An Example

A church meets in a rented storefront. Everyone who attends belongs to one group — the congregation itself. That group has a primary meeting: Sunday morning worship, every week.

Making that one meeting happen takes five serving teams:

• A setup team arrives early to put out chairs and run sound.
• A hospitality team sets up coffee and pastries before people arrive.
• A praise team leads worship.
• A leadership team greets people at the door and handles the business of the day.
• A children's ministry team staffs childcare for infants through age four and teaches Sunday school for ages five and up.

One group. One weekly meeting. Five teams, each with its own roles, its own volunteers, and its own schedule. Nobody needs a separate group for the setup crew — they are a team, and the meeting they serve already exists as a group event.

Where the Two Connect

Groups and serving teams meet at the event. When you build a schedule for a team, you can create each serving time from an event that already exists on a group's calendar instead of re-typing the date and time yourself.

Tying serving times to a group event is worth the extra step. A linked serving time stays aware of the event behind it: if that event is changed or canceled, the team's schedule says so. A manually entered serving time isn't connected to any event, so nothing about the group's calendar reaches it.

The two also meet at attendance. You can mark a volunteer's attendance through the group meeting they served, showing up in the same record of attendance.

What Each Side Shows You

Visibility runs mostly one way. From a serving team's schedule, you can see the group event a serving time is tied to. From the group, you generally cannot see the serving teams working its meetings. In other words, the group's calendar shows the meeting, not who is staffing it.

There is one exception. When someone puts a group into recess and saves, Realm lists the serving teams and schedules that the recess affects. Because the group's page doesn't show this connection on its own, you may want to check the schedules of any teams that serve a meeting before you move or cancel it.

Which One Do You Need?

Ask what the people are doing together.

• Create a group when people meet, belong, or study together — a small group, a class, a committee, a congregation. Groups have rosters, events, attendance, and various communication options.
• Create a serving team when people take a role on a rotation — ushers, nursery workers, sound techs, greeters. Teams have roles, approvals, and schedules, and they draw on what people are gifted and interested in. Teams can also require background checks or other
• Use both when a ministry gathers and serves. A youth ministry might be a group that meets Wednesday nights and a team that staffs Sunday check-in.

Some ministries serve without ever meeting — the people who send cards, deliver meals, or visit the homebound. They belong on a serving team. Whether they also need a group depends on whether they gather.