Christian Mingle is a dating site for modern Christians to find love. The site focuses on building relationships that allow spiritual growth together, so it’s about as far from Tinder as you can get and still be on a dating site!
Spark Networks own Christian Mingle, so the layout and language of the site might seem familiar. Spark, an American company launched in 1997, runs Elite Singles, JDate, LDS Singles, and Zoosk among others.
And with that many irons in the romance fires, you’d think they’d know how to put together a decent dating site…
Spoiler: They do. Christian Mingle is a great site in the tradition of POF or JDate. Your classic finding-love-online experience. Obviously, as it’s a site built for people with strong Christian faith Christian Mingle errs on the PG side of things.
Largely, users are looking for serious relationships and marriage. There aren’t a lot of flashy features or gimmicks for either free or premium members of the Christian Mingle community, but the crowd that the site aims to cater to probably wouldn’t be into that sort of thing anyway.
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There is, however, a dating site blog, Believe Magazine, where you can be inspired by real-life Christian Mingle success stories or discover romantic Bible verses for Valentine’s Day. If you’re unsure about joining Christian Mingle, have a look at Believe. It gives you a flavor of what you’re in for on the site.
As with other niche religious dating sites, Christian Mingle isn’t for non-believers. It is, however, open to members of the LGBTQ. In fact, as there are very few secular or cultural Christians, this one is even more exclusive than say, J-Date. Christian Mingle is not a place to mess around — it is, however, probably the best place on the internet to find love with a like-minded Christian! You can try it yourself here.
Does Christian Mingle Work?
Christian Mingle is a reliable and easy-to-use website based on a template that will be really familiar to pretty much anyone who has used online dating in the last decade. Plus, Christian Mingles has years of success and successful relationships behind it!
In fact, the aforementioned Believe portion of Christian Mingle’s website features pictures of and interviews with happily married couples who met on Christian Mingle at least monthly.
They also keep track of Christian Mingle babies. And as you would imagine from all those Christian marriages, there are quite a few babies.
Research commissioned by Christian Mingle found that almost 30% of Christian Marriages that start online originated on Christian Mingle. That may sound like quite a lot of caveats, but it’s really impressive considering how many people in the English-speaking world would probably label themselves as Christians of some kind.
To qualify as a ‘Christian’ marriage, in fact, couples surveyed only had to attend church once every 4-6 months. This is pretty paltry church attendance by Christian Mingle standards — 7% of the site’s users are regular churchgoers.
The bottom line is that Christian Mingle does work, as long as you’re genuinely putting in the effort and want to find a relationship. This isn’t a site to just test the waters and have a bit of fun, though there are plenty of sites out there for that.
Why not try eharmony if you’re just dipping your toe in? With 84% of Christian Mingle users recommending the site, it must be doing something right. Even those who haven’t yet found love think it’s a good place to try!
Christian Mingle Review
Christian Mingle is quite a commitment as it’s such a no-nonsense community. So, maybe you want to try before you buy (or you know, try before you spend half an hour making your profile perfect). That’s where I come in!
I’ve tried many other dating sites and dating apps before, and I have traversed the dating jungle for you, reaching the furthest corners of Christian Mingle and bringing back all the information I’ve gathered so that you don’t have to commit until you know everything there is to know about the site.
This is a review, yes, but I’ll be going into all site features in detail, from signing up to communication to how to delete your account if you decide Christian Mingle isn’t for you (or alternatively, find the one). Read on to discover all there is to know about Christian Mingle, plus the added bonus of my expert opinion on the site and its features.
Christian Mingle User Overview
Perhaps showing that Christian Mingle users really are looking to find love rather than just have a good time, the site’s gender ratio is an unusual 50/50. That’s 50% men and 50% women.
Dating sites usually skew males, with more ‘serious’ sites having less of an imbalance. Half and half is really quite unusual, especially when we’re talking about a 9-million-strong worldwide user base!
The Christian Mingle user base spans all ages from 18-55+. The most populous age categories span 25 – 45, which is another indication of the kind of site this is.
Those are prime serious dating or marriage years, rather than playing the field or looking for a second chance at love. A lot of users on Christian Mingle are looking to build not only a relationship but a family.
Obviously, Christian Mingle users tend to be… well… Christian. Everyone is asked to include their denomination and how regularly they attend church in their profile, so you can find a match who works for you in terms of faith as well as in terms of chemistry.
Christian Mingle Sign Up
Staying true to its serious nature, Christian Mingle has a straight-down middle sign-up process. You can go ahead and sign up for Christian Mingle for free here.
The whole thing only takes about five minutes, and there’s no personality test or quirky questions about favorite foods or movies. In fact, you can make the whole process even more simple by signing up through Facebook or Apple.
If you choose to go that route, nothing to do with Christian Mingle will appear in your Facebook feed or anything. It’s just about sharing info and cookies between the two sites.
You do have to provide your zip code to Christian Mingle, and for me, the site took a minute to work out where I live. This slowed the sign-up process down somewhat, but it was still pretty quick.
Spark and Christian Mingle specifically, have pretty tight security procedures so I wasn’t worried about sharing my location. If you’re a little squeamish about sharing your exact street, though, just stick in a close-by zip and you’ll still see members near you.
Speaking of security, if you don’t use Facebook or Apple to sign up for Christian Mingle, you will have to verify your email address. This only takes a minute or so and it makes it much harder for bots to create Christian Mingle profiles and clog up the site.
Making Your Christian Mingle Profile
Making your profile on Christian Mingle is almost as easy as the sign-up process. The site’s profiles are pretty simple, which means it’s really easy to get started ‘mingling’ and also encourages actual communication.
You show your personality in the biography section of your profile, but even that is just a few lines about yourself. These are sometimes lightly flirtatious, though less so than on other sites.
More often they state your career, life goals, and a couple of major interests. More info about what you’re doing on a dating site and your hobbies and interests come in the next boxes.
‘Looking For’ And ‘I Like’
Looking for and I Like sections both do what they say on the tin. You choose from a whole smorgasbord of tags in both categories. Looking for is relationship-specific, and includes the gender and age of the partner you’re trying to find through Christian Mingle as well as the type of relationship you’re after.
Most often on Christian Mingle, this is a serious relationship or marriage and kids. Finally, Looking For includes the distance you’re willing to consider a partner within — so, for example, ‘within 50 miles of NYC’.
I Like is where you can share hobbies and interests in the hope of finding someone with either similar or complementary pastimes. So I might say I like writing, dogs, wine, running, food… the possibilities are close to endless. If you have a really weird hobby, like catching tadpoles and growing them into frogs in the bathtub, it might not be listed as an option.
But hey, you can use it as a conversation starter anyway! Or actually, maybe you should wait until you’ve built up a relationship before mentioning the tadpole thing…
Pictures
Pictures are viewable, full size, to paying Christian Mingle members. Free members can see profile pictures in full size. You can upload up to six images to your profile (whether you’re a premium member or not), and rearranging the order is easy.
Most people show off their hobbies and interests with their pictures, as well as maybe a family snap to show off those family values that are so popular in Christian Mingle.
Obviously, and I can’t stress this enough, Christian Mingle is not a space for nudes or sexy snaps. Keep your images strictly PG. You have to upload at least one photo of yourself to access the site. This will act as your profile photo.
Faith
As I’ve already mentioned, faith is super important on Christian Mingle and correspondingly there’s a Faith section on everyone’s profile. You can not only let everyone know what denomination of Christianity you adhere to (nondenominational is an option) but also how devout you are (most of the options here relate to how often you go to church).
Security
The most time-consuming part of creating your Christian Mingle profile is actually waiting for it all to be approved by the site mods. Every profile is checked for authenticity, including pictures being run against search engines to check they aren’t stock photos or pulled from image searches.
While your profile is pending you can browse the site, but various parts of your profile will be visible (to yourself and others) only as ‘under review’.
This is mildly annoying, sure, but it’s some of the best dating site security there is and there are very few fake profiles or bots on Christian Mingle as a result of it. That means you can look for love without worrying much at all about online safety and privacy, as the site does it for you!
Other People’s Christian Mingle Profiles
Other people’s Christian Mingle profiles show all the same info you input into yours (well, not the same, they show their answers, not yours…). You’ll see a bio, what the user is looking for, their interests, and their religious information.
As a free user of Christian Mingle, you can look at profile photos full size, but more than that and you need a premium account.
Under the profile picture on other members’ accounts, you’ll find buttons to like, flirt with, and message the user. You can send a flirty wink or like the user even if you’re not a paying member, but messaging is more complicated.
Christian Mingle Matches
Christian Mingle provides a number of daily matches that suit your desired criteria for you to flick through. This is a pretty standard dating site feature and might be a real plus for Christian Mingle members who don’t have time to peruse the site more widely.
Because you provide so little personal information to Christian Mingle, however, and other users do the same, the matches aren’t much more suited to you than the general Mingle population which you can discover for yourself.
Of course, if you just want things to be quick and easy the matches might help. Remember, though, seriously looking for love can take serious work!
In addition to your daily matches, you can search Christian Mingles by who is New, who is Online, their Distance (from your inputted address), and your Match % with them. In the case of Christian Mingle, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on your percentage match though.
Some sites collate a lot of personal info, and in those cases, the match percentage means a lot. On Christian Mingle, it’s just a very basic indication of boxes ticked.
Where I am, in a major city, there are plenty of members who fit my criteria to choose from so new faces appear in all these categories. Of course, in a smaller place, this may not be the case and you may get profiles showing up in multiple sections.
Your final option for discovering matches is the LookBook. This is identical to JDate’s LookBook and has very similar features on many other dating sites. Basically, it’s an app-inspired swiping game in which you either like or discard or swipe right or left, the profile pictures and mini-profiles of potential matches.
Christian Mingle Communication
There are two kinds of messaging on Christian Mingle. These are Messaging and Messaging+. Only premium members can start conversations, and they can start them with either kind of message. Plain messages are for other premium members, who also have the ability to send/receive unlimited messages with other premium members.
Messaging+ is for premium members to message free users. If you receive a message+ as a free user you can reply to it, it’s just that premium members hold all the cards in terms of starting conversations.
You can use likes and flirty winks to try to persuade them into messaging you and beginning communication, but you can’t do much else!
Christian Mingle has both a favorites list option, for keeping track of users you like the look of or intend to message in the future and more unusually a blacklist function. This makes sense given the site’s focus on safety and security but isn’t something that’s often available on a dating site.
Blacklisting another user essentially blocks them so they can’t message you or contact you in any way.
Christian Mingle App
Christian Mingle’s app is available to download free for both iOS and Android. It’s essentially just an app version of the desktop site, which means there are no extra features or app-specific gimmicks. This also means the app can feel a little crowded and clunky at times.
That being said, it does the job. You can view profiles, messages (if you receive a message+ or are a premium member of course), likes, and use Christian Mingle’s LookBook swiping features.
This is a solid app that’s just an on-the-go version of the site. You can use it to pass the time perusing matches anywhere or to keep up the conversation with a Christian Mingler who might just be the one while you’re on the go.
Christian Mingle Free
The free version of Christian Mingle is great as a taster, but without full messaging access, it can’t be much more than that.
As a profile is so easy to create it’s definitely worth having a go at the free Christian Mingle site and checking out matches near you before you commit to the cost of the premium, but you’re unlikely to actually find love without coughing up for the full site.
Of course, some lucky bucks get a Message+ from a total dreamboat immediately, but we can’t all rely on that! You can try the free version of Christian Mingle here.
Christian Mingle Premium
Premium members of Christian Mingle get to use the whole site. That’s the long and short of it. With the Premium version, you can see all user photos, send and receive messages, and even send a Message+ or two to a free member! You can also see who has been viewing your profile, get read receipts, and view likes.
A Premium Christian Mingle account is essential if you are serious about finding love on the site.
Christian Mingle has a pretty fair and transparent pricing structure (as you would hope for such a God Fearing dating site). As is often the case with dating sites, although these are advertised as monthly prices the payment comes out as a lump sum.
Remember to note when the next payment is coming out of your account, and cancel your membership at least a week before that date if you don’t want to be charged for another six months (or however long you signed up for the first time).
I would advise a three or six-month membership to the site. You might get lucky and find love in a month, but if you don’t, you’ll have to spend way more re-upping monthly. And if you do and you’re all loved up, are you going to begrudge the extra 25 bucks you spent on a three-month membership? No way, you’ll be in love!
| Pricing | Total Cost | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Free | ||
| 1 Month | $49.99 | $49.99 |
| 3 Months | $104.97 | $34.99 |
| 6 Months | $149.94 | $24.99 |
Christian Mingle Value For Money
Christian Mingle is by no means the cheapest dating site out there, but it’s by no means expensive or unreasonable either.
Given the jump in features from free membership to premium and the fact that it is by far the most well-known and trusted Christian dating site on the internet, it’s definitely good value for money. As I just mentioned, though, a single month of membership is a little steep.
If you can, go for the three or six-month plan. And of course, if you can’t afford a paid dating site don’t sign up for one! There are free options out there too. You might have to put a bit more work in to find your perfect partner, but it is possible.
Real-Life Success And Reviews
Christian Mingle’s Believe blog is full of success stories. Lisa and Stephen are now married, but this quote from her tells of $30 well spent on a premium Christian Mingle membership!
I was instantly attracted to the honesty of this man and wanted to know more about him. For me to make contact with him I had to renew my membership. So I spent the $30 just so I could send him an email.
He responded right away and told me he was packing to make a trip to Ohio to be with his dad in hospice. He said he would contact me when he returned. I gave him my condolences, as I had buried my dad just a few years prior.
I wasn’t sure I’d hear from him but he kept his word. A few weeks later he messaged me through the CM site and asked if he could just call me so we could hear voices. I agreed.
He called me that night and every night after that for 2 weeks or more. We spent 2-3 hours on the phone every night. We never ran out of things to talk about and it was easy, never forced. We were both growing close just by having conversations.
Christian Mingle Customer Care
Christian Mingle’s customer care is all online.
There’s a ‘Help’ section very clearly available in the main menu, and from there you can get to FAQs or email a customer service agent directly.
Final Thoughts
Christian Mingle does what it says on the tin. Well, maybe not mingling, can you mingle online and one-to-one?
It does deliver on its promise to be a wholesome, helpful, altogether trustworthy Christian dating site though. The success couples from Christian Mingle have had is clear, and most users seem to sincerely be looking for love. In fact, Mingle has better security features than most secular dating sites which is a little bit annoying. Why is everyone else thrown to the internet wolves?
Christian Mingle is definitely a site for serious dating. Its pricing structure is fair and, if you’re looking for love, it’s good value for money. It is not, as I have already mentioned, a place to go for hookups or anything super casual. Don’t even try, you’d ruin the vibe.
If you’re a Christian looking for love, Christian Mingle is the place to start and hopefully, it’s the place your search will end, too! You can try Christian Mingle for free here.
