Group types are an essential part of the creation and organization of Groups in ChurchTools.
They can be used to sort Groups and to predefine rights and roles for the various group types.

When you create a new group, you must select a group type to which the group belongs.
This specifies which standard permissions are available and which roles are available in the Groups of this type.
Group types therefore serve as templates for new Groups, so that you can quickly and easily create new small or service groups, for example, which are initially structured and authorized in the same way by default.

In order to use group types sensibly, it is best to consider what different types of Groups, teams etc. you have in the church and how they differ in terms of rights management and role distribution in ChurchTools.

Preset group types #

ChurchTools offers four different group types to start with, which we consider to be useful. You can use these directly, but of course you can also change, extend or delete them yourself.

Small groups #

This type of group is intended for your Groups, which meet in addition to the joint church service. If you call these Groups e.g. house groups or Bible study groups etc., it is best to change the name.
The aim of such Groups is to promote fellowship and strengthen the personal faith of the participants.
For this Groups we have the structure in mind that there is one or two leaders in the group and several participants and these roles are preset accordingly.

Services #

By ministry groups we mean all Groups or teams that work in a church, e.g. in worship or in the kitchen.
These Groups serve to organize all volunteers or employees in your church. The members of these Groups work together to support and plan the church’s services and events.
We assume that the Groups have a leader, who may be supported by a co-leader and of course include all team members.

Actions #

At Groups this type of group, we imagine projects or activities within the community, e.g. camps and other events, but also social projects or fundraising campaigns.
Here, too, there are probably leaders and employees, but the role of an organizer is also conceivable.

Features #

Here we imagine that people can be organized in Groups who, for example, share interests, have certain knowledge or perform functions in the congregation. These Groups help to get to know the members of the congregation better, to create targeted offers for specific Groups and to display information in ChurchTools.

Set rollers #

You can assign different preset roles to the different group types.
We have created additional help pages on this topic.

Define standard authorizations #

In the rights management, you can set which global and group-internal rights of a group should be specified by the group type.
We have compiled our recommendations here as to which permissions we consider useful for the individual group types.