A family moved to Canada last October. Another family quietly stopped attending after a difficult season. One of our long-time members passed away in November. In each case, a well-meaning volunteer asked the same question: "Can you delete them from the list?"
The answer is no. We archive.
Archive is a soft delete
On the member list, the Archive action (shown to admins with the right permission) removes a member from active rosters but preserves the record. Their giving history, their family relationships, their participation in past events — all of it stays in the system, just marked as archived.
They no longer appear in engagement segments or default list views. But if their daughter visits next year and wants a copy of her late father's giving summary, the record is there.
Why this is pastoral, not just technical
Churches are communities of memory. People come and go. Some leave well. Some leave in pain. Some die. Every one of those people was part of your story. Deleting their record is not neutral — it is an act of forgetting.
Archiving lets you manage the active list cleanly while keeping the memory intact. A future pastor can pull up the record years later and see that this person was here, that they were loved, that their life intersected with this church.
A small operational note
Archive is reversible. If a member who moved to Canada returns and wants to rejoin, an administrator can restore the record. Everything they were linked to — family, serving history, giving — comes back with them. That is continuity that a hard delete can never give you.
Disclaimer: This story is fictional and is shared for illustrative purposes only. The churches, people, events, quotes, and statistics described are not real. It was written to showcase features and workflows available in StewardTrack.
