That could be done much easier. You would just have to stop “seeing the referents as people”. LOL. ??
What I mean is, if each referent preaches in just one church (all in the same or each in his own, doesn’t really matter), then in the eyes of EM the location has become somewhat obsolete. You won’t need that functionality for your website.
By default the Event has #1 and the location #2 priority, but you could change that around through your setup. So, if you change the slug “location” to “referent” you could use that as the starting point.
Try to think of it this way:
You organise events on different dates, but on several locations (referents). You could then group the locations (referents) together to show their upcoming events (preaches) with the short code [location post_id=”xxx”]
This will leave you with the EM functionalities such as listing all events (preaches) by date or by location (referent). Google Maps would then not point to the church, but the referent. So if they preach in different locations, you can still use Google Maps. Otherwise I would stop using the locations map and just display a static google map image. Seeing the problems some users have integrating Google Maps API, that could turn out to be a less frustrating option as well. ??
Another possibility is to start “seeing referents as categories”. But then not Event Categories, but regular WordPress blog categories. Basically the same idea as Locations, but a bit less flexible, because a lot of that is automated by WordPress itself (such as archives and category info pages). Also a category allows for less info than an EM location does.
By default EM does not support that, but I have a simple snippet that will allow EM to use blog categories…
Then you can group the services together by category/referent. Using blog categories will allow you to use those outside of the EM loop, btw.
So in short, it’s mostly the way you look at the things you’re working with. Yes, WordPress and Events Manager named certain functionalities a certain way, but that does not necessarily mean you have to use them that way.