Creating A Service Type & Setting Up Dates and Times

A Service Type is a set of plans that are grouped together. Service Types are most commonly used for the different services you advertise or for different ministries in your church. For example, this church has a Sunday Contemporary Worship Service that occurs every week at 9:00AM & 10:30AM, and also a Sunday Traditional Worship Service in another room also at 9AM. In Planning Center, I will create 2 Service Types. The first will be Sunday Contemporary Worship which (since 9AM and 11AM are basically the same thing, I group them into 1 Service Type), and the second will be Sunday Traditional Worship.

Name your Service Type a general name, like "Sunday Morning Worship" or "Jr. High Ministry", not a specific date, like "September 4, 2005". The plans inside your Service Type, however, will have specific dates.

If you plan on scheduling People to each plan in your Serivce Type, you can get a head start by choosing some starter people Categories and Positions. Check any Categories you'd like Planning Center to create for you. Don't worry if they aren't exactly what you need, you can edit them and add more at any time.

Click accept to create your Service Type and your first Plan.

Once you have created your service, it will automatically create a plan called "No dates". To set the dates for your plan, click Add a time in the upper left corner. This will allow you to add any times and dates for this plan. Once you add service times, "No dates" will update to reflect those dates.

Enter the date of your service and then the start and end time. Be careful to pay attention to "am" or "pm". If your service has multiple service times, for instance a 9:00 and a 10:30 service that are the same, just enter the 9:00 start and end time in this box, and then repeat this entire step and add 10:30 as a completely separate time later.

Everything else should be good, so you can click accept. If you want to know what the rest of these options are for, check out our lesson on Adding and Editing Times.

Any Service Times you add are reflected where it previously said 'no dates'.

If you have more times you'd like to setup, continue to Add times as many times as necessary.