Group Structure

There are several common small group structures. You can use all of these, and you can extend MinistryPlatform to support variations.

• Home-based groups: Often consist of groups organized by geographic regions.
• Sunday School: Groups are generally divided according to age or stage of life. These generally reflect the departments of the church.
• Cell: Groups descend from other groups. Accountability exists between the parent group and child group through a teacher/disciple relationship between the leaders.

Regardless of your structure, you should set up each group in the Groups page with the Small Group group type. You can rename this group type to work appropriately for your church.

Group Fields

Ministry

The Sunday school model may require that this value reflects the department that oversees the group. Cell and home-based models may have a single ministry assigned to all groups.

Congregation

Multi-site churches should set the correct congregation for each group. For on-site groups, this is the congregation where the group meets. For home-based groups, this may be the geographically closest congregation. You can search this field in Group Finder.

Parent Group

Home-based groups may want to make the parent group the geographic region (community/area). For example, the parent group may be "Northwest Community," and additional tiers might exist in the structure, like "Greater Cityville Area." This area would be the parent group of the "Community". The person who oversees the community or area is the contact person of the group.

Home-based groups may also make the parent group the coach or pastor responsible for that group. For example, the parent group may be "Coach Bob Smith's Groups", with Bob Smith as the group's primary contact. Each of the group leaders that Bob oversees may be participants in his group. And each group that Bob oversees has this group listed as the parent group.

Sunday School groups may want to make the parent group a subset of the ministry. For example, for Children's Ministry, this may be "Elementary". For Adult Ministry, this may be "Empty Nesters".

Cell groups may want to make this the group of the person who discipled the leader of this new group.

Promotion

Visitors to the church website can use the Group Finder to identify a group that fits their life stage and schedule. From the widget, the person can inquire about a group or sign up for a group. A SPoC can set up a process to notify the right people in either case that someone inquired or joined their group. The group leader can follow up with either an inquiry or signup from My Groups or Group Life.

While the Group Finder works well as a self-serve tool, some churches make the Group Finder more readily available. For example:

• You can direct a computer in your lobby to the Group Finder.
• Church staff can use the New Message Tool to email people who are not currently in a small group and send an invitation directing them to Group Finder. It may also be helpful to promote specific groups with a direct link to their page.

Attendance

There are many ways to take attendance for your small groups:

• Group leaders can post attendance through Group Life.
• Group leaders can post attendance through My Groups.
• Group leaders can post attendance using the Classroom Manager app.
• Attendance posts automatically if you use the Check-in System.
• Staff can process attendance with the Group Attendance Tool launched from an Event record.
• Staff can process attendance with a barcode reader using the Roll Scan Attendance Tool.

Remember, you can add to groups or events. Events and groups are separate but related concepts in MinistryPlatform. These tools add a person to an Event and reference the correct Group record at the same time.

Group attendance is only different from regular attendance in one respect. In addition to knowing who attended the event, we know they attended that event as someone with a role in a group. In this sense, you can always find an Attendance record in MinistryPlatform in the Event Participants page. You can always see it from an open Event or Participant record. You may also see a subset of a person's attendance history if you open one of their Group Participant records.