Membership is defined differently by many churches, but most churches agree that they'd like a way to know who is active in their church, so Planning Center helps you manage that information by calling it membership.
You can define membership by your church's values by customizing the membership fields.
You can also add reasons for making someone inactive.
Notice
Deceased cannot be edited or removed.
Once you have your statuses and reasons in place, update profiles according to their membership status.
From a person's profile, click the Membership Status dropdown, and then choose the appropriate membership status.
If people have steps they take to change membership, you can automate those changes as steps are completed.
For example, if you have a Membership Class that promotes people to Members once they finish the class, create a list to automatically change their status when the class is completed.
Create an automation to set their Membership Type to the desired type.
Use workflows and lists to be automatically notified about someone's activity in order to keep their membership up to date.
Create a workflow based on steps you want to take to follow up with people if they have had no activity.
Create a list of people who need to be followed up with.
To find people with no activity, make a rule for each app that shows they haven't had activity in that application in a set amount of time.
Once you submit the list, set your list automation to send people to the workflow you created before, which will notify the person assigned to the first step.
If the person no longer attends your church, you can set them as inactive on their profile, and they will no longer appear in searches. If they attend your church in the future, it's easy to reactivate their profile.
You can manage other aspects of your database by creating some common lists and automations.