Help & FAQ

Quick answers to the most common questions about setting up and running Steward. Can't find what you need? Email us at support@injil-ai.com — we're happy to help.

Getting started

How do I sign in?

Just enter your email address and password — there's no need to pick your church from a list first, Steward finds it from your email. (If you happen to use the same email at more than one church on Steward, we'll ask which one you mean.) If your account has two-factor authentication turned on, we'll ask for a code from your authenticator app after your password. Forgot your password? Use the Forgot password link on the sign-in screen and we'll email you a reset link.

How do I set up my church?

When you first sign in to the admin panel, your dashboard shows a Get started checklist with four steps: set up your church profile, import your members, invite your team, and schedule your first service. Work through them in any order — the checklist ticks each one off automatically as you go, and you can dismiss it once you're done.

Where do I set my church name, logo, and service times?

Go to Church Profile (under System in the sidebar, or /settings/church). There you can set your church name, upload a logo, add your address and weekly service times, set your time zone, and choose a brand colour. Your logo and service times also appear to members in the mobile app, shown in your church's time zone — so set the time zone correctly if your church isn't in the default region.

How do I invite other admins?

On the Church Profile page, use the Invite admins section. Enter one or more email addresses and we'll send each person an invitation. They click the link, set their own password, and become an admin — there are no shared logins or passwords to pass around. Invitations expire after 14 days; you can re-send or revoke a pending invite at any time.

Can I give someone limited admin access?

Yes. When you add or edit a person on the People page, set their role to Ministry Leader — a restricted admin who can run the day-to-day side of the console (ministry teams, services, rostering, courses, events, content, and children's check-in) but can't see pastoral and discipleship reports, manage member accounts, or invite other admins. It's a good fit for a worship or kids' ministry coordinator who needs to organise their own area without full access to everyone's records.

Members & families

How do I import my existing members?

Go to People → Import (/people/import). Upload a CSV, map your columns to Steward's fields, preview the result, then confirm. We support exports from Planning Center and Breeze directly, as well as plain CSV files. The preview flags duplicate emails and missing required fields before anything is saved, so you can import with confidence.

Can members be grouped into families?

Yes. Use Families to create households and add members with roles (head, spouse, child, other). Family grouping shows up in the member directory and powers children's check-in and family attendance views.

Can I add children who don't have an email address?

Yes. On the Families page, use Add Child to create a child record with just a name (and optionally a date of birth) — no email or password required, since children don't sign in. They're added to the household and can be used for children's check-in right away. You can add an email later if they ever need their own login.

Can members control what's visible in the directory?

Yes. Each member can hide their phone, email, or address from the directory in their mobile app privacy settings. As an admin you can also set whether the directory is visible to all members or approved members only.

Attendance & beacons

How does attendance tracking work?

Steward detects attendance automatically using small Bluetooth (BLE) beacons placed at your venue. When a member with the app arrives, their phone quietly records their attendance — no sign-in sheets or QR codes required. Manual check-in is always available as a fallback.

How do I set up beacons?

Go to Beacons in the admin panel to add each beacon (UUID, major, minor) and set your church's location and check-in radius. Each plan includes a set number of beacons. If you're not sure how to configure yours, email support@injil-ai.com and we'll walk you through it.

Why do some members not show as attending?

A member must have the Steward app installed, be signed in, and have Bluetooth and notifications enabled for automatic detection to work. Plenty of people won't tick all those boxes — someone without a smartphone, an older member who keeps Bluetooth off, or a child who doesn't carry a phone at all — so attendance can also be recorded by hand at the door (see the next question) or by a family member. This matters for more than tidiness: attendance feeds the at-risk and engagement reports, so a faithful attender who simply isn't detected looks the same as one who stopped coming.

Can we check people in by hand at the door?

Yes. Go to Attendance → Check In, pick the service, and you get your membership as a searchable list with a check-in button beside each person. Greeters get the same list on the Members tab of the greeter kiosk, next to guest capture. Admins, ministry leaders and greeters can all use it — it's designed for a volunteer at a welcome desk working from a paper roll, not just for the office.

Worth knowing:

• It never overwrites what's already there. If someone's phone already recorded them, the sheet shows that and leaves the original record alone — so it's safe to run a roll call over a congregation that's mostly detected automatically.
• You can catch up on a service you missed recording — admins and ministry leaders can record any service that has already started, within the last 14 days. Greeters can only record the service that's running right now, since the desk is meant for the door rather than for editing history. Either way the service picker only offers what your role can actually record, and the attendance is stamped against that service's own time, so your reports and trends stay correct. You can't check people into a service that hasn't started yet.
• Every record shows where it came from. The sheet labels each row Beacon, Self, By staff or By family; members see "Recorded by …" in their own attendance history in the app; and the attendance CSV export has a recordedBy column.
• Undo is on the row. Full admins can remove any attendance record; ministry leaders and greeters can remove only the ones they recorded themselves.
• Checking someone in while the service is actually on still sends them the usual "you're checked in" confirmation. Back-filling a past service doesn't — nobody gets a notification days late.

Can members check in their family?

Yes. On the app's attendance screen, anyone who belongs to a household sees a Check in my family card listing the rest of their family, with a check-in button beside anyone not yet recorded — the answer to a parent arriving with three children who don't carry phones. It's deliberately narrow: it only appears while a service is actually running (no back-filling), it only covers people in the same family in Steward, and anyone already detected automatically is left as they are. Only adults can use it — a household member whose family role is child sees the same list as read-only status, so a teenager with the app can check themselves in but can't record anyone else.

Why did automatic check-in stop working on an iPhone?

On iPhone, automatic check-in needs Location access set to Always. iOS occasionally asks members to switch this to "While Using the App" — if they do, background detection pauses and the app shows an "Automatic check-in is paused" banner with a one-tap link to fix it in Settings. They can still check in manually in the meantime, and switching the setting back to Always restores automatic check-in.

What does "records pending sync" mean in the app?

If a member's phone detects them at church while it has no usable connection, the check-in is saved on the device and a strip appears on their attendance screen showing how many records are waiting. These upload by themselves once the phone is back online; tapping the strip uploads them straight away. If the server permanently rejects a record — for example the beacon it saw is no longer registered to your church — the app now says so explicitly rather than letting the count quietly disappear, so nobody assumes an attendance was recorded when it wasn't.

Does Steward track where our members are?

No. Steward never records continuous location traces or GPS trails. What it detects is proximity to the Bluetooth beacons your church has registered — nothing else. iPhones and Android phones both require "Always" location permission before any app is allowed to notice a beacon in the background, which is why Steward asks for it.

The two platforms schedule that detection differently, and we'd rather be precise about it: on Android, background detection is switched on only around your scheduled service times. On iPhone, Apple gives apps no reliable way to switch beacon monitoring back on from the background, so Steward leaves it registered the whole time a member is signed in — which means their phone can briefly wake at other hours. If that happens outside a service window, the server discards the result and no attendance record is created, and the fine-grained proximity checking only runs during service windows. Monitoring is removed entirely when they sign out. Our Privacy Policy sets this out in full.

Does Steward remind members who stop attending?

Yes. A member who usually attends but hasn't checked in gets a gentle "We missed you" reminder on their phone. Steward looks at the whole week — any service, not just Sunday — so someone who comes to a Saturday-evening or weeknight service is never nudged by mistake. Members can turn these reminders off in their app notification settings.

Services & rostering

What's the difference between a service and an event?

A service is a worship gathering with attendance tracking and team rostering. An event is a general church activity (fellowship, outreach, youth night) that members can see and RSVP to. Create services under Services and events under Events.

How do I roster volunteers to a service?

Open the service's roster and use Add Person: choose the team, then the person (optionally a sub-team or position). There's no need to set the team up first — Steward allocates it to the service automatically when you roster someone from it. You can still use Allocate Team to lay out a service's teams up front if you prefer, and both stay open so you can add several people in a row. You can roster the same person more than once (across teams, or in different positions) — Steward flags anyone double-booked with a warning badge so you can catch it on purpose.

Can I reuse last week's roster?

Yes. In the roster, choose Copy from previous and pick an earlier service — Steward suggests the most recent one with the same name, or failing that the same service type. It copies that service's teams and rostered people across and then tells you exactly what was copied and what was skipped. It's safe to run twice: anyone already rostered isn't duplicated. People who have since left the team (or been removed from your church) are skipped with a reason, and one-off fill-ins are never carried over — those are deliberately a one-service arrangement.

Someone dropped out — can I roster a fill-in who isn't on the team?

Yes. In Add to Roster, switch to the Fill-in tab and search your whole church: any approved member can cover the slot for that one service. They're marked with an amber Fill-in badge on the roster and receive the usual serving emails, but they're not added to the team — so team lists, member counts, and serving history stay accurate, and they won't be picked up by next week's roster.

Do volunteers get reminded when they're rostered to serve?

Yes. When you add someone to a roster they receive a "you're rostered" email, and everyone serving gets a reminder email the day before the service. These serving emails always go out (they're not part of the optional notification categories members can mute).

Children's ministry

How does children's check-in work?

Mark which ministry team(s) run children's ministry — open the team under Ministry Teams and switch it on there — and everyone on those teams — along with your admins — can check children in and out for each service. There are four ways to do it, and they all write to the same register:

• The Children page in the admin panel, for the office or a laptop at the kids room.
• A parent's own phone, from the Steward app.
• A volunteer's phone, from the Kids Ministry screen in the app.
• A tablet kiosk at the kids-room door, for visiting families whose children aren't in Steward yet.

Apart from the admin page, all of these work only while a service is actually running — there's no service picker and no back-filling, so nobody can quietly rewrite last Sunday's kids register.

Can parents check their own children in from the app?

Yes. When a service is on, a parent sees a Kids check-in card on the app's attendance screen listing their children, with a Check in button beside each one and a one-tap Check out when it's time to collect them. It only covers children in their own household in Steward, and only an adult in that household can use it.

This is the answer to the queue at the kids-room door: families who are already members can check in on the walk across the car park.

Can our kids-ministry volunteers check children in from their phones?

Yes. Anyone on a children's-ministry team (and any admin) gets a Kids Ministry entry on the app's attendance screen. It opens a live roster of every child currently checked in for the service, a search box to find and check in anyone else, and one-tap check-out on each row — designed for a teacher standing in the room rather than someone at a desk.

How do we check in visiting children who aren't members?

Use the kids kiosk: open /kids-kiosk in a browser on a tablet at the kids-room door. It's a full-screen, large-button page with two things on it — check a guest child in (guardian's name, mobile number, child's name, and any notes such as an allergy), and check one out by looking up that mobile number.

Worth knowing:

• Sign the tablet in once. Create a user with the Greeter role, add them to your children's-ministry team, and sign the kiosk in as that account — it stays signed in and shows nothing but the kiosk. There's deliberately no sidebar link to it, so it isn't something staff wander into by accident.
• Phone numbers are forgiving. +61 400 123 456 at drop-off matches 0400 123 456 at pickup — Steward stores Australian numbers in one canonical form, so parents don't have to remember which way they typed it.
• Guests show up alongside everyone else. The Children page has a Guests section for the selected service showing each visiting child, their guardian's name and number, and who collected them; volunteers can check them out from there too.
• No account is created. A guest check-in is a record of a visit, not a member record — so guests don't appear in your directory or your attendance figures. If the family sticks around, add them properly under People or Families.
• The kiosk knows when nothing is on: outside a service it shows a plain "check-in is closed" screen, and it opens by itself when the next service starts.

Who is allowed to collect a child?

When a volunteer checks a child out, Steward shows who may pick this child up — every adult in their household, plus anyone added to the child's authorised-pickup list on the Children page, where you can record the relationship (grandmother, nanny, and so on). Family adults are included automatically, so you don't have to enter the parents of every child before you can use check-in.

Check-out itself is one tap against that list rather than a forced selection — a teacher with a room full of children shouldn't have to work a dropdown while a parent waits. Steward records which volunteer released each child, and when a parent checks out in their own app it records that parent as the person who collected them. Two people checking the same child out at once can't overwrite each other: the first one wins and the second is told the child has already gone.

For guests at the kiosk, pickup is the guardian's mobile number plus the collecting person's name, which is then shown on the Children page as Collected by ….

Does children's check-in count towards attendance?

Yes, for children who are in Steward. Checking a child in also records their service attendance, marked as recorded by staff or by family depending on who did it — so children stop being invisible in your attendance reports, and a child already detected by beacon is never double-counted or downgraded.

Two details worth knowing: volunteers can only record attendance for a service that's currently running (admins and ministry leaders keep the usual 14-day catch-up window), and guest children never create attendance records, because attendance is counted against real member records and a guest doesn't have one. The kids register itself is always saved either way.

Classes & courses

Can I track classes like baptism or membership courses?

Yes. Use Courses to run multi-session classes — baptism, membership, discipleship, sending, or Safe Church / safeguarding training. Create the course, set how many sessions someone needs to attend to complete it, then record attendance each session. When someone reaches the required number of sessions, Steward marks them complete and records the matching discipleship milestone on their record. Completing a class is tracked as preparation — your pastors still decide when someone advances a discipleship stage.

Small groups & group health

How do small groups and Bible studies work?

Create groups under Small Groups — small groups, Bible studies, men's, women's, youth, and more — each with a leader and members. When a group meets (often in someone's home rather than at church), the leader or an admin records the session from the group's Sessions tab: who came, any visitors, and notes. Members see the groups they belong to in the mobile app's Groups tab.

Can I see how our small groups are doing?

Yes — the Group Health report (under Discipleship in the sidebar) gives full admins a pastoral read on every group, across three tabs:

• Group Health — a sortable table of each group's attendance rate, how often it meets, and when it last met, with a Stale flag for groups that have gone quiet. It shows your growth groups by default; you can filter by category or date range, or export to CSV.
• Trends — sessions, attendance, and visitors over time, grouped by week or month.
• Member Drift — growth-group members whose meeting attendance has recently dropped off, sorted by how urgently they need a follow-up, each with a link straight to their journey.

Group Health is a discipleship report, so it's available to full admins only — not Ministry Leaders.

Can I see stats for a single group?

Yes. Open any group on the Small Groups page and choose the Insights tab. It shows the group's all-time sessions, average attendance, attendance rate, visitor count, and when it last met, along with a recent-sessions trend and which members have been least consistent lately — a quick way for a leader to spot who to check in on.

Communication

How do I send an announcement or push notification?

Create an announcement under Content, and choose to send a push notification when you publish it. Members receive it on their phones and in the app's announcement feed. Members can opt in or out of notification categories in their app settings.

Can I choose the Bible verse members see each day?

Not at the moment. The mobile home screen still shows a verse, but it's currently a fixed public-domain one (Psalm 46:10, KJV) rather than a pool you curate. We've put the admin-managed verse list on hold while we work through Bible-translation licensing — most modern translations are copyrighted, and we'd rather not publish text on your church's behalf that we don't have the rights to. Nothing has been deleted: any verses your church had already added are kept as they are, and would return with the feature. Announcements, sermons and other content are unaffected.

Account, billing & data

What do the plans include?

Plans differ by number of adult attenders, venues, beacons, and features (pastoral-care reports, children's check-in, rostering, support level). See the pricing section on our website, or email support@injil-ai.com for help choosing.

What happens if we go over our plan's attender limit?

Each plan covers a number of approved adult attenders — children, members still pending approval, and removed members don't count towards it. If your count grows past your plan's limit, the admin panel shows a gentle reminder banner so you can upgrade when you're ready. We never block you from adding members or interrupt your services. Email support@injil-ai.com to change plans.

How often do members have to sign in again?

Rarely. As long as someone opens the app at least once a month, they stay signed in — each use extends their session by another 30 days, up to a maximum of a year before we ask them to sign in properly again. Members who leave the app untouched for over a month will be asked to sign in next time. (An earlier issue where iPhones could show the sign-in screen to an already-signed-in member has been fixed — a phone that briefly can't read its saved credentials, typically because it's locked, now waits rather than signing anyone out.)

Can we turn on two-factor authentication for our admins?

Yes, for staff accounts — admins, ministry leaders and super admins. Go to Security (under System in the sidebar), scan the QR code with an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, 1Password, Authy and the like all work), and enter the six-digit code to confirm. From then on that account is asked for a code after its password, both in the admin panel and in the mobile app.

When you switch it on we show you eight recovery codes, once — save them in a password manager or on paper. Each one works a single time and they're the way back in if the authenticator device is lost. You can regenerate a fresh set whenever you like, which retires the old ones.

Two-factor is opt-in per account, and members never see it. To turn it off, use Disable on the same page: it asks for your password and a current code, so neither a stolen phone nor a hijacked browser session is enough on its own.

An admin is locked out of two-factor — what now?

Any of their unused recovery codes will get them straight in. Failing that, another full admin can open People, find the person, and use Reset MFA — that clears their enrolment so they can sign in with their password alone and set up an authenticator again. As a brute-force guard we also stop accepting codes for 15 minutes after five wrong ones in a row on an account; Reset MFA clears that too. If the only admin with access is the one locked out, email support@injil-ai.com.

Someone lost their phone, or left the church — how do I lock them out?

Open People, find the person, and use Reset password. As well as setting a new password immediately, this signs out every device that account is signed in on, usually within about 15 minutes. The same applies when a member resets their own password with the Forgot password link — a password change always ends the other sessions. If you want the account gone entirely rather than locked, remove them instead (see below).

Is our data backed up?

Yes. Your church's database and uploaded files (profile photos, church logos, and content images) are backed up automatically every night, and each backup is copied off-site to storage in Sydney, so the copies stay in Australia too. We also rehearse restores periodically — restoring a recent backup into a scratch database and checking it — because an untested backup isn't really a backup. Our Security & Reliability page has the detail.

If I remove a member, can I get them back?

Yes, within a grace period. Removing a member doesn't erase them straight away — for 30 days the account is held in a recoverable state and you can Restore it from the People page (their original login keeps working). After the grace period the record is permanently anonymised and can no longer be restored. This gives you a safety net against accidental removals.

Can I export my data?

Yes — you own your data and can export it any time. The admin panel exports members, attendance records, and family data as CSV. There's no lock-in.

What happens to our data if we stop using Steward?

If your church closes its Steward account, we archive it first: everyone is signed out and the account is paused, but nothing is deleted yet — so it can be fully restored if you change your mind. After a 30-day grace period the church and all of its data are permanently deleted and can't be recovered. Planning to leave? Export your data first (see above), then email support@injil-ai.com and we'll take care of it.

Mobile app

How do members get the app?

Steward is available on the App Store and Google Play. Members download the app, register, and once an admin approves their account they can check in, read announcements, browse sermons and events, and see the groups they belong to.

What permissions does the app ask for, and why?

When a member first opens Steward it walks them through a short setup asking for Bluetooth (so their phone can detect the beacons at your venue), Location (which lets check-in happen automatically in the background, even when the app is closed), and Notifications (for announcements and reminders). Automatic check-in works best with all three, but members can skip any of them and still use the app and check in manually. (On iPhone, background check-in specifically needs Location set to Always — see the iPhone question above.) Location is used only to detect your church's registered beacons, never to track where members go; see Does Steward track where our members are? above for exactly what each platform does.

Does the app support dark mode?

Yes. Members can choose Light, Dark, or System (match the phone) in the app's appearance settings, and the whole app — including the status bar and headers — follows their choice.

Where's the member directory in the app?

The mobile app has a Groups tab where members see the small groups and Bible studies they're part of. Other members' contact details still appear — with each person's privacy settings applied — when you open someone from a group roster.

A new member registered but can't sign in — why?

New registrations require admin approval. Approve them under People, and they'll be able to sign in.

More help

Still stuck? Email us at support@injil-ai.com. For account security concerns, contact us immediately at the same address.