In a few weeks, we'll be releasing some exciting updates to the Pastoral Visits feature in Church360° Members. To help you get ready, we'd like to answer some common questions and give you ideas on how to take full advantage of this feature.
How do I access the Pastoral Visits feature?
To access Pastoral Visits, sign into your Church360° Members account, click on the settings cog, and select Pastoral Visits. The first thing you will see will be a section where you can enter the date, type, visitor and visitee information for a new Visit. Visits entered will be listed below this top row in the Visit History section, where you can go back and edit details such as the date and type.
In our upcoming release, we'll also be adding a "Notes and Visits" section to profiles so that you can see a timeline of visits made to a certain person of family.
Is the Pastoral Visits feature just for Pastors?
We realize that some people might be hesitant to use the Pastoral Visits feature if they are not a pastor. We've even received a few questions from Church360° Members customers asking if they are allowed to use this feature. Thank you for your feedback and honest questions on this subject!
The pastoral office is certainly unique in its divinely-instituted calling to rightly administer Word and Sacrament to a congregation. As such, we wanted to make sure the needs of pastors carrying these gifts of God to those they visit were well-served by the Pastoral Visits feature in Church360° Members. When designing this feature, we wanted to create a place where pastors could easily record communion visits to shut-ins and hospitalized members.
But we recognize that it has the potential to be useful to others in the congregation. Whether an elder whom the pastor has recruited to help with carrying out the duties of his office or a lay leader in the congregation who performs other acts of mercy and care for their fellow members, the Pastoral Visits feature gives a broader picture of all the care people in your church both show and receive.
So the Pastoral Visits feature in Church360° Members is designed for use by Pastors, church staff, and congregation members alike, as they perform their vocations inside and outside your congregation.
What events can I record with the Pastoral Visits feature?
Shut-in visits and hospital visits are likely the most common events recorded with the Pastoral Visits feature, but you shouldn't feel limited just to those. Just about any type of visit or contact can be recorded here as well. You may want to use the Pastoral Visits feature to record outreach visits made my your evangelism team or Baptism Birthday cards sent out by your care ministry. You could even use Pastoral Visits to record phone calls or prayer requests sent out by the church office!
Think of Pastoral Visits as a place to keep a record of all visits and communications on behalf of the congregation for the spiritual and physical care of your members.
Where can I use the Pastoral Visits Feature?
We're prepping to make the new Pastoral Visits feature a mobile-friendly experience. That means you can record visit information both at church with your desktop computer and on-the-go with your mobile device! Our recent addition of a day event view in calendars made it even easier to view your schedule for the day on your phone. In a few weeks, we will also be adding a Pastoral Visits calendar in Church360° Members, which will show you a list of your visits for the day and make it easy to enter notes immediately after visits are completed.
We hope this post answered some questions and deepened your understanding of the Pastoral Visits feature in Church360° Members. Keep checking our blog or subscribe here to stay up-to-date on the latest additions to the Pastoral Visits feature in the coming weeks!
If you have any questions or comments, please contact our support team at support@cts.cph.org or 800.346.6120.
