Plan Our Christian Life and Ministry Meeting
This guide walks through one planning week from start to finish: create the program, assign the parts, set the technical assignments, publish, and print the notice. The Weekend Meeting works the same way, except that the public talk has its own Public Talk Planning workspace. The feature page Command Center (opens in new tab) shows what CongPlan pulls together while you plan.
What has to be in place first
Three things decide whether assigning is quick or painful:
- Meeting times. They drive the planning range and decide which meetings exist to assign at all. Set them under Congregation > Organisation > Settings > Meetings & calendar.
- Publishers with qualifications. CongPlan suggests people from their qualifications and their field service group. When the suggestion lists look empty, the qualifications are usually the reason.
- Permission. Someone who only plans the midweek meeting does not need full administration. The Midweek planner preset limits editing to that one meeting type.
The full setup order is in First Steps.
Create the week's program
Nobody has to type the program in. Midweek meeting content can be imported from the workbook source; the coordinator then adds participants and technical roles. The meeting is displayed in the S-38 section order:
- Treasures From God's Word
- Apply Yourself to the Field Ministry
- Living as Christians
Congregations that split the meeting across parallel rooms set up Auxiliary Classes. A part can then be marked to be held in all classes: CongPlan duplicates it and gives each class its own assignment slot, instead of you creating and assigning every copy by hand.
Assign the program parts
Open the meeting and turn on Edit Program from the action bar.
- Tap a part to assign it inline, or open its detail sheet for more options.
- Changes save immediately. There is no separate "save all changes" step.
- A short Undo notice appears right after each assignment. The persistent Undo last change control in the program list reaches back further than the latest pick.
- Turn Edit Program back off when you are done. It is a session choice, not a lasting mode.
A Student Assignment can carry an assistant. Both sit on the same part.
The shared person picker keeps search, qualification filters, sorting, recent and upcoming assignments, absences, same-day conflicts, and planning-context badges in one place. It stays open after an inline assignment so you can move straight to the next slot. Technical duties use the same person-selection logic in their planning matrix.
On desktop the meeting editor keeps the program list and selected part side by side. On a narrow screen, one sheet switches between Edit and Sort. Choosing a person saves immediately; there is no second Apply step for a two-person assignment.
What CongPlan shows while you assign
While you edit, CongPlan surfaces signals that are easy to miss in a manual plan:
- existing assignments for the same publisher
- absences that overlap the selected date
- qualifications for the selected role
- recent assignment history
- public-witnessing, field-service, or task context
Conflict markers and a conflict list jump you straight to the affected part.
These signals decide nothing. They make the decision visible before it is committed. Absences behave the same way: in the person pickers an absent candidate is shown struck through and dimmed with an absent (until …) badge, and stays selectable. A coordinator sometimes knows more than the calendar does, and a return flight landing the morning before the meeting is not something the app can judge.
Automatic suggestions for technical assignments are stricter. An absent person is neither scored nor offered there.
Technical assignments
Technical assignments sit in the same detail view, separately from the program parts, each with its full role name next to the person assigned. Which roles exist depends on your congregation's templates, for example stage, microphones, attendants, sound, or video. Keeping them beside the program saves the second list nobody has to hand when someone drops out.
Draft and publish
Saving is not the same as publishing.
- A meeting that has not been published is a draft. It is visible only to editors, not to viewers, not to the assigned participants, and not to the planned chairman. Nobody is notified about a plan that may still change.
- Editors see a Draft badge on the meeting, plus a chip in the overview whose tooltip explains who can see it.
- Publish makes the meeting and all of its assignments live at once. Edits after that are live immediately.
- Unpublish in the ⋮ menu turns a published meeting back into a draft.
For newly created congregations, draft mode is switched on by default.
Publishing is what sends the assigned people their notification. Reminder times are configured separately by category, with up to five preset or custom times. Congregation assignments use the congregation language; assignments in a foreign-language group's meeting use the group language.
Notice board and printout
The Print action on a meeting opens the Print Center with that meeting already selected. Four templates cover a normal planning week:
- Meeting — the program with its assignments as a handout
- Chairman's Worksheet — the same program with space for handwritten notes
- Week Overview — all meetings of one week on a single page
- Month Overview — the month at a glance, for the information board
Choose the style (black & white, subtle colour, full colour), paper size A4 or A5, and orientation before printing. The preview updates as you change them. Instead of printing, you can Download as PDF.
When someone drops out at short notice
Whoever cannot serve a technical assignment, or a meeting part the congregation allows to be handed over, can hand it over in the app. CongPlan asks the people who may take it over and are not absent on that date, and the first person to say yes gets the assignment. See Find a replacement for an assignment.