Key concepts

A handful of concepts appear throughout the documentation. Having them clear from the start saves confusion later. For short definitions of specific terms, see the Bilingual glossary.

Tenant

A tenant is the maximum unit of isolation in Ministrium. In practice, one tenant equals one church: its members, donations, permissions, and reports are separated from those of any other church on the platform.

The isolation is structural, not cosmetic: it’s enforced by Postgres Row-Level Security before the query returns results. Even if a programming bug forgot to filter by tenant, the database would still not return rows from another church. See Isolation between churches.

Church

The church is the Christian organization that contracts Ministrium. It has legal data (name, address, EIN or tax ID), branding (logo, colors, domain), subscription (plan, billing cycle), and primary language (ES or EN). Each church is exactly one tenant.

A church can have one or several campuses. This matters: if your organization is a denomination that groups several legally independent churches, each church is its own separate tenant (not a campus).

Campus

A campus is a physical location of the church. Every church has at least one (the primary campus). Multi-campus churches operate each one with autonomy: their own check-in kiosk, their own attendance, their own communications campaigns, their own local leaders.

The campus is the natural unit of filtering. Most reports, member lists, and operational views are automatically filtered by the campus the viewing user belongs to, unless they have permission to see several or all.

Member

A member is a person the church recognizes as part of its formal community. The exact definition depends on each church (some require baptism, others a membership class, others an explicit declaration), but at the platform level a member is someone with a complete record, assigned to a household and a campus, with status Active, Inactive, or Transferred.

Prospect

A prospect is someone who has a relationship with the church but is not yet a member: typically a recent visitor or someone captured at an evangelism event. Prospects live in the assimilation pipeline, a configurable sequence of stages (visitor → contact → new member → active member) through which the pastoral team accompanies them until they become members.

The distinction between prospect and member enables honest operational reports: the church sees how many visitors it received this month, how many advanced a stage, and how many stalled.

Household

A household is the family unit a member belongs to: parents, children, other people living at the same address. Ministrium consolidates the record by household, which lets you see at a glance whether the whole family attended the service, whether children are registered at check-in, and what the combined household donation is.

Households are not rigid: a single member can belong to a primary household and, optionally, a secondary household (for example, children of separated parents who attend both homes).

Role

A role is what a user can do inside the church. Ministrium defines 9 functional roles (admin, pastor, supervisor, secretary, accountant, finance, ministry leader, cell leader, member) plus an internal technical role (super_admin) used only by the Ministrium team for support. See Roles and permissions for details.

Campus scope

Each user has a role and, optionally, a campus scope that limits what they can see:

• No restriction → sees all of the church’s campuses.
• Restricted to one campus → sees only that campus.
• Restricted to several campuses → sees the listed campuses (typical for zone supervisors).

The scope is applied structurally: the database filters by campus before returning results. It is not possible to see data outside the assigned scope, not even by mistake.

Audit

The audit is the immutable log of every critical action that happens on the platform: who did what, on which entity, when, and from where. It’s append-only: nobody, not even the Ministrium team, can modify past entries. It’s retained for 7 years in compliance with financial regulations. See Audit and logs.

Accounting batch

A batch is a group of donations closed for accounting purposes: typically all donations received on a date or at a service. Closing a batch freezes it: the donations in the batch are no longer edited and tax-deductible receipts are issued against that figure. Batches sync with QuickBooks as a single aggregated entry or with detail per donation, depending on preference.

Recurring donation

A recurring donation is a donor’s commitment to give a fixed amount at a certain frequency (weekly, biweekly, monthly). Stripe Connect charges automatically each cycle, and Ministrium issues the corresponding tax-deductible receipt. Failed recurrences (expired card, insufficient funds) automatically trigger a retry-and-notify sequence to the donor.

Next steps

• Bilingual glossary — short definitions of key terms in ES/EN.
• Quick Start — put these concepts into practice by creating a test church.
• Roles and permissions — what each role can do.