Terms of Service

What The Church Map is

A free public map and directory of churches in the United States, together with tools that let congregations pray for their cities and work with one another. It is offered free of charge to churches and to the public. We do not charge for a listing, and a church cannot pay to rank higher.

A few things offered alongside the map — a sponsorship, or a funding conversation with an outside partner — are separate arrangements with their own paperwork. When one of those applies you will be told plainly and asked to agree to it separately. Nothing on this page commits you to any of them.

Using the site

You may browse, link to, and share anything published here. You may not:

• scrape or bulk-copy the directory to rebuild it elsewhere;
• use anything on the site to send unsolicited mail to churches;
• post anything unlawful, abusive, deceptive, or written to impersonate a church or a person;
• claim a church you have no authority over;
• attempt to break, overload or work around the site’s security.

We can remove content and close accounts that do these things. Automated access to our data for research or ministry use is usually welcome — ask us first rather than hammering the site.

Your account

You need an account to claim a church, post to a community feed, or comment. Use real information, keep your sign-in details to yourself, and tell us if you think somebody else has got into your account. What happens under your account is your responsibility.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account, and if you are under 18 please get a parent or guardian’s permission first. You can ask us to close your account at any time.

Church listings

Church records are assembled from public sources and from churches themselves, and they are provided as they stand. We work hard on accuracy and publish how each field is sourced on our methodology page, but a service time, an address or a denomination can be out of date. A church may have moved, merged, or closed. Check with the church before you travel.

A listing is not an endorsement. A church appearing on the map does not mean we endorse it, that it endorses us, that it is affiliated with us, or that it has agreed to anything at all. Most churches here have never spoken to us, and we do not vouch for the beliefs, teaching, conduct or safety of any church listed.

If something about your church is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. A church can also claim its own listing and maintain it directly: choose Claim this page, sign in, and tell us your role there. A person reviews every claim before it is granted, and we may decline one, ask for more proof, or withdraw one that turns out to be wrong or disputed. If you would rather your church were not listed at all, we will not usually delist it. A church’s name, address and denomination are public facts, and a map with holes in it is not a map — the same position Google, Yelp, Apple, OpenStreetMap and every church directory we know of takes. What we will do instead, on request from an address we can connect to the church, is switch it to a basic listing: the page keeps the church’s name, address, denomination, its pin on the map and a link to its own website, and loses everything we assembled about it — the photos, the description, the events, the service times, the contact details and the rest. It stays in search, because taking a church out of Google costs the church more than it costs us. A church can also switch the prayer section off separately, or ask us to. And, without argument, we remove personal information about an individual whenever a church asks — a named person’s email address, or a personal event carried in a published calendar.

What you post

You keep ownership of what you write. By posting publicly you give us permission to store it and display it on the site, and — where the page is a public one — to let search engines and other people see it. That permission ends for future display when you or we take the content down. Post only what you have the right to post: words, photographs and music that are yours or that you have permission to use, and other people’s stories only when they have agreed.

Some contributions are read by a moderator before they appear and some go up straight away, so please do not treat publication as our approval of what was said. We are not obliged to keep anything published, and we do not review everything. If you think something here infringes your copyright, send us a link and we will look into it.

Prayer requests, and what is public

There are two different things happening on the prayer pages, and it matters that you know which is which before you type.

A prayer request you ask for is public. When you ask people to pray for you, that request is meant to be seen and prayed over by strangers: it can appear on the prayer wall, on the map, on the prayer page, and on a church page. It is shown with your first name and last initial, or with no name at all if you choose to be anonymous. An anonymous request is read by a moderator before it goes anywhere; a request from a signed-in account may appear right away. Please do not put anything in a public request that you would not want a stranger to read, including other people’s names and situations. Sometimes, instead of publishing a request, we pass it privately to a church to pray over.

A prayer you write for somebody else is private. When you pray for a stranger’s request and write words for them, those words are not published anywhere on this site. A moderator reads them, and if the person who asked chose to hear from those praying, the prayer is emailed to that one person. Nobody else receives it.

Your email address is never published. We use it only for what you asked for — to tell you somebody prayed, to send you a prayer written for you, or to forward your request to a church when you tick that box — and every message includes a link to stop them. What we keep and for how long is set out in the privacy policy.

Prayer here is prayer, not professional help. Nothing on the site is medical, legal, financial or counselling advice, and we cannot promise anyone will see a request in time. If you or someone else is in danger, call 911. If you are thinking about suicide or in crisis, call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline answers day and night.

YouTube

Parts of this site are built on YouTube API Services. By using The Church Map you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google’s handling of data is governed by the Google Privacy Policy.

We show whether a church is broadcasting and what it has broadcast in the past. Video itself is played by YouTube, in YouTube’s embedded player or on youtube.com — we do not host, copy or re-distribute anyone’s video, and a church controls its own channel entirely. Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play. A church that does not want its broadcasts listed here can tell us and we will stop listing them.

Community statistics

Alongside churches we publish figures about the neighborhoods around them, drawn from public datasets such as the Census Bureau and the CDC. These are survey estimates, not measurements of the street outside. Where a figure is too uncertain to state honestly we print no number at all, and every threshold is explained on our methodology page. Please check the original source before using one to make a decision that needs precise data.

Links to other places

The site links out to church websites, live streams, giving pages and public data sources. Those places are not ours and we are not responsible for them. Once you leave The Church Map, their terms and their privacy practices apply, not ours.

No warranty, and limits

The site is provided “as is”. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and to the extent the law allows we are not liable for losses arising from using it or from relying on information published here — including anything that follows from a listing, a statistic, a prayer request, or content posted by somebody else. Because the site is free, our total liability to you for any claim connected with it is limited to one hundred US dollars. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and some states do not allow certain limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute belongs in the state or federal courts sitting in Kent County, Michigan. If a court decides some part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still stands.

Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top of the page shows when they last changed, and continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it. If a change is a significant one we will say so on the site.

Contact

The Church Map · 2279 New Town Dr NE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49525, United States · [email protected]