Delete or Remove a Member

Church Social is designed as a long term source of your congregation's membership statistics. By storing both present and past membership information, Church Social is able to store historical data for your church and can generate statistical reports based upon it. One simple example is the Year in review report that your statisticians and office-bearers have access to in the Reports section of the software.

Often times, former members still have connections to current members of your congregation. These may be grand-parents, parents, children or other connections of your current congregation members. Retaining this information can be very helpful for your elders, deacons and pastors in their role of shepherding the congregation since they will then continue to see family connections to deceased family members or former congregation members. An example of a report that uses this historical information is the Deceased family report which lists living members of persons who are deceased.

Consequently, it is our recommendation to set a person's membership as ended in Church Social rather than to remove that person's record entirely. This preserves a record of that person's membership in your congregation even though this member no longer shows up in your member directory.

When adding an "end date" to these people's memberships it is also important to then deactivate their login accounts if they have logins enabled.

When you delete a member, Church Social will also permanently delete many other pieces of information that are connected to that member. This includes Messages, Visits, Office-bearer Terms, Schedule Entries and much more as pictured below.

Note that existing tax receipts are not deleted when a person is removed from Church Social and the historical tax receipts can still can be printed (just not emailed).

If you do need to delete a person for some reason (e.g. a duplicate entry or some other matter) the administrator or statistician is able to do so by searching for the person on the People page, clicking on the person's name to go to their Edit page. On this page you click on the 3-dot menu in the top right of the page and select Delete in the menu that appears, as pictured below.

You will then be prompted to acknowledge the effects of deleting this person and can proceed with deleting the person from Church Social. Note that this action cannot be reversed!