How to add a ministry

The process of producing rotas begins with adding your ministries, adding each ministry's teams and members and optionally assigning team member roles - the ministry is the foundation of building a rota. Once ministries are added - a task you'll likely do once and then periodically manage - you can produce rotas for your ministries (see the related article for how). Where a ministry serves multiple services, you will produce separate rotas for each service, with each rota based on the same underlying ministry. However, if the ministry's teams, members and roles are significantly different for each service, you'll need to add separate service-specific ministries to produce service-specific rotas. In this article, we'll follow this same workflow – adding a new Ministry and then later in the article, we'll produce the Rotas. If ministries have already been added, then you can jump straight into the related article: How to create a rota.

Adding a new ministry

Navigate to the Ministries section of the Rotas module. Note also the ministry Actions for existing ministries in the list to View, Duplicate, Edit, Archive and Delete. Click Add ministry.

On the Add ministry pop-up, give the ministry a suitable Name, e.g. "AV/Media", "Refreshments", "Preaching", or "Set up".

Next, set ministry defaults for when this ministry typically serves - the serving day/s, times, team rotation and repeat rota. Later, when producing rotas, these ministry defaults will be suggested but you can override these defaults if adding rotas for different services. Note that rota clashes will be more accurately detected if the serving times reflect the actual time range within which people are expected to serve rather than the service start and end time. For example, a "Refreshments" ministry serving at a service starting at 10.30 am might be expected to serve from 9.30 am. While clashes can be overridden or even disabled for a rota, it's often helpful to be alerted to unwanted clashes if people are being assigned to multiple rotas serving at the same time.

Next, set the Team Rotation. Again, this ministry default can be later overridden when adding rotas. For Ad Hoc and Simple Rotation ministries only, choose the Repeat Rota frequency, which determines how a rota's dates are generated for the days/times within the rota's date range. Repeat Rota is not an option for Serve 13 team rotation as this rotation is by nature always "Every week".

Which team rotation?

Select Ad Hoc if the ministry doesn't follow a specific serving pattern. Rotas will be created with an empty grid of dates for you to manually assign people or teams to each date on the rota. You'll typically select Ad Hoc if the ministry has only one team representing the pool of all ministry members from which you assign people to rota dates on an ad hoc basis
Select Simple Rotation for ministries that will have multiple teams that follow a team rotation pattern. For example, if a ministry's teams serve every other week, you'll create two teams; if a ministry's teams serve every four weeks, you'll create four teams
Select Serve 13 when teams serve on certain weeks of the month. Ministries with four teams serve once per month - Team 1 on the first week, Team 2 on the second week, etc. For months with five weeks, week five is covered by each team in simple rotation - Team 1 is assigned to the first fifth Sunday of the year, Team 2 is assigned to the second fifth Sunday of the year, and so on. Across a calendar year, each team will serve 13 times rather than 12. Note that you can optionally add five teams to a Serve 13 ministry, with Team 5 assigned to all fifth Sundays on a rota

Continuing our example, we'll select Serve 13. Later in this article, we'll see how to add teams. Finally, for multi-site customers only, select the ministry's Site. Ministries are always site-specific. Where a ministry serves multiple sites, you will need to add a separate ministry for each site.

Click Save to add the ministry and be redirected to the ministry View.

You can return to the ministry View at any time, perhaps to Edit and make changes. This is also the page where you can:

Assign ministry overseers
Enable/disable and manage default rota reminders
Manage ministry teams and roles
Add rotas for the ministry
Archive or delete the ministry

We'll cover each of these topics in the remainder of this article.

Assigning ministry overseers

Designated ministry overseers receive swap and decline notification emails for the ministry rotas they oversee (if rota swaps and accept/decline are enabled in the module options). They also receive unavailability clash notification emails if added unavailability causes a clash for a person assigned to a rota date and rota expiry reminders. Overseers can fully manage all their rotas and teams in the member-facing My ChurchSuite without needing Rotas module User access. In this way, you can empower volunteer ministry leaders to organise and manage just their rotas.

From the ministry View, click Add overseer.

On the Add overseer pop-up, search and select the Address Book contact to be added as an overseer.

Click Save to add them.

You can add multiple overseers if you wish or return here in the future if you need to Remove an overseer.

Managing ministry roles

For each ministry, you can optionally define roles and then assign those roles to ministry members. For example, you may have roles to distinguish those who are team leaders or those who play different instruments in a worship ministry. It's also sometimes helpful to be able to communicate with just those ministry members in certain roles. While roles are added for a ministry, existing roles can be shared across multiple ministries. For each ministry, you can choose the role order, perhaps having a 'leader' role first. The role order is respected in rota views and reports when "Order by Role" is used. In this section, we'll focus on adding and managing roles. Later, we'll see how to assign and remove roles for team members in a ministry.

Working from the ministry View, navigate to the Roles tab and click Add role.

On the Add role pop-up, search and select from existing roles - the list filters as you type - or click +Add to create a new role. Then click Save & Return to complete the process e.g. 'Leader', 'Helper'. Role names must be unique.

Click Save when you are done. Continue adding further ministry roles as needed. You can return to the roles list at any time to View, Edit or Remove roles. Removing a role only removes it from this ministry – it will only be deleted when the role is no longer used for any other active or archived ministries.

In this next example, note the Order option to change the role order. Click on any order icon to open a pop-up through which roles can be re-ordered as desired.

When a subsequent rota is created, these roles are shown on the rota.

When viewing the rota ordered by Name, the people serving on that date are shown alphabetically by last name, and the roles are shown below each person's name - you'll notice in the example below that some people serve in multiple roles in the same week:

Changing the Order dropdown to Role shows each role separately, in the order defined within the ministry roles tab, with the name of the person serving in each role detailed below the role itself:

In the next section, we'll see how roles are assigned or removed from ministry team members.

Managing ministry teams

Introduction

Some ministries might only have single team comprising the pool of people from which people are later assigned to rota dates on an Ad Hoc basis. For example, for a Worship ministry, you could group band members in separate teams where each band typically serves together on rota dates where the team (band) is assigned, or you may prefer to maintain all your musicians and vocalists in a single team and for them to rotate dates on an Ad Hoc basis as needed for each occasion.

However, some ministries may comprise multiple teams - perhaps a team for each week of a month labelled as "Week 1", "Week 2", and so on. When producing rotas, ministry teams can be rotated on a simple rotation or Serve 13 basis. Therefore, a ministry always has at least one team. For simple rotation, you need two or more teams, and for Serve 13, the ministry must have four or five weekly teams. See earlier in this article for a description of Simple rotation and Serve 13 rotations and the distinction between four or five weekly teams for Serve 13.

While the language of 'team' suggests multiple people, a team can comprise a single team member where that's appropriate. In the context of rotas, teams are about rotation across dates on a rota. Additionally, it may be the case that you currently have no members for a particular team. An empty team can still be included in a simple rotation or Serve 13 rotation. In this way, you can build your rotation rotas with the volunteers you currently have but make ad hoc additions to rota dates where you have team gaps or shortages. In this regard, the ministry, teams and chosen rotation are used to generate the initial rota, but ad hoc changes to those serving on rota dates are, of course, possible.

People can be assigned to multiple teams in a ministry and they can be assigned different roles in different teams. When adding new people to ministry teams, you'll have the option to update existing rotas wherever the team is currently set to serve.

Adding teams

From the ministry View, navigate to the Teams tab. New Ad Hoc ministries are initially added with one team called "Ministry Members". New Simple Rotation and Serve 13 ministries are initially added with four weekly teams, labelled "Week 1", "Week 2", etc. Teams can be added, edited, renamed, reordered and deleted as required. Note that adding and reordering teams will not affect existing rotas - team changes that affect a rota rotation only apply when a new rota is added.

With teams added, suitably named and ordered as required, you can now begin adding team members – click Add member.

On the Add member pop-up, search and select each person to be added to the team. Where roles exist, optionally select the role/s that apply to the selected person for that team. Assigned roles change from grey to blue when selected. Where the ministry serves Ad Hoc and has a single team of ministry members, you will typically assign all the roles that each team member can serve – e.g. a worship leader who also plays keyboard, drums and guitar - as this will help you later when adding ministry members to rota dates using the "Add to role" option, which auto-suggests just those people assigned with that role – ensuring you'll never add a drummer to a bass guitarist role if they can't play the bass guitar!

Click Save to add the team member. Continue adding team members as appropriate. Both children and Address Book contacts can be assigned to teams. Children are distinguished in lists with a child icon next to their name.

You can easily make role changes – perhaps if someone's role changes in the future. To do so, use the inline role editing feature, which is enabled by hovering anywhere in the Roles column of a Team and clicking the Edit icon.

Make the relevant role changes and click Save to apply those changes. Assigned roles change from grey to blue when selected.

In future, and having added rotas, when adding or removing ministry team members, Users will be given the option to Update existing rotas - to apply the team member change to all future rota dates on the selected rota/s. In this way, you can make team member changes to a ministry and choose whether or not to update existing rotas.

Archiving ministries

Deleting a ministry is a destructive action that also deletes all past, active and future rotas associated with the ministry. Instead, where a ministry is no longer needed, you can archive the ministry, retaining all historic, active and future rotas for that ministry. Archived ministries can be set as active again. Within the Ministries section, you can easily switch between viewing Active and Archived ministries.

When a ministry is archived, ministry members remain assigned to the archived ministry but they are excluded from certain reports. For example, the Not in a ministry report only matches against active ministries - those in archived ministries are included in the report's results if they are not serving in an active ministry. Similarly, the Ministry members report and Multi-ministry members report exclude archived ministries, listing members of active ministries in the report results.

To archive a ministry, navigate to the ministry View, click More and select Archive. Archiving a ministry will make no changes to the ministry's overseers, roles, teams, default serving times or rotation, or the ministry's team members and assigned team roles. Active and future rotas persist unaffected by the ministry being archived.

You can easily reinstate an archived ministry. From the archived ministry View, click Set as active.

Deleting ministries

Deleting a ministry is a destructive and irreversible action - consider archiving, as described in the previous section. Deleting a ministry will delete all linked rotas - past, active and future - and any ministry-specific roles. Smart tags with ministry conditions may also be affected. To delete a ministry, click More and select Delete.

Confirm the deletion as instructed. If in doubt, archive first, delete later!

Adding rotas

See our related support article below for details on how to add rotas.