The United Methodist Church has many resources for statistical reporting, data collection and data analysis.
For local church data, the process begins with the annual statistical reports completed and sent by each congregation to its annual conference. These reports are comprehensive, including fields about membership, participation, gender, ethnicity, and giving for each local church, among many others. Each annual conference compiles these reports, publishes them in its conference journal and provides them to the General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA).
With the compiled data from the annual conferences, GCFA hosts and regularly updates UMData.org to make a subset of the U.S. data searchable by local church, district, annual conference and jurisdiction. In addition to displaying the data in list form, the site can generate charts showing changes and trends in those data points over any time period between 1989 and the most recent year collected (2024 at the time of this writing). The site also contains information about every bishop in the United States, appointment records of clergy, key leaders in the annual conferences, regional conferences and jurisdictions, and board members of the general agencies.
Regional Conferences outside the United States also provide statistical reporting to GCFA on a regular basis. If you are seeking data or reporting about these Regional Conferences or the annual conferences within them, you may use GCFA’s contact form to make your request.
While UMData.org displays only a subset of local church statistical reporting, each annual conference’s journal includes all of it. Most annual conferences in the United States make their conference journal available on their website, and a few, such as the California-Pacific Conference have published digitized editions of journals going back as far as 1874 (referred to as “Minutes of the Conference” at that time).
In addition to local church statistical data, conference journals also include the financial reports of the conference, documenting its actual receipts and disbursements as well as its approved budget for the following year. This means your conference journal is the primary source for learning how the apportionments from the churches in your conference have been used in the previous year and are planned to be used in the coming year.
Annual Conferences and some staff within the general agencies, including the staff of Ask The UMC, have access to an additional online database provided by GCFA which provides more searchability and the ability to generate reports based on U.S. annual conference reporting.
This database is the backbone for our Find-a-Church service which provides contact information, average attendance, and languages used for all chartered United Methodist local churches in the United States. Find-a-Church also gives each local church the opportunity to add and regularly update information about its worship times, programs, and accessibility. We also provide video-based guidance to help you update your church's Find-a-Church profile.
As you can see, your local church’s statistical reports and how your conference collates and passes these on to GCFA play a significant role in the availability of timely data for the denomination as a whole. This means if you find out of date or inaccurate information about your church on Find-a-Church or UMData, you will want contact your conference office to make sure they received your church’s most recent statistical report and have accurately conveyed that information to GCFA.
Finally, if your interest is in denomination-wide finances, you will want to review the regularly updated reports section of the GCFA website. Here you can see the annual general budget apportionments to the annual conference, monthly reporting on how the annual conferences have paid them, contributions to the Episcopal Fund (which underwrites the work of United Methodist bishops worldwide), the latest audited financial reports from the general agencies and African University, information about church closures in the United States and the United Methodist Church Budget Handbook, available in five languages. This handbook details all line items of the general church budget and how the funding of the general budget is distributed across the quadrennium.
United Methodists have many resources you can use not only to track and report data over time, but more importantly to make use of it to become more effective in fulfilling the mission of the denomination: to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
Burton Edwards serves as lead for Ask The UMC, the information service of United Methodist Communications.
