Introducing office-bearer terms

We're excited to share a big update to the office-bearer roles in Church Social — you can now track office-bearer terms!

Previously when assigning someone as an office-bearer in Church Social you simply set their current role as either an elder, deacon or a pastor. However, there wasn't any way to keep track of their term length, start date, or end date, nor could you keep track of past terms. Meaning once you removed the office-bearer role from someone's profile, there was no history within Church Social that they ever served. We've changed all that!

On the edit person page, administrators are now able to track multiple office-bearer terms for a member. Each term has a role (elder, deacon or pastor), expected term length, start date, and end date. You can add as many past terms as you'd like, but of course each member can only have one active term at a time.

Since many churches have a standard term length for elders and deacons (three years anybody?), we've added an option for this on a new "Office-Bearer Settings" page. Adding this simply makes adding new terms a little easier since it will automatically set the term length for you for elders and deacons, and you can still customize it on a per term basis as needed.

Probably the most exciting part of this whole feature is the new "Office-bearer terms" report, found on the "Reports" page (only available to administrators, statisticians and report managers). This report will list all your active and past office-bearer terms, grouped by the year that the term ends. This is really helpful information when nominating new office-bearers, as you can quickly see who is currently serving and who has served more recently. Many of our customers give past office-bearers a two-year "break" out of office, which this report makes easy to see.

Finally, if tracking office-bearer terms doesn't makes sense for your church, but you would still like to set who your current elders, deacons and pastors are — no problem! Simply create a term without any length, start date, or end date, and when their term is completed you can simply delete it. Of course we think this is useful information to track, but if you'd rather not have to maintain this information that's totally fine too.

We really hope that this new feature helps your church, and especially your councils and consistories, keep track of these terms and provide a little better visibility into them moving forward!