- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web · interactive world map · desktop and mobile browser
- Developer
- Testament Made LLC · Derek Castelli
- Launched
- 2026
- Updated
- Aug 9, 2026
The verdict
Here's My Church has grown from a rapid U.S. map experiment into a substantial worldwide discovery layer. Its live service reported 655,436 church records across 19 countries, including 244,043 in the United States, with map browsing, global search, denomination and size filters, language signals, service and contact fields, verified markers, community additions and corrections, regional reports, and unusually candid methodology notes. It is free, has no paid rankings, requires no account to browse or contribute, publishes its source, and uses privacy-conscious analytics. The scale comes from OpenStreetMap, public datasets, inference, and crowd input—not continuous confirmation by every congregation. Attendance and language can be estimates, taxonomies flatten real identities, and public fields go stale. Use HMC to discover possibilities and improve public data; follow the official church website, call the congregation, examine its beliefs and safeguarding, and verify the next service before traveling or making a pastoral decision.
Try Here's My Church ↗Opens heresmychurch.com
Here's My Church, commonly shortened to HMC, is an interactive map and directory for finding Christian churches worldwide. A visitor can explore countries and regions, zoom to local congregations, search by name or place, filter denominations and estimated size, look for confirmed or inferred language offerings, and open listing details such as address, website, service times, pastor, phone, email, ministries, and campus relationships. The service is free, carries no premium listing or sponsored-result tier, and does not require an account.
The project began March 9, 2026 as “Church America Map” after founder Derek Castelli received the idea from a friend. The first version was built rapidly, then renamed and expanded. Although the repository description and some README language still say United States, the current product is global. Its live countries endpoint on August 9 reported 655,436 records across 19 populated countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Coverage is aggregated rather than individually enrolled. Official explanations cite OpenStreetMap for churches, names, denominations, footprints, and map data; U.S. Census population; ARDA reference data for U.S. attendance modeling; other country or boundary sources; and community submissions and corrections. Attendance is primarily estimated from building footprint, supplemented by denomination averages, capacity data, and regional scaling when direct data is unavailable. Language can come from structured records or be inferred from church names, demographic patterns, regional priors, and later confirmations. The interface distinguishes estimates in some contexts, but a reader can still mistake precise-looking numbers for reported facts.
We reviewed the live application and public endpoints, privacy page, map methods shown in the interface, sitemap, repository, README, architecture and data-flow documentation, changelog, and license on August 9, 2026. We did not visit or contact sampled churches, validate a statistically representative record set, submit or moderate an edit, test an opt-out, measure geocoding error, verify attendance models, assess every country source, conduct an accessibility test, audit privacy or security, or determine which churches the product’s classification includes or excludes. Counts, community totals, coverage, and status change continuously.
✓ The good
- Exceptional free coverage - the live database spans more than 655,000 records in 19 countries with no search fee or account wall
- No pay-to-rank model - the product explicitly says there are no paid listings, premium tiers, or sponsored results
- Useful discovery controls - map exploration, global and local search, denomination, size, language, and verification filters create practical shortlists
- Rich potential fields - addresses, websites, service times, leaders, ministries, languages, contact details, and campus relationships can go beyond a pin
- Community correction path - visitors can add a missing church or suggest field changes without account friction, with moderation before merge
- Methodology candor - the interface explains source data, denomination grouping, language inference, attendance estimates, completeness, and report snapshots
- Public source and documentation - code, data-flow explanation, architecture, changelog, and license are visible for inspection and noncommercial reuse
- Privacy-conscious baseline - browsing needs no account, Fathom is used for aggregate analytics, and cookies are described as functional rather than advertising profiles
- Search visibility - country, metro, and hundreds of thousands of church URLs in public sitemaps can make individual listings discoverable outside the map
✗ Watch out
- Coverage is not verification - a record may represent a closed, moved, renamed, merged, duplicated, non-congregational, or misclassified place
- Attendance can look more exact than it is - footprint, capacity, denomination, and regional models estimate weekly size rather than report a church’s own count
- Language inference is probabilistic - name patterns and demographics cannot prove that a current service, sermon, or pastoral conversation is available in a language
- Taxonomy compresses identity - fixed denomination buckets and keyword matching can obscure independent networks, multi-tradition congregations, and local nuance
- No-account submissions invite abuse - rate limits and moderation help, but malicious, competitive, mistaken, or privacy-invasive changes remain an operational risk
- Sensitive public fields need restraint - personal leader names, email, phone, exact location, and service patterns may create risk in persecution or safety contexts
- Open source has a commercial restriction - CC BY-NC 4.0 permits sharing and adaptation with attribution but not commercial use without separate permission
- Docs trail expansion - repository copy still describes a U.S. map while the live service spans 19 countries and a larger data and policy surface
- A directory cannot assess church health - doctrine, leadership integrity, safeguarding, accessibility, welcome, accountability, or pastoral care require human discernment
Best for
- People moving, traveling, or exploring who need a broad geographic shortlist of nearby Christian congregations
- Church members correcting a public address, site, time, language, ministry, or campus relationship without opening an account
- Researchers and regional leaders examining high-level directory coverage and clearly labeled geographic patterns
- Developers and nonprofits studying or self-hosting the source for attributed noncommercial use under the published license
- Searchers willing to confirm every consequential detail through the church’s official channel before visiting
Avoid if
- You need a vetted recommendation, doctrinal endorsement, safeguarding inspection, accessibility audit, or guarantee that a congregation is healthy and active
- An estimated attendance, language, denomination, or service time would be treated as authoritative without church confirmation
- Publishing a church or leader’s location and contact data could create persecution, domestic-safety, child-safety, or harassment risk
- You need commercial reuse rights, a formal data SLA, a licensed contact database, guaranteed completeness, or certified record provenance
- You are choosing a church solely from filters, popularity, size, reactions, or map proximity rather than visiting and speaking with accountable people
What Here's My Church is
Here's My Church is a public-data aggregation, map, search engine, profile directory, and community correction system. The frontend visualizes records and boundaries; backend services populate and search churches, accept additions and field suggestions, track confirmations and reactions, and generate regional statistics and reports. Public sitemaps expose browseable profiles for search engines.
It is not a membership registry, denominational authority, recommendation engine, background-check service, doctrinal examination, booking system, verified review platform, or substitute for a church’s own website. A pin says a record exists, not that the organization endorses the congregation or that the congregation approves every displayed field.
Why church searchers use HMC: map-scale breadth with visible data humility
Many church finders belong to one denomination, network, publisher, or commercial directory. They may be more curated but exclude large parts of the landscape. HMC uses open geographic data and community contribution to create a broad layer across traditions and countries, then adds discovery tools and methodological explanations. The lack of paid placement is important: results are not auctioned to congregations that buy a premium profile.
Breadth changes the right user behavior. Do not rank a church by a synthetic attendance bubble or assume a bucket fully describes belief. Start with distance, official website, language, and a few practical needs. Open the church’s current beliefs, leadership, safeguarding, accessibility, service, and contact pages. Call when details matter. Visit more than once, speak with leaders and members, and consider accountable local counsel. Use the directory to widen discovery, not automate discernment.
World map, search, filters, profiles, and reports: huge reach with uneven depth
The live service supports 19 populated countries and navigates from world to country, region, and local church. Search can operate worldwide or within an area. Filters group denomination, attendance size, language, and verified status; profiles may contain a site, address, service times, leader, ministries, languages, contact fields, campus links, confirmation, and community reactions. Metro and seasonal report pages aggregate coverage, density, completeness, denominations, languages, attendance, and change.
Test the area you actually need rather than judging the global count. Compare a random sample against current official sites, denominational directories, OpenStreetMap, phone calls, and street-level evidence. Record duplicates, false positives, missing congregations, stale times, misplaced pins, bad URLs, and taxonomy errors. A country with tens of thousands of inherited buildings can look complete while current worshipping communities are underrepresented; a newer congregation in rented space may be invisible to building-based sources.
Attendance, language, denomination, and verification: estimates should guide questions, not claims
Official methodology says attendance is primarily estimated from building footprint, with denomination averages, capacity data, and regional population scaling when needed. Denominations are grouped into fixed buckets by matching stored labels, with first match winning. Structured language tags count as confirmed signals; when only English is listed or data is absent, the system may infer likely languages from names and regional patterns. Verification and community confirmation provide separate signals for some fields.
Every inferred field should display its source, confidence, method version, and date at the point of use. A cathedral-sized building may host a small congregation; a multisite church may report one total; a rented church may be large; a language in the name may not describe every service. Denomination labels can be missing, historical, ambiguous, or locally distinctive. Searchers should filter broadly and ask the congregation. Researchers should preserve uncertainty and never sum estimates as though they were audited weekly attendance.
Community edits, privacy, and open source: low friction requires careful moderation
Visitors can add or correct records without an account. The privacy page says submissions and technical metadata needed for moderation and fraud prevention are stored. Fathom provides aggregate analytics; a random browser identifier supports a live visitor count; first-party cookies remember notices; session storage may cache location hints; and optional nearby search can use coordinates with browser permission. Supabase hosts the database and logic, while OpenStreetMap and geocoding services receive relevant map or address queries. The code is public under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Moderation should prioritize harm as well as accuracy. Require evidence for closures, relocations, leaders, emails, phones, and service times; rate-limit and compare conflicting edits; preserve history; let churches claim, correct, suppress, or appeal; and remove personal fields when risk outweighs discovery value. Location permission should remain optional and coarse where possible. A source repository aids scrutiny, but a Creative Commons noncommercial license is not a standard permissive software license; commercial implementers need separate counsel and permission.
Pricing
Browse and search
Free
Explore the world map, countries, regions, metro pages, church profiles, search, filters, and public reports without creating an account.
Add a church
Free
Submit a missing church with name, map location, and optional public details. The interface performs duplicate checks and routes submissions through moderation.
Suggest corrections
Free
Propose changes to address, website, attendance, denomination, service times, languages, ministries, leader, phone, email, or campus relationship. Changes may require review.
Source use
Free for licensed noncommercial use
The repository uses CC BY-NC 4.0 and expressly treats internal or noncommercial self-hosting by a church or organization as noncommercial. Attribution and license conditions apply.
Commercial use
Permission required
The published license prohibits commercial use. A business, paid directory, reseller, or revenue-directed application should obtain separate legal permission.
HMC is genuinely free for searchers and contributors. There is no account conversion funnel, premium profile, sponsored rank, or paid recommendation disclosed on the product.
Free operation is supported by open data, community work, the founder, hosted infrastructure, and third-party services. Long-term continuity and funding are still material even without a price.
The noncommercial license is generous for personal, educational, church, and nonprofit experimentation when its conditions are met. The repository explicitly says internal church or organization self-hosting is considered noncommercial.
Commercial use is not included. Advertising-funded derivatives, paid lead products, resale, or a hosted business should obtain permission rather than stretch the license definition.
A user’s main cost is verification time. A five-minute call or official-site check is cheaper than arriving at a closed building, relying on a false language signal, or choosing from an estimated metric.
Where Here's My Church falls behind
Display field-level source, direct versus inferred status, confidence, retrieval or confirmation date, and edit history on every church profile, not only in methodology explanations.
Publish validation samples by country and field with precision, recall, geocoding error, duplicate rate, closure rate, attendance error, language accuracy, and known coverage bias.
Give churches a safe claim, verification, correction, suppression, opt-out, and appeal path with protection against hostile edits and special handling for sensitive locations.
Separate reported attendance from modeled capacity, label ranges rather than false precision, show the model date, and prevent research exports from treating estimates as observations.
Expand language labels to reported, confirmed, and inferred service or ministry language with schedule, source, confidence, and expiry rather than one general filter.
Publish moderation rules, reviewer access, evidence standards, conflicts, turnaround, revision history, rate limits, abuse response, and escalation for safety-sensitive changes.
Complete the privacy policy with retention periods, deletion and correction rights, international transfers, security measures, submission metadata, visitor identifiers, geolocation precision, and church-record removal.
Improve accessibility with a fully equivalent list view, keyboard map controls, predictable focus, screen-reader summaries, non-color symbols, reduced motion, and testing disclosures.
Keep repository, homepage, structured data, coverage copy, country list, methodology version, and live product counts synchronized as worldwide expansion continues.
Here's My Church vs. Church Finder vs. denominational locators vs. Google Maps
HMC offers the widest transparent map concept here and exposes source and estimation methods, without paid placement. Church Finder and other commercial directories may have claimed profiles or reviews but can be uneven and monetized. Denominational locators are usually narrower yet more authoritative about active affiliation, current leaders, and official congregations. Google Maps has enormous behavioral freshness, photos, hours, reviews, directions, and user corrections but weak theological taxonomy and opaque ranking.
Use them together. Search HMC for broad discovery and language or size leads, consult the official denominational or network directory for status, use a general map for directions and recent public activity, and make the church’s own site or direct contact the authority for the next service. If sources disagree, report the discrepancy and do not invent a resolution. A multi-source shortlist is more reliable than loyalty to any one directory.
The bottom line
Here's My Church is an impressive public-interest directory built at unusual speed. In five months it expanded into a live worldwide dataset of more than 655,000 records, added map and search layers, country and metro pages, filters, profiles, reports, community improvements, privacy documentation, public source, and a license that welcomes attributed noncommercial adaptation. It also publishes more methodological humility than many directories: attendance may be modeled, languages inferred, denomination buckets rule-based, and report snapshots dated. That honesty should shape use. The database does not mean 655,436 congregations personally confirmed their listing. Open geographic sources overrepresent visible buildings; renters and new churches disappear; historic buildings may no longer host an active community; service and leader details expire; and modeled attendance or language can be materially wrong. The no-account correction design lowers barriers but raises moderation and safety duties. Use HMC to see what you might otherwise miss, not to outsource discernment. Confirm the address, current website, service, language, accessibility, affiliation, and contact directly. Read the church’s own beliefs and safeguarding information. Visit, ask questions, and involve people who know the community. For operators, add field-level provenance, confidence and dates, public accuracy studies, church claim and suppression, clearer privacy retention, safer sensitive-location policy, and an accessible list-equivalent. The map is a strong beginning to church discovery precisely when it refuses to pretend the map is the church.
Alternatives to Here's My Church
Frequently asked questions
Is Here's My Church free?
Yes. Browsing, search, filters, profiles, reports, additions, and corrections are free. The project says it has no paid listings, premium tiers, or sponsored results, and no account is required.
How many churches are listed?
The live countries endpoint reported 655,436 records across 19 countries on August 9, 2026, including 244,043 in the United States. Counts change as sources refresh and community edits are processed.
Where does the church data come from?
The project cites OpenStreetMap, public boundary and population sources, U.S. Census and ARDA reference data, building footprints and denomination modeling, plus community-submitted churches and corrections.
Are attendance numbers exact?
Often no. HMC says attendance is primarily estimated from building footprint, with denomination averages, capacity information, and regional scaling used when direct information is unavailable. Treat it as a rough size signal.
Are language filters verified?
Some language information is structured or confirmed; other values are inferred from name patterns, demographics, denomination, and regional probabilities. Contact the church to confirm the language and schedule of a current service.
Is Here's My Church open source?
The source is public under CC BY-NC 4.0. You may share and adapt with attribution for noncommercial purposes; the repository says internal church or nonprofit self-hosting qualifies. Commercial use requires permission.
Does HMC recommend or endorse listed churches?
No endorsement should be inferred from inclusion. HMC is a discovery directory assembled from public and community data. Verify current facts, beliefs, leadership, safeguarding, and fit through official and personal sources.
Sources & further reading
More Church Directories
Christian Tech JobsA focused two-sided market for technologists and mission-driven Christian employers, now combining free posts, premium career-page aggregation, talent search, and AI matching—with unusually clear privacy detail and real hiring caveats.
Compassion InternationalThe largest Christian child sponsorship organization in the world, built around a single radical idea - you sponsor one specific child, by name, through their local church.
Christianbook.comThe family-owned warehouse that has quietly become the default storefront for serious Bible buyers, homeschool families, and pastors who actually care about binding quality - and still undercuts Amazon on most titles.
CrosswayThe nonprofit publisher of the ESV Bible and the modern Reformed book canon - and the publisher-direct storefront, free article archive, and sermon resource library that sit on top of it.
InterVarsity PressThe publishing arm of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has quietly become the broadest evangelical Protestant academic catalog in print - and the spiritual formation imprint is the deepest in the category.
Mass TimesThe internet’s oldest Catholic Mass-time directory, still the first place travelers check before Sunday morning - and the rare user-edited site that has aged well.