Members, leaders, and join requests

A group's roster lives on the group's own page. Open Groups in the sidebar, click the group, and everything below happens there.

Add someone to the group

1. 1

   Open the group and click Add Member

   The button sits in the header next to Take Attendance.

2. 2

   Pick the Role first

   The Role dropdown offers Member, Co-Leader, and Leader, and it defaults to Member. Set it before you search, because clicking a person adds them right then at whatever role is selected.

3. 3

   Search and click the person

   Type at least two characters into Search people by name.... Until then the modal reads Type at least 2 characters to search. People already in the group are filtered out of the results.

There is no confirmation step and no Save. The person is added the moment you click their row, and the modal closes.

If that person has a churchHQ account, Scout sends them a push notification titled You're in {group name}, and the last 30 days of that group's updates appear in their feed. Someone without an app account is added to the roster and told nothing, so mention it to them yourself.

This is the only way to add someone to a group. A person's profile has a Groups & teams section, but it is read-only: it lists the groups they are already in and links to each one. There is no add-to-group control there, and no CSV path for group members. (Planning Center is the one exception, covered in Import from Planning Center (PCO).)

Leaders and co-leaders

To make someone a leader, hover their row in the Members or Leadership section and use the small role dropdown that appears on the right. Pick Leader or Co-Leader. The change saves immediately, and they move up into the Leadership section.

That role is an attribute of their membership in this one group. It is not a Scout role and not a permission. Making someone a group leader gives them no dashboard access at all, and it changes nothing about any other group. Staff access is a separate thing, set under Settings → Permissions, described in How roles work.

Leadership of a group grants exactly three things:

• Logging that group's post-meeting reflection in churchHQ, which is where a leader records who was there. See Recording what happened at a meeting.
• Posting an Update to that group from churchHQ, under Who's this for? in the compose screen.
• Answering that group's join requests, with the limitation in the next section.

So a small group leader who needs to log meetings does it on their phone in churchHQ, not in the dashboard. They never need a staff login.

Approve or decline a join request

When a member taps Request to join in churchHQ, a Pending requests · N section appears at the top of the group page, above Leadership. Each row shows the person, the date they asked, and two buttons: Decline and Approve.

Approve adds them to the roster, sends them the You're in {group name} push, and backfills that group's last 30 days of updates into their feed.

Use Approve rather than adding the person through Add Member. Someone with an open request is not counted as a member yet, so they still turn up in that search, and clicking them fails with no error on screen.

Decline deletes the request. The member is sent nothing. There is no declined state anywhere in the app for them to see, and they can request again immediately. This is deliberate: a no is a conversation, not a notification. If the answer needs explaining, that part is on you.

Who finds out a request came in: Scout pushes New group request to that group's leaders and co-leaders. If the group has no leader yet, it goes to your church owners instead. Nobody else is notified and no email is sent, so if you are the one staffing the queue, check the group page.

One count to watch: the group card on /groups counts pending requests as members, while the header inside the group counts approved members only. A group with two open requests can read "12 members" on the list and "10 members" inside.

Remove someone

Hover the member's row and click the ✕ button on the right, labelled Remove from group. There is no confirmation dialog, and they are removed immediately. Their name in past meeting records stays as it was, so your attendance history does not change.

Members cannot remove themselves. churchHQ has no Leave group button, so anyone who wants out has to ask the office, and you do it here.

Archive and restore

Archiving hides a group without deleting anything. Open the group, click the kebab (⋮) in the header, choose Archive group, and confirm. Members, meetings, attendance, and leader reflections are all kept. The group disappears from the member app entirely.

To bring it back, switch the Group status toggle on /groups to Archived, then use the kebab on the card, or open the group and click Restore group in the banner at the top.

To handle several at once, click Select on /groups, tick the cards (or Select all N), and click Archive N or Restore N. Done exits selection mode.

Bulk actions cover archive and restore only. There is no way to add people to groups in bulk, change roles in bulk, or edit group details in bulk. Everything else on this page is one group at a time.

One thing archiving does not do: it does not lock the group. You can still add members and take attendance on an archived group, because nothing checks its status on those writes. Only the Edit group and Archive group menu items are hidden.