We've added the ability to add and remove families from a shepherding group directly from the group page. Previously the only way to change this was to edit this on a person's page in the "People" section.

Now when you (as an administrator) visit a shepherding group page, you'll see a new "Edit families" option in the three-dot dropdown menu. From there you'll see a list of all the active families within your church, and can add or remove them from that group.

Note, there is a "Remove families from existing shepherding groups when adding" option in this dialog, which will automatically remove a family from all their existing shepherding groups. This can be really helpful if families only ever exist in one shepherding group in your church.

It's now possible to have up to ten administrators per group or schedule. Previously you could only have one. Also, now when you print a schedule, it will include who manages the schedule.

Today we added a new prayer wall feature to the app, which gives members a place to share prayer requests with other members. To enable this feature, visit the "Prayers" page within your account settings.

By default, all members are able to post prayer requests. However, you can choose to limit this to only administrators. Further, when posting a prayer request, members can choose to have their name shown (the default), or if they prefer, they can post their prayer request anonymously.

The native iOS and Android apps have also been updated to support this feature. When this feature is enabled, you'll see a new prayers button appear in the main navigation. This screen will show your church's latest 15 prayer requests. Please note that (at least for now) you can only create prayer requests in the web app.

A new contribution search page has been added to the giving section. Previously if you (as a treasurer) were looking for a specific contribution, it could be difficult to find, since you had to browse through each individual deposit until you found it.

This new page makes this process much easier, since you can search across all your church's past contributions. You can search by date, amount, contributor, payment method, fund, and receipt status.

Once you've found the contribution(s) you're after, you can click on them to make changes, or delete them, or view the tax receipt associated with them, or even just jump over to the deposit they're within. You can even export the search results to CSV or Excel.

A new "Shepherding group summary with fund totals" statement has been added to the giving section. This statement is very similar to the existing "Shepherding group summary" statement, with the addition of fund totals below each member. This is helpful for understanding which funds a member has contributed to.

In addition to this, we've also improved the design of the form on the giving statements page a little.

If your church uses a third-party sermon archive, such as Sermon Audio, you can now display this on the sermons page instead of the standard Church Social sermon archive.

To enable this feature, go to the "Sermons" settings page, disable the sermon archive (if it isn't already), and then add your third-party HTML embed code.

There is a new "Empty trash" button on the file trash page, which lets you permanently delete all the files in the trash much more quickly. Previously you had to permanently delete each file one at a time.

We have fix a scrolling issue with our search input controls. Previously, if you clicked on the scroll bar in the search input dropdown to scroll through the list of possible items, it would immediately close the dropdown. This has now been resolved.

The families report now has a new "birthdays" column, which lists all the birthdays of the members within that family.

Last week we deployed an update to the app that created a bug where you couldn't edit a family's shepherding groups (wards/districts) from the edit person page in the People section. This issue has been fixed.

Church Social now has a new "statistician" role, which lets churches grant people access to the people and reports sections without making them a full administrator. You can find this setting when editing a person, under the "Access & Privacy" heading.

Statisticians are able to create, edit, and delete people and reports. However, they are not able to edit access roles or office bearer roles. These roles must still be set by an administrator.

Further, to prevent a statistician from gaining access to a "higher" role, they are also not allowed to edit the login information (email and password) for administrators, office bearers or treasurers.

You can now create private groups. Private groups are exactly the same as invite-only groups, except that their membership list is hidden, and only group members are allowed to send messages to those groups. This is helpful for groups where it really doesn't make sense for everyone in the congregation to know who is part of that group.

The following group types can be private:

• Bible studies
• Clubs
• Committees
• Mailing lists

Office bearer and shepherding groups don't have this setting, as they are always invite-only.

The group pages have been updated to now display member photos, as well as the latest messages sent to that group. Note, group messages are only visible to the recipients of those messages.

When editing a person's membership information, Church Social now automatically suggests previously used churches in the "previous church" and "left to church" inputs. These churches are now also included in the "baptism church" and "profession church" suggestions, and vice versa.

Church Social now has a new "report manager" role, which lets churches grant people access to the reports section without making them a full administrator. You can find this setting when editing a person, under the "Access & Privacy" heading.

Note, report managers are able to create, edit and delete custom reports.