Church member directory template
The office copy: families, contacts, addresses, and who's a member versus who simply comes. Import the list you already keep, decide what's printed and what isn't, and hand out a searchable link instead of emailing a spreadsheet.
Built around households, not rows
A membership spreadsheet has one row per person, which is right for storing data and wrong for reading. Nobody wants to look up four Andersons on four separate lines to work out they live in the same house.
Here people belong to households. One card holds the whole family — everyone's name, their place in the household, each birthday, the shared address and phone, and the wedding anniversary. The card headline is “The Anderson Family” by default, and you can override it to anything: “Miss Ruth Bennett”, “Dr. and Mrs. Cortez”, “The Whitfield Household”.
You still get the person-level detail where it matters — an individual phone number or email for the head of house, a note that a teenager is away at college — without splitting the family across four entries.
Members and attendees, without a wall between them
Every person is marked member or attendee. The distinction is real for church governance and it's worth recording, but a directory that puts attendees in a separate section at the back tells a family who's been with you two years exactly where they stand.
So the printed card lists everyone together and marks attendees quietly. You know who's who; nobody feels sorted.
Bring in the list you already keep
Nobody should retype four hundred people. Download the CSV template, open it in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets, paste your list into the same columns, and import it.
The importer is built for real spreadsheets rather than tidy ones. Column headers are matched loosely — Family, *Household*, and *Surname* all work, as do Birthday, *DOB*, and *Born*. Extra columns are ignored. Blanks are fine. And everyone sharing a family name and address becomes one card, so two unrelated Andersons at different houses stay separate.
- Dates read the way people type them: 3/14, *3/14/1985*, *March 14*, or *1985-03-14*.
- The year is always optional — plenty of members give you a birthday but not a birth year.
- Family-level details like address and home phone only need to appear on one row of the family.
- Anything the importer can't read is reported line by line instead of silently dropped.
Decide what's printed and what stays in the office
Contact information in a printed directory leaves the building. Each field has its own switch, so the same records can produce different documents:
- Home addresses — on for the congregation's copy, or off for a copy that goes to visitors.
- Phone numbers — usually on.
- Email addresses — off by default, because a printed sheet with fifty email addresses on it gets left in coffee shops.
- Photos — on for the pictorial edition, off for a names-only roster that fits eight families to a page.
- Birthdays and anniversaries — month and day print; the year never does.
Two documents from one record
Most churches keep a printed directory that's out of date and an office contact list nobody else can see. Here they're the same information. Correct an address once, and the shared link is right immediately and the next print is right too.
The shared link is searchable, works on any phone, is never indexed by search engines, and can sit behind a password that you can change or remove at any time — which signs everyone out at once if a list ever needs locking down.
Keeping the roster current
- Reorder families or sort them A–Z with one click, so the printed order makes sense.
- Edit a household without touching the rest of the directory — add a baby, remove someone who moved away.
- Replace the whole list from a fresh import when your records are rebuilt elsewhere.
- New edition each year: change the edition label and print. Last year's information isn't thrown away, it's updated.
Questions churches ask
Can I import our existing church membership spreadsheet?+
Yes. Save it as CSV and import it — one row per person, with a column for the family surname. Headers are matched loosely, extra columns are ignored, and the importer tells you line by line if anything couldn't be read.
How does it know which people are one family?+
Rows sharing a family name and address become one card. That way two unrelated Andersons at different addresses stay separate, while a household spread over five rows is joined up.
Can I record someone with a different last name in the same household?+
Yes — put their surname in the Last Name column and it prints alongside their first name, while the card still carries the household's family name in the headline.
Do email addresses have to be in the printed copy?+
No, and they're off by default. The switch applies to the shared link as well, so if you hide emails they're hidden in both places.
Is this a church membership database?+
It's a directory, not church management software. It holds families, people, contact details, birthdays, and anniversaries — not giving records, attendance, or check-in. For most small churches that's the part they actually needed.
Can more than one person maintain the list?+
A directory belongs to the account that created it, so the usual pattern is one person doing the entry — often the secretary — with details coming in from everyone else. For a bigger update, collect changes in a shared spreadsheet and import them in one pass.
Import your list and see it as a directory
Download the CSV template, paste in what the office already keeps, and look at the printed result. It's usually the first time the membership list has looked like a book.
Start your free directory