Skip to content
EasyChurchApp

Create your first group

Groups give members a place to gather for Bible studies, Sunday school classes, ministries, prayer groups.

In this article

A group in EasyChurchApp is a space inside your member app where a subset of your church gathers: a Sunday school class, a Bible study, a women's ministry, a worship team, a youth group. Each group has its own posts, chat, attendance, and (optionally) a leader who can manage it. Groups work on every plan.

What a group can do

Once you create a group, members of that group get:

  • A group page with announcements from the leader
  • Group chat: private to that group
  • Attendance tracking (optional): for classes and small groups that take roll
  • Event RSVP: the leader can post group-only events
  • Member directory for the group

Visitors to your public website can see a list of published groups (with descriptions). A group's public page can show a contact email or signup button so a visitor can reach the leader; joining the group itself happens in the member app, signed in.

Step-by-step

  1. Open Groups.
  2. Click New Group.
  3. Fill in:
    • Group Name: e.g. "Tuesday Morning Bible Study" or "Youth Group 7th-8th"
    • URL Slug: filled in from the name; it becomes the group's web address
    • Tagline and Description: 2-3 sentences. This is what visitors see when browsing your groups page.
    • Category and Age Range: optional, for grouping in the directory
    • Group Image
    • Meeting Information: day, time and how often (you can add more than one meeting time), plus Location and Capacity
    • Settings: Publish Group, Members Only, Requires Approval, Show on homepage and Enable Group Chat (see Public, members-only and open groups)
    • Contact Settings: a contact email, a request-to-join message, and whether to show the signup form and leader contact info on the group's page
  4. Click Create Group.

A new group is not published until you switch on Publish Group, so it will not show on your website yet.

The group's leader is set after the group exists. Open the group, go to the Members tab, and give someone the Leader role (or use Invite with the Leader role). See "Invite group leaders". Once you have a leader, you can pick the Primary Leader shown publicly in the group's settings.

What to create first

If you're just getting started, create the two or three biggest groups in your church: the ones with the most members. Get those rolling, then add smaller groups as you see traction. Trying to set up 20 groups at once is a fast way to burn out.

Typical starting set:

  • Adult Sunday School
  • Youth (one group for middle + high school, or split)
  • Women's ministry or Men's ministry

Members joining a group

Once a group exists, three things happen:

  1. Once it is published, it appears in the Groups section of your public site, and on your home page if Show on homepage is on.
  2. Existing members of your church can browse to it from the member app and tap Join Group, or Request to Join if the group requires approval.
  3. When approval is required, the group leader (or you, as admin) approves or declines the request from the group's Members tab.

Approved members get access to the group's chat, posts, and events.

Unpublishing or deleting

To take a group off your website without losing anything, switch off Publish Group. To remove a group for good, use Delete group from the group page: it removes all members, announcements and chat history and cannot be undone. There is no separate archive button for groups today.

More in Groups