Logging Pastoral Visits and Contacts

Shepherd keeps two different records of your pastoral touch: contact logs (lightweight) and pastoral visits (substantive). Understanding the distinction will save you time and keep your Dashboard honest.

Contact vs. visit

A contact log is a quick, utilitarian record:

• A phone call to confirm a Sunday ride.
• A text checking in on a sick child.
• A hallway conversation after service.
• An email sent, a card mailed.

A pastoral visit is a substantive encounter — something you’d write about in a pastoral journal:

• A hospital visit.
• A counseling session.
• A home visit with a homebound member.
• A bereavement call after a death.
• A discipleship or catechesis meeting.

Both count as “touch” for Dashboard disengagement math. The difference is in what Shepherd records and how it surfaces later. A contact is a one-line entry. A visit carries structured fields: subject, type, confidentiality, follow-up.

Err on the side of logging a contact rather than a visit when you’re not sure — it takes five seconds and still keeps the Dashboard accurate.

Logging a contact

From the Dashboard, the Person detail view, or any person in a list, tap Log Contact (often a swipe action on list rows).

The sheet asks for:

• Date — defaults to now.
• Method — phone, text, email, letter, in-person, social media, other.
• Notes — one or two lines of what was discussed.

Save. The contact appears on the Person detail timeline and resets their “days since touch” for Dashboard purposes.

Logging a visit

From the same places — Dashboard quick action, person detail view, household detail view — tap Log Visit.

The visit sheet has:

• Visit type. General, pastoral counseling, hospital, homebound, bereavement, discipleship, premarital, new member, reconciliation, other.
• Subject. A short title — “Discussed mother’s decline”, “Pre-op anxiety”, “Catechesis #3”. This is what appears in timelines.
• Date and duration. Defaults to now; duration is optional.
• Notes. Long-form — the substance of the visit.
• Confidential. Hides notes behind a confidentiality banner. Counseling and bereavement visits default to confidential.
• Follow-up needed. When turned on, reveals a follow-up date picker.

Save. The visit appears in the person’s timeline and, if you toggled follow-up, is queued for the Dashboard’s Follow-ups Due section on its follow-up date.

Household visits

From the Household detail view, Log household visit opens the visit sheet pre-linked to the head of household. A home visit to the Smith family is usually logged this way — pick head of household, write once, and the visit appears on their person timeline while still being readable as a family event.

Follow-ups

The Dashboard’s Follow-ups Due section is the most-used feature you haven’t used yet. Whenever you end a visit saying “let me get back to you next week,” toggle Follow-up needed, set a date, and trust Shepherd to remind you.

When the follow-up date arrives:

1. A card appears in the Dashboard’s Follow-ups Due section.
2. Tapping the card jumps to the source visit in the person’s timeline.
3. Re-read what you promised. Make the call. Log the new contact or visit.

The original visit doesn’t disappear from Follow-ups Due automatically — log a follow-up contact or visit on the same person, and Shepherd resolves the follow-up.

Homebound visits

Homebound members don’t show up on attendance rolls. Without pastoral visits logged against them, they look invisible to the Dashboard. Shepherd handles this with a specific section:

• Any member whose pastoral status is homebound and whose last pastoral visit was more than half your disengagement thresholdago will surface in Homebound — Needs Visit.

In practice: set homebound on every homebound member, log visits when you make them, and the Dashboard will never let you forget them.

Confidentiality

Visits marked confidential display a banner in the timeline:

This visit is confidential. Tap to view notes.

Notes are revealed on tap. Confidentiality is stored with the visit and respected in exports.

A note on the trust this implies: confidential notes are not yet encrypted at rest. They are protected by your device passcode and your iCloud account security. A future Shepherd release will add field-level encryption for pastoral notes. Until then, treat your device the way you would treat a filing cabinet of paper pastoral notes — with a lock on the door.

Viewing history

The Person detail view shows contacts and visits as two separate timelines. Filter by date range or type from the section headers.

The Household detail view collects visits logged against any household member into a single family-level timeline, so you can see “when was this family last visited?” at a glance.

Exporting

Pastoral visits and contact logs can be exported as CSV from Settings → Export Data. Confidential notes are not included in the CSV export unless you explicitly include them via the “Include confidential notes” toggle. See the Importing and Exporting Data article.