Building Your Worship Team in PewPlan
Most Sabbath programmes involve more than one person. Here's how to bring your team into PewPlan, give them the right level of access, and keep things running smoothly when multiple people are working on the same service.
Most Sabbath programmes are not built by one person.
There's the head elder who sets the order of service. The pianist who needs to confirm which hymns are scheduled. The Pathfinder leader checking whether the investiture item is still on. The deacon who prints the bulletins and needs the final version to be final.
PewPlan was built for exactly this — multiple people, different responsibilities, one shared programme. Here's how to set that up.
Inviting someone to your organisation
Every church's programmes live inside an organisation. To work on them together, your team members need to be part of that organisation.
Go to Settings → Members, enter a team member's email address, and choose their role. If they already have a PewPlan account, they're added immediately and receive a confirmation email. If they don't, they'll receive an invitation — when they sign in with Google for the first time, they'll be taken straight to your organisation.
Invites are valid for seven days. If someone doesn't get around to signing in before then, you can send a fresh invitation from the same Members page.
Getting roles right
There are three roles in PewPlan, and the difference matters.
Owners have full control: they can create and edit programmes, manage who's in the organisation, change settings, and handle billing. Every organisation starts with one owner — the person who created it — and you can promote others to owner if you need to share that responsibility.
Editors can create and edit programmes and use the media library, but they can't manage members, touch billing, or change organisation settings. This is the right role for most of your team: your elder, your music coordinator, your youth leader.
Viewers can see programmes but not edit them. Useful for someone who just needs to follow along with what's planned — a deacon checking the order of service, or a visitor from the conference office — without the risk of accidentally moving things around.
When in doubt, give people Viewer access first. It's easy to upgrade later.
When someone finds your programme through a share link
If you share a programme link publicly — posted in a WhatsApp group, printed in last week's bulletin — anyone who follows it can see the programme. But some people may want more than that. They may want to be added to your organisation so they can help build future programmes.
When a signed-in PewPlan user visits your share link, they'll see an option to request access. That request comes through to all owners of your organisation by email. You can approve or decline from the Members page in your settings.
This is a useful flow for onboarding new team members without having to know their email address in advance. Someone new joins your worship team, they find the share link, they request access, and you approve them from the notification.
Working on the same programme at the same time
PewPlan handles concurrent editing. If two people open the same programme and start making changes, their edits don't overwrite each other.
What you'll see is a lock on individual blocks. When someone is actively editing a block, other editors see it as locked — they can read it but can't move or change it until the first person is done. This prevents the frustrating situation where someone's changes silently disappear because a colleague saved over them at the same moment.
In practice, the simplest approach is still to divide responsibilities before you start: one person handles the music, another handles the liturgy, another handles announcements. But if you do end up working in the same area at the same time, the locking keeps things from getting confused.
A note on plan limits
On the Free plan, each organisation can have up to three editors (plus any number of viewers and one owner). That's enough for many smaller churches.
If your team is larger, the Pro plan removes the editor limit and gives you more storage for your media library. If you're part of a church conference or a larger group of churches, the Corporate plan allows a group administrator to bring multiple congregations together under a single subscription.
You can see what's available on the pricing page.
The practical short version
If you're setting up for the first time: go to Settings → Members, invite your head elder and music coordinator as Editors, and share the programme link with anyone else who needs to follow along. That's genuinely all you need for a typical Sabbath service.
The rest — roles, access requests, locking, corporate groups — is there when you need it.