Households vs. family: how grouping works in Churchday

Churchday groups people in two related but separate ways. Knowing which is which helps you keep families together at check-in and send tidy, one-per-home messages.

Two layers: family and households

Family belongs to a person. It is attached to their Churchday account and travels with them to every church they join. When someone links a spouse or adds a child, that connection follows them everywhere.

Households belong to a church. Each church keeps its own household records, and a person can be in only one household per church. A household is simply the people at your church who live and register together.

The short version: family is personal and portable, households are per-church.

What a household is for

Grouping people into a household lets your church:

Keep families together at check-in, so parents and kids appear as one group.
Share event registrations across the family, so one person can sign up the whole household.
Surface birthday and anniversary reminders for the people in that home.

Where each one is managed

Members manage their own family. They go to Settings, open the Family tab, and add a spouse, partner, or child. Learn more in Add your family members.
Admins manage households. From the dashboard, open the People page and select the Households tab. Open any household to rename it, choose its primary contact, or add people who are not yet in a household. See Manage the Households tab.

Churchday keeps them in sync automatically

You rarely have to build households by hand. Churchday links a person's confirmed partners and managed children into one household at every church they share whenever:

Someone joins your church.
A family invite is accepted.
A member adds a child to their family.

This sync is safe by design:

It only adds, never removes. If someone later unlinks a family member, the existing household stays intact, and an admin can tidy it up.
It never merges over other people. If two family members are already in separate households that also include unrelated people, Churchday leaves those households alone rather than combining them automatically. It stays a per-church cleanup an admin can do by hand from the Households tab.

If you have a pile of imported people who look like they belong together, use Review possible households to build households from your existing list.

The primary contact

Every household has exactly one primary contact, marked with a star and labeled Primary. To change it, open the household and click Make primary next to another person.

The primary matters most for email. When you turn on Send one per household while choosing recipients, only the primary contact gets the message and the rest of the household is skipped. It is the easiest way to email one message per home instead of one per person.

Good to know

A person can belong to only one household at your church at a time.
Renaming a household is display-only. It never changes who is in it.
Family links are private to the member. Your church only sees the household that results from them.