How to Invite Members, Pastors, and Admins to Your Church

Admin is the only role that can access the dashboard, manage billing, edit church settings, invite users, and publish sermons. Pastors are members who can be attributed as the speaker on sermon cards — they need a first and last name so attribution works correctly. Members can sign in and use the church homepage, including bookmarks, tag favorites, listening progress, and search.

You can change a person's role any time from the Edit dialog. Roles are per church, so the same Sermon Mind account can be an admin in one church and a member in another.

The Invite User button at the top of the page opens a dialog where you enter an email, choose a role, and optionally add a first and last name. If the email matches an existing Sermon Mind account, the user is added to your church right away. If the email is new, an invitation email goes out and the user appears in the list with an "Invited" status until they accept.

Pastor invites require a first and last name because that name is used on sermon cards. Member and admin invites can leave the name fields blank and the user can fill them in when they accept.

The Bulk Invite button opens a dialog where you can download a CSV template, fill it with your team, and upload it. The expected columns are first_name, last_name, role, and email. Role must be one of member, pastor, or admin — anything else defaults to member. Pastor rows require both first and last name.

After you upload the CSV, the dialog shows a preview table with a Status column that flags any row with issues before you send. Successful invites go out one at a time and the progress bar updates as the system works through the list, so you can see exactly where it is.

A user with the "Invited" status has been emailed but has not signed up yet. The row gives you two actions: Resend Invite (sends the invitation email again) and Cancel Invite (revokes the invitation and removes the pending membership). You can also edit a pending invite the same way you edit an active user — change the role, the name, or both, and the changes apply when the user accepts.

If you remove an active user instead of cancelling an invite, the user loses access to your church but keeps their Sermon Mind account. They will still appear on any other church where they have a membership.

In the Edit User dialog, admins have one extra option: a checkbox labeled "Ready for Publishing emails". When it is on, that admin gets an email every time a sermon finishes AI processing and is published. The field is disabled for non-admins because only admins receive these emails.

This is useful when one person uploads and another reviews, or when you want a record of every publish event in your inbox. For larger teams, it is common to turn it off for most admins and leave it on for one or two people who handle review.