Category Archives: Tip

TIP – Tags for disbanded churches

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Here is a great idea for using “tags” that comes from Carol Sirpless, clerk for Iowa-Missourri Conference. We asked if we could share it with you.

Because we found it to be a pain to keep switching the disbanded churches from inactive to active in order to be able to process a transfer and then remember to switch it back to inactive, and since technically, those members are members of the conference church anyway and their transfers need to be voted by the conf committee, once TAGS became available, we transferred all those people into the conference church records and created a tag for each disbanded org.  So for example we have tags:

Closed-Audubon (IA) Iowa-Missouri Conference 03/01/2012 IA-MO Conference Clerk edit delete
Closed-Cherokee (IA) Iowa-Missouri Conference 02/19/2012 IA-MO Conference Clerk edit delete
Closed-Lake City (IA) Iowa-Missouri Conference 02/19/2012 IA-MO Conference Clerk edit delete

We can now look up in each person’s record to see if there is a tag showing where they were prior to being moved to the conf church and we can search for all the names as a group for any specific disbanded church.

It makes the stats correct with regard to membership count within the conf church (since the members are no longer dispersed among disbanded churches).  The Statistical Recap doesn’t list all those disbanded churches either, cleaning up that report.

When we did this in 2012, I wondered if anything would come up later (hindsight being 20/20) that would make me regret moving these folks’ records from the disbanded churches to the conf church and if tags would be adequate, but in the year since, it has been ALL GOOD.  I highly recommend it for all conferences.

“Declined” & “Denied” explained

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We recently included “Denied”, “Declined” and “Withdrawn” transfers on the Transfers report that clerks print for churches that do not use eAdventist. Apparently the terms “Denied” and “Declined” aren’t widely used because many clerks are wondering what they mean.

“Withdrawn” is used when there is an error in the request — wrong church, wrong name — or the situation has changed — member has already transferred out, member decided not to transfer. Only the requesting church can “withdraw” the request.

However, “Denied” indicates that is no error on the request but the church deems the member not to be “in good and regular standing” — in other words, “Not recommended” for transfer.

Likewise, “Declined” indicates that “Grant” (or “Recommendation”) was received but the requesting church now deems the member not to be “in good and regular standing” — in other words, “Recommendation not accepted”.

In a nutshell, “Withdrawn” is the general-purpose way to abort any transfer request. “Denied” and “Declined” are used to convey that the member is being held accountable for his/her actions — exactly what the transfer process was designed to do.

 

 

TIP: Keeping a second membership list in sync

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Does your church also use another membership database, like CMD or Servant Keeper? If so, you know how challenging it is to keep two databases in sync. You probably wish that eAdventist would just email you whenever one of your records changes.

There is actually a more efficient solution in eAdventist that won’t flood your inbox. The “FURs by Change Date” report allows you to print an families that have changed in a date range that you choose (e.g. 12/1/2010 to 12/31/2011). The report doesn’t indicate which items have changed but is laid out in a easy-to-read format so that you can scan it quickly.

“FURs by Change Date” lets you check for changes as often as you want and even lets you check for older changes that you may have missed.