Office-bearer terms

Administrators can record 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. These terms are visible and added on the edit person page in the Access & Privacy section.

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

Office-bearer term reports

Probably the most exciting part of this feature is the Office-bearer terms report, found on the Reports page. 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.

If tracking office-bearer term length 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.