to group.
• The roster re-fetches — the new person appears in the list.
• The header member-count badge ticks up.
• The Groups list back-cache is invalidated so the card count is correct when you navigate back.

Already on the roster?

The dialog catches duplicates before saving. If the member is already in the group you'll get a destructive toast: Already a member. Nothing is written and the dialog stays open so you can pick someone else.

Not in your members list yet?

You can't add a non-member to a group. If someone is showing up to your home group but isn't yet on the books, register them through Add a member first, then come back and assign them to the group. (If they're a one-time visitor who came once and won't be back, mark their visit through Attendance instead — don't clutter the roster.)

Add many members at once

For batches — onboarding a new cohort to the same group, restructuring after a leadership change, splitting one large group into two — use the Members page bulk action flow instead of clicking through the add dialog twenty times:

1. Open Members.
2. Filter the list to the people you want to add — by member type, by org unit, by custom field, by anything the Members filter supports.
3. Tick the rows you want, or click Select all at the top of the filtered list.
4. Open the bulk action menu and choose Assign to group.
5. Pick the target group from the dropdown. Confirm.

Each selected member gets a group_members row written server-side — same as the single-add path, just looped. A success toast confirms the count.

This path is much faster than adding one at a time when you're moving more than a handful of people.

The leader's roster screen

Once the group has a roster, the Members card on the group detail page becomes the leader's daily workspace. A few things to know:

• Live search. The search box at the top filters the loaded roster as you type — first name or last name, case-insensitive. The filter is client-side, so it's instant even on a 200-member group.
• Column config. Click the columns icon next to Add member to toggle which member fields show beside each name. Defaults are phone and last-attended date; you can also surface email, date of birth, member type, gender, address, occupation, city, or registration date. The choice persists per-group — Young Adults and New Believers Class can show different columns.
• Quick view. Click any member row to open the Member Quick View slide-over — photo, contact, profile completeness, and shortcuts to the full profile. It's faster than navigating to the member's page when you just need a phone number.
• View all. The View all button (top-right of the Members card) deep-links to the Members page pre-filtered to this group's roster. Use this when you want to run a bulk action — message blast, workflow enrolment, export — against everyone in the group at once without leaving the filter behind.

Remove a member from the group

On a desktop, hover any member's row and a trash icon appears at the right edge. On mobile and tablet, the trash is always visible — there's no hover dependency.

Click the trash. A confirmation dialog asks: Remove from group? — and the wording is deliberate. This removes the member from this group only. Their profile stays, their attendance history stays, their other group and ministry assignments stay. Only the one group_members row is soft-deleted.

Confirm. The row disappears, the header count drops by one, and the toast confirms: Member removed from group.

WARNING

Remove from group is not Lost member. If the person has actually left the church, mark them as lost from their profile (see Active vs lost members) — that removes them from all groups, ministries, and attendance rosters going forward. Remove from group is the right action for someone who's rotating out of this group but staying in your church.

What gets stored

Each entry is a row in group_members with group_id, member_id, organization_id, and created_at. There's no role, no joined-on date beyond the row's created_at, no per-member status — just is on the roster, yes/no. Removal is a soft-delete (deleted_at), so the join history is recoverable for 30 days if a leader removes someone by accident.

Permissions

Action	Required permission
See the roster	groups.view
Add a member	groups.write
Remove a member	groups.write
Change visible columns	groups.write

Unit-scoped pastors only see groups inside their assigned units, and the member picker is scoped to members visible at their level. See Create a group for how the org-unit assignment interacts with scoped roles.

Next steps

• Leaders, meeting day & location — capture the when and who's responsible.
• Group attendance — track who actually shows up to meetings.
• Group reporting — rosters, member counts, and trends.
• Compare with Ministries → Add members — the analogous flow on the ministries side.