Every chartered local church in the United States and a good number in the Philippines, Africa, and Europe have profiles available on Find A Church. Unless your church has a website that gets regular traffic, the first search result for your church may very well be its Find A Church profile page. Even if it is not the first result, it will almost always show up in the top five and often be cited in AI summaries on search engines.
This means that even if your local United Methodist church does not have a website, it probably does have a Find-a-Church profile which acts as your church’s first impression on the web.
All local church profiles provide some basic information about a church, whether the church has updated it or not. It will include the church’s name, city, and country of origin. If the church is in the United States, it will also include its physical address, average worship attendance, a link to directions to get there, and English as the default spoken language. Churches outside the United States can add this information as well.
In addition to modifying these fields, there is much more your church can display when you take the time to update your profile. You can find full, step-by-step video instructions to register for a free MyUMC account which lets you update your local church’s profile on ResourceUMC.org.
When you login to update your profile, you’ll see all the information you can provide or update. The basic part of the profile let’s you update core contact information, including physical and mailing address, phone number, email, website, spoken languages, accessibility options, average attendance, and a photo of your church building. These items will be reviewed by our staff at United Methodist Communications before they go live to make sure they are accurate.
In addition to these, you can complete an extended profile. Information in these fields will appear on your profile immediately after you click the Update Extended Profile Data button at the bottom left of the update page. These fields include age related ministries, counseling and support groups, mission and service opportunities, music, art and worship offerings, recreation, health and wholeness programs, spiritual life ministries, worship times and service types, a link to your online worship page, and links to the social media platforms your church uses.
Since ministries your church offers can change from time to time, you’ll want to plan to update your page at least once per quarter or whenever any of these items changes.
So, make what may be your church’s first impression on the web a positive one. Update your Find A Church profile, and keep it updated regularly!
Burton Edwards is Lead for Ask The UMC, the information service of United Methodist Communications.
