Ok, here's the deal... If a group is set to private, it's invisible to everyone but the person who creates the group and the "super admin" (which would be me). The creater of the group is the "group admin" and can approve or deny membership requests.

If you want the group to be totally private, then it should probably be configured as "invite only" and "private". In other words, the only way anyone is even going to know that the group exists is if you send them an invitation to join. If you don't care that everyone knows that the group exists, but you don't want them to see it's content without your approval, then the group is set up as "moderated" and "list in groups directory". That way, they'll only be able to access the description of the group and a link to request membership, but not any of it's content.

Now, with respect to approving membership requests: you have to be logged into the site in order to manage group membership for your groups, so if you click on the links in the request email and nothing happend, more than likely you are not currently logged into the site. This may be an issue of having cookies configured to only accept session cookies, which means that as soon as you close the browser window or navigate away from the site, you are logged out. If you want to be permanently logged into the site on your computer, you can configure cookies in your browser to always accept all cookies from this domain (fingerlakeschristian.org). If you are logged into the site, when you click on the first link, the approval of the requesting member happens automagically. If you click on the second link, you will go to a page where you can deny the request or manage membership in the group.

Hope that helps.