"Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid." — Matthew 5:14
A church can be doing everything right on Sunday and still be, for all practical purposes, hidden on Tuesday afternoon. The preaching is faithful, the people are warm, the building is open — and the young family that moved in three streets over has no idea the church exists, because when they searched for one, nothing came up.
I keep a database of something like thirty-five thousand churches, and I have spent a long time now looking at their websites, their listings, and their social pages. The pattern is remarkably consistent. Most churches have four or five of the fifteen things on this list. And the ones they are missing are almost always the free ones.
So this is not a marketing plan. It is closer to a building inspection — the basic, unglamorous list of what a church should have online, in the same way a building should have a working furnace and a sign out by the road. Thirteen of the fifteen cost nothing at all.
Start here, or you will do it twice
1. A Google for Nonprofits account
I am putting this first even though it is the least exciting item, because the order matters more than anything else in this article.
Google for Nonprofits gives a qualifying church free Google Workspace. That means church email on the church's own domain — pastor@yourchurch.org instead of firstbaptistpastor1958@gmail.com — with shared calendars and document storage for the staff.
But the real reason it goes first is ownership. Nearly every other item on this list lives inside a Google account: the Business Profile, the YouTube channel, Analytics, Search Console. Whoever's account creates them, owns them.
Here is how it usually goes wrong. A helpful young man in the church sets up the YouTube channel on a Saturday in 2019. Four years later he takes a job in another state, or has a falling out, or simply stops answering. The channel with six hundred archived services is attached to an email address nobody in the building can log into. I have watched churches spend a year trying to recover their own sermons.
Set up the church's Google account first. Put every listing under it. Give at least two people — the pastor and one other officer — access, and turn on two-step verification.
The one snag: verification usually wants documentation of your tax-exempt status, and because churches are automatically tax-exempt without filing, many do not have an IRS determination letter sitting in a drawer. If yours does not, that is the first phone call to make.
Be findable on the map
This is the part most churches underestimate. A stranger looking for a church does not type your name — they cannot, they do not know it. They type "baptist church near me," or they open Maps. What comes back is not your website. It is a listing.
2. Google Business Profile — claimed and verified
This is the single highest-leverage free thing a church can do online, and I have written about it at length elsewhere. Claim the listing, verify it, and then actually fill it in: service times as hours, a real street address with the pin dropped in the right place, the phone number, the website link, and photographs of the actual building — the front door especially, so a first-time visitor recognizes it from the road.
Most churches have a listing whether they created one or not, because Google generates them. The question is only whether anyone in your church controls it. An unclaimed listing can be edited by strangers, and frequently is.
3. Bing Places
Free, and about five minutes, because Bing will import everything straight from your Google listing. Bing is small next to Google, but it is the default in Windows and Outlook, and it feeds a meaningful share of the answers that AI assistants now give. Claim it and forget it.
4. Nextdoor
The most local room on the internet, and the one churches most often overlook. Nextdoor is organized by neighborhood, and "does anyone know a good church around here?" is a post that appears in it constantly. A church can set up a free page, and being present when that question gets asked is worth more than a great deal of advertising.
5. Yelp — claimed
Low traffic for churches, and I will not pretend otherwise. But an unclaimed Yelp listing with the wrong service times is worse than no listing at all, and claiming it takes ten minutes. Do it once.
One rule governs all four of these: your church's name, address, and phone number should appear identically in every listing. Not "First Baptist Church" in one and "1st Baptist" in another, not a suite number that appears in three places and vanishes in the fourth. Search engines use the consistency of those details to decide whether they are looking at one church or several, and mismatches quietly suppress you. The jargon for this is citation consistency, and I cover it further in local SEO for churches.
The things you own
Listings put you on the map. But a listing is rented ground — Google can change it, and Facebook can take a page down. These next four are yours.
6. A website
Not an elaborate one. A website that loads fast on a phone, runs on the church's own domain, and puts the service times and the street address in plain readable text near the top — not baked into an image where neither a search engine nor a screen reader can find them.
Two-thirds of the people who look at your church website will do it on a phone, most of them on a Saturday night, and most of them will decide in under thirty seconds whether these are people they could walk in among. If you want an outside read on where yours stands, I run a free website score that grades it in about a minute.
7. Website chat
A contact form is a suggestion box. Chat is a conversation. The practical difference is that a question asked at 9:40 on a Saturday night — is there a nursery, is it alright if I come alone, what do people wear — gets an answer before Sunday instead of on Tuesday when someone remembers to check the inbox.
The questions people ask on chat are almost never the questions you built the website to answer. That is exactly why it is worth having. I wrote more about what churches actually hear on chat after watching the transcripts for a year.
8. Online giving
On the website, and by text if you can. This is not about pressure; it is about not making faithfulness depend on whether somebody made it into the room. People travel, people get sick, and a great many people under forty simply do not carry a checkbook.
Expect to lose roughly 2 to 3 percent of each gift to processing. That is the cost of the service, and most churches find it is more than covered by the giving that no longer falls through the cracks in February.
9. Google Analytics and Search Console
Both free, both about twenty minutes to install, and together they are the only way to know whether any of this is working.
Analytics tells you how many people came and what they looked at. Search Console — the more useful of the two, and the more overlooked — tells you the actual words people typed into Google before they landed on your site. That list is regularly surprising. Churches discover they are being found for a preschool they no longer run, or for a funeral, or for a food pantry they mention in one sentence on one page. It tells you what your neighbors need.
Be seen and be heard
10. YouTube streaming
Stream the service and leave it up. This serves the homebound member, the family traveling, the son who moved to Arizona — and, quietly, the stranger deciding on Saturday night whether to walk in on Sunday morning. A great many people will watch a service before they will risk attending one.
It is also an archive. A church that has streamed for three years has three years of preaching indexed and searchable. If you have not started, the equipment question is smaller than you think.
11. A Facebook page
For a considerable share of families in your community, Facebook is the church directory. It is where they check whether services are cancelled for snow, whether there is a funeral, and whether the church is still open at all. Make sure the page exists, that the church controls it, and that the information on it is true.
12. Facebook streaming
The same service, carried into the feed people are already scrolling. This costs nothing beyond what you are already doing for YouTube, and it reaches a different set of people — the ones who will never go looking, but will stop when it appears in front of them.
13. Posting regularly
Here is the item that decides whether the three above it do anything at all.
A Facebook page whose most recent post is from eight months ago reads, to a stranger, like a church that closed. That is not a small misunderstanding; it is the single most common false signal I see churches send. Nobody needs a content strategy. One post a week — a photo from Sunday, the sermon text, a note about Wednesday supper — is enough to say we are here, and we are alive.
14. Instagram
Where nearly anyone under forty looks first to find out whether a church feels alive. Post the same things you post to Facebook; it takes almost no extra work. Photographs of real people in your actual building outperform anything designed, every time.
15. A LinkedIn page
The smallest item on the list and I will not oversell it. But it is twenty minutes, it is free, and it gives you one more piece of ground you control in the search results for your church's name — which matters most on the day something gets said about your church that you did not say.
The whole list, in order
- Google for Nonprofits account (do this first)
- Google Business Profile — claimed and verified
- Bing Places
- Nextdoor
- Yelp — claimed
- Website
- Website chat
- Online giving
- Google Analytics and Search Console
- YouTube streaming
- Facebook page
- Facebook streaming
- Posting regularly
- LinkedIn page
Fifteen items. Thirteen of them free. Realistically, a capable volunteer with the church's login can finish everything except the website and the streaming setup across two or three evenings.
If that still sounds like a mountain, do these three and stop: the Google account, the Business Profile, and the website. Those three are eighty percent of the good.
After the fifteen
Once the basics are true, four more are worth the hour:
Apple Business Connect. The listing behind Apple Maps and Siri. Roughly half the phones in the country read it, and almost no churches have claimed theirs — so the pin is often wrong.
A sermon podcast. You are already recording. Pushing that audio to Apple Podcasts and Spotify costs nothing and puts your preaching in the commute of every member who drives to work.
An email list. The only channel on this entire page that you truly own. Facebook can change its algorithm and Google can change its ranking, but an email list goes to the people who asked for it.
Google Ad Grants. If your nonprofit application goes through, Google gives eligible organizations $10,000 a month in free search advertising. It comes with real rules and it takes work to use well, but it is worth knowing it exists.
A last word
None of this is the ministry. The ministry is the preaching, the visiting, the burying and the marrying and the sitting in hospital rooms. No listing ever sanctified anybody.
But the woman three streets over is going to search for a church this year. She is going to do it on her phone, probably at night, probably during a hard week. And a church that is faithful in the pulpit and invisible on the map has, without ever intending it, made itself hard to find at exactly the moment somebody was looking.
A city set on a hill cannot be hid. It seems a small thing to make sure ours is not hiding by accident.
If you would like an outside read on where your church currently stands, the free church website score will grade your site in about a minute, no cost and nothing to install.