Flocks: More Room for Shared Reading and Life Together

A reading group changes as its people do. A meeting moves online. A second reading begins before the first is finished. Someone helps lead, another person needs fewer notifications, and an invitation link needs to be replaced.

Recent Flock improvements give those ordinary changes a clearer place in Feason. Leaders can manage a group's details and roles, while members can follow several shared readings and choose how they hear from the group.

The aim is to support a real community's work. A Flock should make it easier to return to a passage and one another without turning group administration into the center of the experience.

Let the group change without starting over

Flock management now supports changes to meeting mode and details after creation. Groups can move between the arrangements that fit them rather than carrying an obsolete description because it was chosen on the first day.

Leaders can appoint co-admins and transfer ownership. Join requests, optional capacity, member removal, bans, and invitation-link resets give a group more control over admission and ongoing participation.

Those controls belong to authorized roles. Having a link or asking to join should not silently grant someone the ability to manage other members. Group access also remains separate from a person's connection to a church page.

For a leader, this means a Flock can continue through a change in responsibility. For a member, it means the group's stated boundaries have a more consistent place in the product.

Keep each reading easy to find

A Flock can now carry more than one concurrent reading. A group might keep a weekly passage alongside a longer course of reading, or finish one conversation while beginning another.

Session-specific links help members open the exact reading being discussed. That is especially useful when a message mentions a passage from an earlier week: the link can point back to that session instead of asking everyone to search through the room.

Shared reflection then has a stable context. People can revisit the text and earlier responses before adding another thought, keeping the conversation connected to what the group actually read.

Open Flocks to find or return to a group, and use Scripture for the wider passage around an assigned reading.

Choose which notifications are useful

Persisted member preferences give notification choices a place across web and iPhone. The point is to help a person keep up with the group in a way they can sustain.

An urgent conversation, a new reading, and an ordinary reply may not deserve the same level of interruption for every member. Quiet participation can still be real participation.

Changing a preference should not be mistaken for leaving the community. A person may need fewer notifications during work, caregiving, or a demanding season and still want to return to the group when they have room.

Add a short activity when it fits

Hosted trivia offers a different form of gathering: a five- or ten-question round, a room code, and a host who controls the session. It can work as a brief shared activity without asking the group to turn its ongoing reading into a competition.

The round's timing and results describe the game. They do not rank the group's members by faithfulness or interpretive maturity. A good conversation about a difficult passage may begin precisely where the quick answers end.

A clearer invitation to a live voice room is next

The new member picker lets someone in an active voice room invite existing Flock members, with an in-app notification and push delivery when eligible. Its backend is deployed, and its native interface is included in 1.4.41 build 426 in internal TestFlight as of October 15. The public App Store version remains 1.4.40.

The native invitation controls are therefore upcoming for public App Store users. Membership, blocking, room occupancy, and notification permissions still apply; an invitation does not force someone into a call or guarantee that a device will display a push.

The direction is simple: help people gather when a real conversation is happening, preserve the group's membership boundaries, and let an invitation remain an invitation. The quality of life together will still depend on how the people in the room listen.