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The Pastoral Visitation module helps you track a pastoral visiting ministry in your church — spotting newcomers who’d benefit from a first visit, keeping a list of people who receive regular visits, scheduling appointments onto a calendar, recording notes from each visit, and giving your visiting team a printable PDF of the person’s details to take with them.
Enabling the module
The module appears as a box on the main Church Admin screen. If you can’t see it, go to Church Admin → Settings → Choose Modules, tick the Pastoral checkbox, and click Save at the bottom.
Settings
Before using the module, set it up. There’s always a Settings button in the module box (and a reminder prompt if you haven’t configured it yet). Click it to open the settings form.
- Days of new registrations to show — how many days a newly registered person stays in the “latest visitors” list for a first visit. The idea, drawn from Herb Miller’s Magnetic Church, is that newcomers are far more likely to return if someone visits them soon after their first appearance. Many churches use a “Visitor” member type for new attendees so they flow into this list automatically.
- Frequency of pastoral visits (in days) — how often people on the visitation list should be visited. Once a visit is older than this, the plugin flags it as overdue.
- Pastoral visitation calendar category — the calendar category that visit appointments are added to. You can pick an existing category or choose Create calendar category to make a new one (a text box appears for the name). Keeping visits in their own category means you can hide them from your public calendar.
- Pastoral visitation ministry — the ministry whose members do the visiting and can access this part of the plugin. Pick an existing ministry, or choose Create visitation ministry to add a new one — two extra fields appear, letting you name the ministry and add team members by typing their names.
Email templates
The lower half of the settings form sets up the two optional emails the module can send when you schedule a visit — one to the team member doing the visiting, and one to the person being visited. You set a shared from name and from address, then a subject and message for each.
Both message boxes are full editors, and you can drop in merge tags that are swapped for real details when the email is sent:
- Team member (visitor) email — supports
[date],[time],[name],[address],[phone],[mobile]and[iCal](a link to add the appointment to their diary). The team member’s email also carries a PDF attachment with the person’s name, address, a map (if you’ve set a Google Maps API key) and previous visit notes as a briefing. - Visited person email — supports
[date],[time]and[visitor].
Click Save when you’re done. Setting a Google Maps API key is worth doing so the visitation PDF includes a location map.
The main screen
The module’s main screen has three sections: the latest church visitors, the pastoral visitation list, and the pastoral visitation calendar.
Latest church visitors
This lists households that have registered within the number of days you set. For each one you get their registration date, name(s), address, and a row of actions: download a visitation PDF of their details, add visit notes, view notes already recorded, and schedule a visit. If there are no new people, you’ll see a prompt with a button to add a household.
Pastoral visitation list
This is the list of people who receive regular pastoral visits. It’s shown as a searchable table, so if your list is long you can use the search box to find someone quickly. From here you can see who’s due or overdue a visit and jump to scheduling a visit, adding notes, or viewing a person’s visit history.
Some churches create a People type such as “Seniors” for the group who typically expect regular visits, which makes building and maintaining this list easier.
Pastoral visitation calendar
Below the list is the visitation calendar, showing scheduled appointments for the category you chose in settings. This gives your team an at-a-glance view of upcoming visits and helps avoid double-booking.
Scheduling a visit
Click Schedule visit against a person. On the scheduling screen you set:
- Date, Time and Visit end time for the appointment.
- Team member — who from the visitation ministry will make the visit.
- Email options — tick to email the appointment details to the person being visited, the team member, or both. The team member’s email includes the briefing PDF.
Click Save appointment. The visit is added to the pastoral calendar, and the calendar is shown beneath the form so you can check availability as you book. There’s also a link to download a PDF of the whole month’s visit calendar.
Adding visit notes
After a visit, click Add visit notes for that person. On the note form you choose the visitor (from the visitation ministry), set the date and time of the visit, and type your notes.
If the person has a spouse in the same household, you’ll see a Copy details for… checkbox — tick it to record the same visit against both people at once, saving you entering it twice. Click Save to store the note.
Viewing visit notes
Where a person has notes recorded, a View notes link appears. This opens their full visit history, newest first, in a table showing the date and time of each visit, who visited, and the notes. From here you can Edit an existing note or add a new one.
Recorded notes also appear on that person’s visitation PDF, so a team member picking up a return visit has the previous history to hand.
The visitation PDF
Throughout the module you can download a visitation PDF for a person. It gathers everything a visitor needs on one sheet: the person’s name and household members, contact details, address, a location map (when a Google Maps API key is set), and previous visit notes. It’s designed to be printed or emailed to the team member ahead of a visit.