We've fixed a bug affecting visit note visibility between elders and pastors. In Church Social, pastors are treated as elders for the purposes of note visibility—so if your settings allow office-bearers to see notes from others with the same role, elders should be able to see pastor notes, and pastors should be able to see elder notes.

However, until now, this wasn't actually working as intended. Visit notes were only visible to office-bearers with the exact same role.

As of today, this has been corrected. Elders and pastors can now see each other's visit notes—if the "What visit notes can office-bearers see?" setting is set to "Only those with their role".

We've made a small tweak to when visit reminder emails are sent. Previously, office-bearers received reminders the day before a scheduled visit. After using the visits feature in Church Social ourselves through a full "home visit season," we’ve found that receiving the reminder on the morning of the visit is more helpful in practice.

It's a subtle change, but we think reminders work best when they're fresh—closer to the moment you actually need them.

Members will now receive email notifications when their criminal record checks are nearing expiry — or if they’ve already expired. Previously, only administrators were notified, requiring them to follow up manually. This update helps members stay on top of renewals and reduces the workload for admins.

These emails are sent on the first day of each month, starting six months before a criminal record check expires and continuing for up to six months after it has expired. In other words, if a member doesn’t renew it right away, they can expect up to 12 monthly reminder emails nudging them to take care of it.

You no longer need to hunt for embed codes when adding sermon videos. Simply copy and paste the video URL from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, or SermonAudio — we’ll take care of the rest.

This update brings several benefits:

• Simpler: Just paste the link you see when viewing the video (e.g., from your browser's address bar).
• Smarter: We now automatically generate the embed code behind the scenes, ensuring videos display correctly and consistently.
• Safer: By removing support for raw HTML embeds, we prevent the possibility of broken or malicious code being added.

This change applies to all new sermon videos going forward, as well as past videos which have been migrated automatically.

For now, we support the services mentioned above. If your church uses a different video platform, just contact us at [email protected] — we’d be happy to add support for it.

We've given the sermon authors page a small refresh! Instead of displaying each author in a card, we now use a table layout. This denser format makes it easier to scan through authors quickly while still showing extra details like the number of sermons they've preached and the date of their last sermon. You can even sort by these the headings.

We've also added a new search input, making it easier to find a specific author—especially helpful for churches with a long list of ministers.

We've introduced a new "Confessions" page in the sermons section of the app. This page provides a quick overview of all sermons connected to the Three Forms of Unity—the Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession, and Canons of Dort.

Only chapters from these confessions that have associated sermons will appear on this page, each with a count showing the number of sermons available.

Click on any chapter to view all the sermons linked to it.

We've corrected a small issue with the "age this year" column in the people reports. This column is designed to show a person's age at the end of the current year—helpful for knowing how old someone will be turning. It is used in the built-in "Birthdays" report.

Previously, if someone was less than a year old by December 31st, the column displayed their age in months and weeks. While technically accurate, this could be confusing.

We've now simplified it to display "< 1 year old" instead.

We've just rolled out a small change to how roles are assigned in Church Social.

Previously, roles such as administrators, statisticians, or bulletin editors were assigned from the edit person page under the "Access & Privacy" heading. These options have now been relocated to their respective settings pages.

This change has been on our roadmap for a while, as we believe the setting pages are the more appropriate place for role assignments—especially since only administrators can make these changes. It also improves visibility by allowing you to see all individuals assigned to a specific role in one place, alongside other related settings.

For example:

• Bulletin editors can now be managed from the bulletin settings page.
• Treasurers can be assigned in the giving settings page.
• Sermon editors are now managed in the sermon settings page, and so on.

More general roles, including administrators, statisticians, and report managers, can now be assigned from the security settings page.

While roles can no longer be edited from the edit person page, you can still view all the roles assigned to a person there. This provides a quick and convenient reference to see their complete role assignments at a glance.

We hope this update makes role management a little more intuitive!

Office-bearers can now see recent visits on the visit details page, making it easier to review a member’s visit history. This allows for quick access to other recent visits and notes, helping with preparation for upcoming visits.

We've updated the PDF tax receipts generated by Church Social to now require a password for modification. This change ensures compliance with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) requirements, which state:

Computer-generated official donation receipts are acceptable as long as:

1. they have all the required information
2. they are clear and easy to read
3. the data on them cannot be altered and is protected from unauthorized access

The "Subscribe to calendar" feature now respects any filters you have applied to your calendar, so you can choose to limit which types of events from Church Social appear in your external calendar.

For example, if you're an office-bearer, you could choose to only include your visits in your external calendar.

We’ve introduced a new group setting that allows you to disable sending messages to certain groups.

This feature is particularly useful in situations where alternative communication methods are already established for a specific group, making messaging everyone in that group unnecessary. For example, many church councils and consistories have designated clerks responsible for managing correspondence, so all communication with these groups is typically routed through the clerk.

You can configure this setting on the "Create Group" or "Edit Group" pages. Simply set the "Allow sending messages to this group?" option to "No," and the group will no longer appear as a recipient option on the "New Message" page.

We've updated the option to download an entire file folder as a ZIP file to now include all the nested folders and files within it. Previously this option only included the files in the folder, and not any of the folders within it. This change is much more inline with what you'd expect when downloading all the contents of a folder.

We've updated all the Excel exports in Church Social to improve date handling. Previously, date columns were exported as plain text values, like "November 7, 2024". With this update, we now explicitly set the date data type, making it easier to work with dates in Excel.

The response to the new office-bearer visit tracking feature has been very positive—almost half of the churches using Church Social have already enabled it! We're thrilled to see that you’re as enthusiastic about this feature as we are.

This week, we made a few minor adjustments to the visits feature. This is fairly common when rolling out a major new feature, as we receive feedback from churches that helps us make small improvements.

First, the calendar now only displays your own visits, not those of other office-bearers. Initially, we thought it would be helpful to see all visits in the main calendar, but in practice, this made it more cluttered and made it harder to see your own visits. If you want to see what other visits are happening in your church, simply go to the reports area and view the "Visits" report or the "Week overview" report.

On the topic of visits in the calendar, our iOS and Android apps have also been updated to include visits in their calendars. Just make sure you’re using the latest version of the app (v1.2.0 or newer), or they won’t appear.

In the reports area, you may notice that the "Most frequently visited" report has been removed. While this was an interesting idea, we’re not convinced it provides much value to office-bearers and could even have unintended downsides, such as prompting questions like, "Why is this particular family getting so many visits?" That said, if you found this report helpful, you can recreate it as a custom report using the family report builder.

Finally, you can now export visits from the "Visits" report to either Excel or CSV. Please note that, due to their sensitive nature, visit notes are not included in this export.

We hope you find these improvements helpful!