Ministries
A ministry in GCM is a service team or department — Worship, Ushers, Children's, Media, Hospitality. Anything where a group of members shows up regularly to do the work of the church.
Ministries answer a different question from Groups. Groups (small groups, life groups, home cells) are about belonging — discipleship, community, pastoral care. Ministries are about serving — the rota, the volunteers, the team. A single member typically belongs to one or two groups but can serve on several ministries.
When to use ministries
Reach for the Ministries module when you need to:
- Track who is on the worship team, the ushers, the media team.
- See how many people serve in each area at a glance.
- Pull attendance for a ministry-specific meeting (worship rehearsal, ushers' huddle).
- Assign new members to a serving track.
- Report on ministry health — growing, plateaued, shrinking.
If you instead need pastoral care groupings, see the Groups module. The two are deliberately separate because the data they collect and the questions they answer don't overlap.
What lives in a ministry
Every ministry has just one required field — name. That keeps the barrier to entry low: you can sketch out your whole org's ministry list in five minutes, then enrich the records over time.
Each ministry record stores:
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Name | The team name — Worship, Ushers, Children's Ministry |
| Members | Roster, fetched via the ministry_members join |
| Attendance | Linked when meetings reference this ministry |
| Audit trail | Who created it, who last edited, when |
The list page also shows a member count badge per ministry and a tiny visual bar that compares ministry size against your largest team — a quick way to spot ministries that need recruiting.
How members get onto a ministry
Three paths, all landing in the same ministry_members join table:
- From the ministry page — open a ministry, click Add member, search for the person. See Add members.
- From the member's profile — open the member, scroll to the Ministries section, add. Same join row, different starting point.
- From bulk actions — in Bulk actions, select many members at once and assign them all to a ministry. Best for onboarding a batch of new volunteers after a recruitment drive.
There is currently no per-member role within a ministry (e.g. "lead vocalist" vs "backing vocalist"). If you need that distinction, the conventional approach is to use the Custom fields module to add a free-text or pick-list field on the member record.
Hierarchy and scoping
If your church has multiple campuses or centers configured under Org structure, the Ministries list respects the cascading hierarchy filter at the top of the page. Pick a campus to see only the ministries whose members belong to that campus's units, or leave it on All to see everything.
Ministries themselves are organization-wide — they aren't tied to a specific campus. The same Worship ministry can hold members from any unit. This is intentional: worship teams often serve across campuses.
Permissions
Two permissions gate this module:
| Permission | What it grants |
|---|---|
ministries.view | See the list, open a ministry, view its members |
ministries.manage | Create, edit, delete ministries; add and remove members |
Both are typically assigned to admins and ministry leaders. Regular members don't see the Ministries module in the sidebar at all — but they can see their ministries on their own profile.
TIP
There is no dedicated "ministry leader" field in the schema today. Teams handle this in two ways: (1) custom roles in Users & Roles — e.g. a "Worship Leader" role that grants ministries.manage; (2) a custom field on the member like Ministry leadership role set to Worship Lead. Both work; pick whichever fits your governance.
Reporting and attendance
The ministry detail page embeds an attendance chart that pulls from the attendances table where ministry_id matches. So if you mark attendance for a Worship Rehearsal meeting and tag it with the Worship ministry, those numbers show up on the ministry's chart automatically.
See Ministry attendance and reporting for the full flow, including how to link a meeting to a ministry so the data lands in the right bucket.
Next steps
- Create a ministry — start with your most active team.
- Add members — populate the roster.
- Leaders and permissions — decide who can manage what.
- Ministry attendance — wire up meetings for reporting.
- Delete or archive — when a ministry is no longer active.