Using the pastoral visit module

The pastoral visit module allows you to track a pastoral visitation ministry within your church. It is a premium plugin feature.

On the main Church Admin screen you should be able to see the module.

If you can’t see that box, then you will need to enable it. Head to Church Admin>Setttings>Choose Modules

Make sure the checkbox for “pastoral” is checked and click Save at the bottom of the screen.

Settings

The first thing you will need to do is to setup your setting for pastoral visits, which will include which team of people has access to the module and how often visits need to happen. There is always a button “Pastoral visit settings”showing in the module and a nag button if they arent setup!

Pastoral Visit Settings

Click the Pastoral visit settings button.

In the book “Magnetic Church” Herb Miller’s thesis is that new visitors to church are much more likely to come back if someone visits them. So the first form field helps you with that. It sets “days of new registrations to show” – every time someone is registered or added to the address list (we would use a member type “Visitor” for all our new attendees), the date of registration is noted. This field then sets how long they show in teh pastoral visitation module for a first visit.

The second form field is for your normal pastoral visitation ministry. Here you can set how often people on the visitation list are visited. The plugin will then show when a visit is overde automatically.

The “Pastoral visitation calendar category” – allows you to great a category for the calendar (which can be hidden from the public) for the visit appointments. If you select “Create calendar category” a form field to allow you to do that happens.

The next field is important! This will be the “ministry” who do the visiting and can access this section of the plugin.

You can use a current ministry or if you choose the option “Create visitation ministry”, two form fields appear to allow you to create a new ministry and add team members.

The next section handles emails that are (optionally) sent to a person being visited and the team member.

The message body section has some “shortcodes” that are replaced with the relevant information automatically.

Lastly you can set up the team member email template. The team member gets an attachment PDF with visit name and address, map (if you have set up the Google Map API key) and previous notes as a refresher.

Pastoral Visitation Main Screen

Has three sections

  1. Latest church visitors
  2. Pastoral Visit List
  3. Pastoral Visit Calendar

Latest Church Visitors

When new people have been registered their details will appear in this section.

You can schedule a visit, add visit notes and download a PDF of their details ready to visit

Pastoral visitation list

Initially no-one is on this list, so you will need to add some people! Click “Edit visitation list”

You can add people manually by typing names, or everyone of a specific people type or member type.

Some churches create a new People type “Seniors” – which is typically the group of people expectig regular pastoral visits.

Once you have added some people, you will see a table of them with some options for each one.

“Remove from list” simply takes them off the visitation list (but keeps them in the directory!)

Schedule visit – allows you to schedule a visit

Schedule visit

The schedule visit screen looks like this, with the pastoral visitation calendar underneath to help show availability.

Fill in the options and click Save appointment.

Add notes

Clicking the “Add visit notes” links leads to this screen.

The notes are then added to the record and can be viewed on the PDF for that person

The next update will add in view notes for the different people.