About Church Map

Church Map exists to answer one question well: where can I find a church near me, and what happens there. It covers every Christian tradition, and it is not run by any of them.

You can search by place, by denomination, by what a building offers, or simply by what is closest to where you are standing.

Listings are built from two open sources. Wikidata is public domain and often carries a photograph. OpenStreetMap carries far more small congregations, along with addresses and phone numbers, and its licence requires us to credit contributors, which we do on every page.

Churches then claim their own pages and correct them. That is the point at which a listing stops being a record and starts being a church speaking for itself.

We do not invent service times. If we do not know when a church meets, the page says nothing rather than guessing, and a listing no church has claimed is labelled as such.

Not every listing has a photograph, because not every source had one, and we would rather show a church with no picture than not show it at all.

Church Map is built and run by an independent developer. Not a company, not a charity with a board, and not a team: one person who writes the code, reads the messages and fixes what is wrong.

The same person pays for it. The servers, the domain, the backups, the email and the bandwidth that serves photographs of nine hundred churches all come out of one pocket, every month, whether anybody donates or not. There is no advertising over church pages, no fee to be listed, and no paid placement in the results, because the moment any of those pays the bills they start deciding what you see.