Channels are the open rooms of your church's chat, where members talk. They appear on the left, grouped into categories. Channels come in two kinds: a Text channel is a flowing timeline of messages (the default), and a Forum channel is a board of titled posts — see How do I use threads and forum channels in Chat?
Public and private channels
Public - visible to everyone in your church, and anyone can join.
Private - hidden and invite-only, marked with a lock icon. You can't self-join a private channel.
Categories
Channels are organized under categories to keep the list tidy. Only chat admins create and name categories, and a new channel drops to the bottom of its category.
Channel naming rules
Channel names work like handles, not free text — this is the most common reason a name is rejected.
Allowed: lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores, and emoji or accented characters.
Not allowed: spaces and punctuation — so Youth Group! fails; use youth-group.
Mixed case is accepted but automatically lowercased.
Up to 200 characters, and the name must be unique.
Tip: Inside a group's channels, the names general and group-(number) are reserved and can't be reused.
Renaming a channel, changing its privacy, or deleting it requires Full Write Chat permission
Roles inside a channel
A channel has its own admins and members, separate from a person's church-wide permissions. The person who creates a channel becomes its admin.
Channel admin - can invite, remove (kick), ban, and promote members, and make another member an admin.
Member - the default role; can take part in the channel.
Inviting people to a channel
Private channels and restricted group channels grow by invitation.
Open the channel's people or settings menu and choose to invite.
Pick the people you want to invite.
A channel invite sends the person a branded email and lands in their Invitations list, where they can Accept or Ignore it. The sender can cancel an invite while it's still pending. You don't invite people to public channels — they just join those directly — and a duplicate invite to someone already invited or already a member is quietly skipped.
Restricted (invite-only) group channels
Inside a small group, a group admin can add extra channels. A normal group channel includes the whole group automatically. A restricted channel is invite-only: only group admins and the creator start in it, and everyone else must be invited. Only group admins can create these, and only restricted group channels accept invitations.
Joining, leaving, and deleting
Anyone can join a public channel. Someone who has been banned from a channel cannot rejoin it.
You can leave a channel you joined yourself. You can't individually leave a group or service-plan channel — that membership follows the group roster.
Deleting a channel permanently removes it and everything in it, including its threads and posts. There is no "archive" action for a normal channel.