Quick Start Guides

The following quick start guides have been designed to help you get your Congregate site up and running, provide a brief understanding of Congregate Admin, and offer recommendations to get your membership engaged on your site.

View our launch your site guide when you’re ready to go live.

1. Introduction to Congregate Admin

Congregate is a complete platform for churches: a public website, a members-only area, and the member-management tools your leadership uses week to week. Congregate Admin is where all of it is managed. It is one place to publish sermons, run the calendar, keep the directory current, take attendance, schedule volunteers, and message the congregation.

How Access is Controlled

Nearly every feature in Congregate (i.e., modules) can be enabled or disabled at any time.
Access to nearly every module is controlled by a user account’s permissions.
Permissions are granted through permission groups. You can create as many groups as you need and assign any number of them to a single user account, under User Accounts › Permissions.
The Directory is the hub of Congregate. User accounts are paired to the member records in your directory, so a person’s contact details, family, groups, attendance, and volunteer history all connect back to one record.
“Super admins” see everything, including managing the church account and email tools. Everyone else sees only what their groups allow, and menu items a user has no permission for simply don’t appear.

Where You Sign In

Administrators (meaning anyone using Congregate Admin to manage the site or the membership tools) sign in by adding /admin to your website address: https://www.your-church-site.com/admin
Members sign in on your website’s member section or through the Congregate Members app.

Congregate Admin runs in any modern browser on a computer, tablet, or phone, and there is nothing to install.

Getting Around

The Sidebar:

Every module lives in the left sidebar, grouped by what it does.

Dashboard: your starting page with notifications/action items (if any)
News & Events: Announcements, Blog, Calendar, News
Media & Files: Articles, Photos, Sermons, Shared Files
Membership: Directory, Groups, Interests, User Accounts, Verification
Tools: Attendance, Classes, Finances, Jobs, Leadership CRM, Resources, Songs, Virtual Library, Visitors, Volunteers
Website CMS: File Manager, Pages, Popup, Widgets
Communication: Blocklists, Forms, Lists & Subscribers, Message Center, Sent Logs, Weekly Recap
Configuration: Appearance, Email, Settings

Click a group to expand it. You will only see the groups and items your permissions allow, and only the modules your church has enabled. The sidebar can be collapsed to icons when you want more room to work via the small arrow at the bottom.

The Top Bar:

Your church name, with a link that opens your website in a new tab.
Help icon for support.
Church account icon (super admins only) to manage your Congregate plan, billing, and contacts.
User profile photo/icon, which opens a menu with:
- User Account: shortcut to manage your own username and password.
- Church Account: shortcut to manage your church account (super admins only)
- Color Scheme: light, dark, or contrast styles.
- Sign Out: log out of your account.

The Dashboard:

The Dashboard is the first page you land on. It surfaces the things waiting on you, such as pending user account requests, volunteer and job requests, and blog comments awaiting approval, and announcements from Congregate.

How Modules Work

Learn one module and you have effectively learned them all. Each one follows the same shape:

The list: the module opens on a list of everything in it, such as All Sermons, All Events, All Accounts. Search it, filter it, sort it, tick rows for bulk actions, and page through the results.
The New button: top-right of the list, such as New Sermon, New Group, New Post. This is how you add an entry.
The tabs: the row of tabs under the page title holds the supporting pieces that module needs. For example, Sermons has Speakers, Series, Services, Types, Podcasts, and Transcriptions. Directory has Move Members, Custom Fields, and Photo Wall. Attendance has Overall, Per-Member, Graph, and Reports.
Settings: the last tab. Everything about how the module behaves and how it displays on your website is configured here.

Can’t Find a Module or Feature?

If you can’t find something expected inside of Congregate Admin, it’s almost always one of these cases:

The module isn’t enabled for your church. Disabled modules don’t appear at all.
Your permissions don’t include it. Ask a super admin to add the relevant permission group to your account.
Your church runs in members-only mode. Some churches use Congregate purely for member management, with no public website, so the website-facing tools are hidden.
Your public site runs on WordPress. In that case Pages, Widgets, and Popup are hidden, because WordPress handles them instead.

2. Initial setup in Congregate Admin

This guide takes a brand new account to a working website with members, pages, and permissions in place. Work through the steps in order, since each one builds on the last.

1. Signing in for the first time and changing your default password

Your default admin account, provided when your development site was set up, is a Super Admin account. It can reach everything inside Congregate Admin and it bypasses permission groups entirely, so securing it is the first thing to do.

If the default account has no email address on it, Congregate stops you at a Complete Your Account Setup window before it will let you into the console. Add an email address and choose a new password of at least 8 characters. The email address is your recovery address: it is what the Forgot your password? link on the sign-in screen uses, so use one you can actually receive mail at.

To change a password later, or to change one on any other account:

Go to Membership › User Accounts › All Accounts.
Find the account, open the three-dot menu at the end of its row, and choose Change Password.
Your own account is one click away: open the avatar menu at the top right and choose User Account.

After changing your own password, sign out from the avatar menu and sign back in with the new one.

2. Configuring your website’s basic settings

Go to Configuration › Settings.

Website Details: your church or website name, website URL, website status, time zone, and any custom header codes or tracking scripts.
Header & Footer: the text that appears above and below every page.
Display: menu and sidebar options for your public site.
Google Analytics: your GA4 ID (optional).
Passage Hover Display: whether Bible references on your site expand on hover, and which translation to use.
Email Settings: your default or fallback email address. The sender name is your church name and is set from Website Details.
Forms: who receives Ask a Question and Send a Message submissions, and the subject lines used (if applicable).
Member Dashboard: which modules members see when they sign in.
Google Cloud/Maps API: keys for the modules that plot locations on a map (optional).

Important: leave Website Status set to Development (Search Engine Inaccessible) until your site has launched and your domain name is configured. That setting controls whether search engines are allowed to index your site, and switching it to Live (Search Engine Accessible) too early lets an unfinished site into search results. For the same reason, do not change your Website URL until your domain is configured and live. See our documentation on launching your website and follow it before changing either field.

3. Setting up your pages and navigation menu

Go to Website CMS › Pages. The All Pages tab lists every page on your site in the order it appears in your navigation menu.

Drag a page by its handle to move it up or down.
Drag a page to the right to indent it, which makes it a sub-page of the page above and puts it in that page’s dropdown menu.
New Page, at the top right, creates a page.
The three-dot menu on each row edits the page, assigns a module to it, switches it between Published and Draft, or archives it.

A page set to Draft stays in Congregate Admin but disappears from your site, which is how you take a page down temporarily. Archiving removes it from the list entirely, and archived pages can be restored from the Archived panel below the tree, so a page is never lost to a mis-click.

4. Setting up your homepage

Where your homepage content comes from depends on your template, which you choose under Configuration › Appearance › Templates.

Homepage content comes from one or both of these:

Page Designer theme homepages are built like any other page in Website CMS › Pages.
Legacy theme homepages are made from widgets, under Website CMS › Widgets.

A widget can be an image, a block of text, HTML, or embed code, or one of the built-in feeds: Recent Sermons, Recent News, Recent Articles, Upcoming Events, or Recent Blog Posts. Each widget appears in one of three places: Homepage, Sidebar, or Homepage Slideshow. Drag widgets to set the order they appear in, and open the Homepage Slideshow entry to manage its images, including showing or hiding individual slides.

5. Understanding how modules are displayed on your site

Congregate’s modules, such as sermons, news, blog, and the directory, each appear on their own dedicated page on your site. You need one page per module you want to display, and a page can host at most one module.

This is set up from the Pages screen rather than from inside each module:

Create a blank page named for the module, for example Sermons.
Position it in the tree where you want it to appear in your navigation menu.
Open the page’s three-dot menu, choose Assign Module, and pick the module. Only modules that are not already assigned somewhere are listed.

To stop displaying a module later, open Assign Module again and unassign it, then set its page to Draft or archive it. The module and its content stay in Congregate Admin, they simply no longer appear on your website.

6. How permissions work

Congregate uses permission-based access control for members and administrators. Administrators decide what everyone else can see and edit.

Go to Membership › User Accounts › Permissions to see the groups already on your site. Click New Group to create one, give it a name, and tick the features its members should have access to. Turning on Add to Default Permission Groups pre-selects that group whenever a new account is created.

You can create an unlimited number of groups.
An account can belong to several groups at once, and its access is the total of everything those groups allow.
A Super Admin account bypasses permission groups completely.

Most churches end up with a handful of groups: one for regular members, one for members allowed to see additional content, one for leaders, and one for administrators.

7. Populating your member directory

The directory is the hub for everything member-related, including user accounts. Members need to exist in the directory before you can use any member-facing module.

Go to Membership › Directory. Add people one at a time with the New Member button, or use the Import/Export tab to load your whole directory at once.

The same module holds Custom Fields for the extra information your church tracks and Move Members for shifting people between families.

8. Creating user accounts

Go to Membership › User Accounts › All Accounts and click New Account. You will be asked for:

A username.
Link to Directory Member: search for the person this account belongs to. This is required for anyone in your directory, and it is what connects the account to their member record.
Email: shown only when no directory member is linked, since a linked member already has one.
Password: at least 8 characters.
Account Type: User or Super Admin. A User’s access comes entirely from its permission groups. A Super Admin bypasses all permissions and can reach everything, so permission groups are ignored for that type.
Permission Groups: enable the groups this account belongs to.

The Requests tab holds account requests from members waiting on your approval, and the Invitations tab lets you invite members to create their own accounts.

9. Configuring your features and modules

With settings, pages, permissions, and accounts in place, you can set up the individual modules you plan to use. Each one has its own Settings tab covering how it behaves and how it displays, and most have supporting tabs for the pieces they need, such as speakers and series for sermons or categories for the calendar.

3. Introduction to feature modules

1. Go to the “features” page on our website

Visit the features page on our website to learn more about any feature module. Click into its details page to read more about what the feature does, how it does it, how it helps, and who it’s for.

2. Go deeper with documentation

If a feature module interests you, visit the documentation page on our support website and read the documentation for that specific feature module to learn how to set up the module and add data/content.

3. Activate/deactivate feature modules

Modules each appear on their own dedicated page on your site. You need one page per module you want to display, and a page can host at most one module.

This is set up from the Pages screen rather than from inside each module:

Create a page named for the module, for example Sermons.
Position it in the tree where you want it to appear in your navigation menu.
Open the page’s three-dot menu, choose Assign Module, and pick the module. Only modules that are not already assigned somewhere are listed.

4. Initial member login experience

1. Requesting or accepting an account (optional)

If you allow members to request/register for an account, simply instruct them to go to the members section of your website and click Register. After they complete the form and verify their email address, an administrator will be notified and he or she can approve or deny the request.

If you have sent account invitations to members requesting that they register for an account, after they complete the form an administrator will be notified and he or she can approve the request.

2. Logging in for the first time

If an administrator has already created a user account for a member, the member can go directly to your members section and login using the username and password provided to him or her. If the member’s account request was approved, the member can return to your members section and login using their username and password.

3. Confirming his or her directory listing and account settings

After logging into his or her account, it is advised that he or she go directly to the My Account page where he or she can review his or her directory listing (with permission) and account preferences (such as participation, communication, etc). This will allow the member to see and learn where these types of settings and preferences are controlled so if in the future he or she wishes to make changes, he or she knows where they are located.

4. Accessing member-only features/module pages

Members can then view pages inside the members section of your website based on the permission group(s) they are included in.

5. Congregate Members mobile app deployment

1. Launch your website first

Your website must be launched and live at your domain name before members should access your content through the mobile app.

2. Ensure members have user accounts

Members cannot register or create an account via the Congregate Members app; they need to already have an active in order to log in.

3. Download the Congregate Members app

Members can search for and download the “Congregate Members” app from their device’s app store (Apple App Store or Google Play Store). Members will then enter the URL of your website and log in using their user account.