Lifecycle stages — and the honesty behind them
A lifecycle stage is a gentle, one-word read of where a household stands: *visitor, newcomer, registered, engaged, drifting, lapsed,* or *reconnected*. (*Visitor* simply means someone we know by name who isn't attached to a registered household yet.) It shows as a small chip on a person's profile, beside their directory status.
It is an inference from evidence, never a score and never a judgment on anyone's faith.
How the stage is worked out
- Envelope households. Presence at Sunday and Holy Day Mass is the measure the parish has always used. If a household's envelope comes back most Sundays, that's strong presence; if it has largely stopped, that's the signal — always shown as *"envelope evidence: 9 of the last 13 Sundays,"* never as a claim about attendance.
- Electronic givers. A household on bank transfer or automatic card giving leaves no envelope in the basket, so Vianney reads their recent electronic gift as a presence-level signal, alongside recorded contact — a visit, a reply, ministry service. The evidence line says what it actually knows — *"Electronic giving on file — last gift …"* — and the caveat says the rest: *"gauged from electronic giving and recorded contact, not attendance."* It never claims they were at Mass; it shows the household is still here. Before 20 August 2026 that steady giving read as silence, and faithful families surfaced as drifting.
- Households with no envelope and no electronic giving. Vianney falls back to recorded contact alone and says so plainly with a *"no weekly signal"* caveat. A data gap is never treated as a verdict.
- No signal at all. When there is genuinely nothing on file, the household is shown as a blind spot — an honest "we don't know," not a conclusion.
Calibration season
When your parish first turns Engagement on, stages are visible only to the pastor for a while. This lets Father review whether the reads ring true for the families he knows before they show to the rest of the staff. When he's satisfied, he turns them on for everyone from Settings → Engagement.
Overriding a stage
The pastor can set a household's stage by hand — that override always wins, and is recorded. Use it when you know something the records don't.
Settings → Engagement also covers Admissions
If your parish uses the School module, the same Settings → Engagement tab that holds this lifecycle-stage policy also carries the Admissions funnel's stages and three school-specific reminders — an inquiry with no tour yet, an application awaiting a decision, and the graduating-family follow-up, which you set to a calendar month of the year (1–12, so 4 is April) rather than a number of days — they live together because both are lifecycle-style, evidence-based settings.