Members

The Members module is the heart of GCM — every other module (attendance, giving, messaging, workflows) ties back to records here.

What's in a member record

Every member has:

• Names — first names + last names + a computed full-name field used for search.
• Photo — uploaded to your church's storage bucket, displayed in lists and on the connection network.
• Contact — primary phone, secondary phone, email.
• Demographics — date of birth, gender, marital status, country/state/city.
• Membership — date of registration, member type, who invited them.
• Org unit assignment — which branch / center / cell group they belong to.
• Custom fields — anything else your church wants to track (food allergies, baptismal date, gift survey results).

Two ways to add members

Path	Best for
Add a member	one at a time, full profile capture
Bulk import	migrating from another system (CSV)

Important concepts

• Active vs lost members — every member is either active or marked lost. Lost members don't count against your plan's limit and don't appear in attendance lists by default.
• Custom fields — define your own profile fields per church.
• Merging duplicates — combine two records into one, carrying attendance + donations from both.
• Connection network — visualize who invited whom across your whole church.

Permissions

Action	Admin	Shepherd	Member
View member	✅	✅ scoped to assigned units	✅ self only
Add member	✅	✅	❌
Edit member	✅	✅ scoped	✅ self only
Delete member	✅	❌	❌
Merge duplicates	✅	❌	❌

Next steps

1. Add your first member
2. Customize the profile fields for your church
3. Once you have ~50 members, run a duplicate scan