How membership works (subscriber vs member)

Churchday keeps this simple with two separate ideas. One is a person's membership, their relationship with your church. The other is their subscription, whether they've agreed to get your email and text. These are tracked separately, and changing one never changes the other.

Membership: subscriber, pending, or member

Every person in your directory has one membership state:

Subscriber. Someone who has signed up to hear from you. This is the starting point for everyone in your directory.
Pending. Someone who has asked to become a member and is waiting for you to approve them. This state is set automatically when a person submits a join request, so you never pick it by hand.
Member. Someone who is formally part of your church. A person becomes a member when you approve their join request, or when you promote them yourself.

These three are built in. You can't rename them, add your own, or remove them.

Subscription: email and text are separate

Whether a person gets your Email and Text is a different setting from their membership. A member can be unsubscribed, and a subscriber can be fully opted in. When someone has turned off both Email and Text, they show as unsubscribed, but that describes their subscription, not their membership.

Because the two are separate, promoting someone to member or moving them back to subscriber never turns their email or text on or off.

Change a person's membership

You have two quick ways to do this:

From the People list. Click the membership badge next to a person's name and choose Subscriber or Member. (You need a role that can manage people.)
From their profile. Open the person, go to the Settings tab, and set their membership in the Membership row.

To change what they receive, use the Email and Text switches on that same Settings tab instead.

Organize people beyond membership

Membership describes someone's overall relationship with your church, not the many ways you might want to group people. For ministries, service teams, first-time visitors, age groups, and so on, use tags, groups, and teams. Those give you flexible labels you fully control.

Good to know

There's no build-your-own-status screen. If you've seen older help mentioning a Statuses tab or a Create Status button, that's out of date.
Whether new members need your approval is set on the Settings page under General, not here.
You can change several people's membership at once. Select them on the People page and choose Change membership.