Every small group with a name, a leader and numbers of its own.
In Eclesi a group belongs to a church and has a life of its own: leaders kept apart from members, an address, a category, its gatherings and its transactions. The group screen shows the attendance rate and the balance for the period without anyone having to build a thing. That is the difference between knowing the church is doing well and knowing which small group is.
Twelve groups, twelve versions of the truth
Every leader runs their own people their own way: one in a notebook, one from memory, one in a phone message thread. When it is time to add it all up, the church does not have one list of groups, it has twelve lists that do not talk to each other.
The group report arrives on Sunday night, when it arrives. Half the leaders forget, nobody chases them, and what is left is a feeling that "the group is doing fine" with no number behind it.
When a group starts to empty out, the decline takes months to become visible. By the time it does, it is a group of four people and nobody can explain which month that started.
What Eclesi groups do
A leader is not just another member
The group’s leader list is kept apart from its member list. You promote a member to leader and return a leader to plain member in one click, and the person’s history in the group stays exactly the same. The church can see instantly who answers for each group, and the leader appears as a leader on the group screens, not as one more name in the middle of a list.
A group belongs to a church
Every group belongs to a church, and that is not paperwork: it is what makes filtering by church work across the whole system, and what lets an organisation with several congregations look at each one’s groups without mixing them up. A group also has an address of its own, because the small group meeting at sister Marta’s house is not at the same place as the building.
The group’s attendance rate
The group screen carries the attendance rate for the chosen period, always calculated as present over expected across that group’s gatherings. The attendance by group report lines every small group up with the same maths and a colour band for the rate, and the executive summary points out groups in decline. That is how leadership trades "I think so" for "this one dropped".
The group’s gatherings in one place
The group’s latest gatherings appear on its screen, with the attendance recorded for each one. Group meetings live in the same church calendar, repeating weekly when that is the case, and each meeting’s expected list is already assembled from the group’s members — the leader only marks who came, who arrived late and who said they could not make it.
The group’s own cash
Transactions posted to the group make up the balance for the period, and the latest ones show up on the group screen itself. The meeting offering, the whip-round for materials, the money spent on snacks: it all stays attached to the group that spent it, with the receipt attached to the entry. Church finance is still one book, but each group now has its own share in plain sight.
Categories and per-group permissions
Groups have tree-shaped categories, with colours and ordering you define: small groups, ministries, classes, whatever your church calls them. And write permissions can be granted for one specific group, so a leader receives permission to record attendance or post finance entries only inside their own group, and not across the whole church.
Frequently asked questions about groups
Put your small groups on the same map.
Thirty days free, no credit card. Create the groups, name the leaders, and watch each group’s attendance show up week after week.