AChurchNearYou.com is the Church of England’s official church finder tool, and it also offers free websites for churches and benefices.
You can locate your parish church, which can be useful for weddings, christenings and other special life events; or find a church near you that provides aparticular service such as children's groups, specific styles of worship or community action work.
If you are looking for your parish church be sure to put in your postcode in full or use the 'get my location' option to get an accurate result.
Information for churches
AChurchNearYou.com is the Church of England’s official church finder tool for the public,helping more people discover your church and contact you. Every Church of England church has a listing on the site.
AChurchNearYou.com receives over 70 million page views per year. By keeping your church's listing up to date, you help more people find your church.It’s free and easy to update your listing by becoming an editor.
Throughout the year, and particularly at Christmas and Easter, the Church of England drives the public to discover churches on AChurchNearYou.com through adverts, social media posts and printed resources.
“This Sunday one of the Church Wardens came up to me after the service and said that she had had an email from AChurchNearYou.com from a lady asking where the service was in the benefice. She had replied immediately and the lady was in church with us!”
AChurchNearYou.com also offers free websites for Church of England churches and benefices. Your listing quickly becomes a full website when you populate and customise all the available sections.Using AChurchNearYou.com as your main church website could be the right choice for you if you want your church to have a modern website that is quick and easy to update and costs nothing.
If you want to, within AChurchNearYou.com you can also set up a website for your multi-church benefice, suitable if you are a Team Parish, Team Ministry or similar. You can then add events, news and whole pages to your benefice site and have them automatically copy across to your individual church sites.
Why use AChurchNearYou.com as your main church website?
Benefits
- Completely free – no costs for hosting, setup or development.
- Simple to update – designed for people with no prior website experience.
- Training and support available - 'how to' guides and videos, regular daytime and evening webinars, and a support team to answer your questions.
- Secure – we handle security and access. Never lose access to your website again, even if volunteers leave.
- Mobile friendly and visible on search – Google search prioritises web pages which are mobile friendly. Your AChurchNearYou.com site will often appear on the first page of search engine results for your church.
- Continuous improvement – editor feedback shapes our development plans for the site.
- Solutions for multi-church benefices - save time by copying content across your benefice site and individual church sites.Customise with language of your choice (e.g. 'Team Parish' or 'Team Ministry' instead of 'benefice').
“We love the new benefice feature and works really well for our two locations in the same parish.”
Key features
- Customisable homepage – highlight upcoming events and key news, add online donation button.
- Services and events calendar and news pages – keep everyone up to date.
- Add your own pages – option to add custom pages if you wish.
- Contact form – all messages you receive via the site are sent direct to an email address of your choice for you to reply from.
- Embed video – easily display your latest recording if you film your services.
- Web address options - if you have an existing web address you can redirect it to your AChurchNearYou.com site, or you can get a new one of your choice and use that.
“For a church with no one who understands the underlying technology it is a good idea, especially as mobile devices can be used to edit. Thank you very much for providing this service.”
Optional extras
- Church Development Tool to survey your congregation - to support any existing planning process you may be doing. Questions cover faith, discipleship and demographics.
- Online Services Register - list your service attendance online instead of in your paper book and this will pre-populate your Statistics for Mission form so it is quicker to complete at the end of the year.
- Integration with The Church Organiser – display a Room Bookings page, and /or display Life Events contact forms that collect all the details you need from enquirers about weddings, christenings and funerals.
- Support faith from Monday to Saturday - add a page about how you support people to live out their faith Monday to Saturday and link them to online discipleship tools on the Everyday Faith platform.
- Resource Hub - free music tracks to download if you don’t have access to musicians or organist, plus a range of other useful downloads.
Is a website on AChurchNearYou.com right for me?
For many churches, AChurchNearYou.com offers everything they need, with zero cost, making it the best choice of website for them.
Some churches with staff and a budget to run a separate website, prefer to do so with other website providers, rather than using AChurchNearYou.com as their main website. These churches can add just their basic information on AChurchNearYou.com, including providing a contact email address and a link to their main website.
We recommend then logging in at least twice a year, in October and February, to list your Easter and Christmas events on AChurchNearYou.com. This is to make sure you don't miss out on getting noticed by the boosted visitor numbers that come to find a church on AChurchNearYou.com at these times of year.
Getting started
The best way to explore if you want to use AChurchNearYou.com as your main church website is to register on the site and then request to be an editor of your church(es).
- Registerand then log in.
- Search for your church on A Church Near You.
- Choose ‘Edit this church’ from the church’s menu and fill out the form.
- You get approved by an existing editor of that church. In case of any problems or delay, contact us for approval.
- Book onto a short editor training webinar or watch videos and read help articles when it suits you.
Frequently asked questions
What will my website address (or URL) be?
The default web address you will have will be something like achurchnearyou.com/church/12345.
To change the address, you can:
- Contact us and ask for an alternative AChurchNearYou.com URL with your church name in it, which we provide in the format achurchnearyou.com/all-saints-millington
- Purchase a new custom URL, for example, ‘allsaintschurchmillington.org’ from any domain name provider, and set it to forward to your AChurchNearYou.com URL.
- If you already have custom URL for a separate website, but want to move to AChurchNearYou.com, you can redirect it to your AChurchNearYou.com URL.
How do I find my parish church?
A Church Near You is designed to search for your nearest church. This may not be your Parish Church, because of the way parish boundaries work.
When searching by location, the system specifies your parish above the list of nearby churches.
The system performs its search with the address you enter; the more detailed the address, the more accurate the results received. For example, entering only a town name will result in the system locating the nearest church to the geographical centre of that town. Again, this may not be your nearest church.
In the case of multiple church benefices, the system refers to the church in the group that is labelled as the Parish Church.
If you need to work out what parish you are in, simply enter an address into the A Church Near You search box and click the orange arrowbutton. A search results page, similar to the image below, will then show you the parish your address falls under, as well as your parish church.
I already have a website that works for me. Why should I use AChurchNearYou.com?
AChurchNearYou.com has over 70 million page views a year. By adding your website address and preferred contact email address to your listing on AChurchNearYou.com you can benefit from this traffic. You will find that many people use AChurchNearYou.com to make enquiries about weddings, baptisms and funerals. By adding an email address to your listing, you can now get their messages straight into your inbox, with no need to log in to AChurchNearYou.com like you had to in the past. We can even add the website address and email address to your AChurchNearYou.com listing for you if you don’t want to do it yourself.
Beyond keeping your basic church contact details up to date, how much or how little you use AChurchNearYou.com is up to you.
If possible, we recommend logging in at least twice a year, in October and February, to list your Easter and Christmas events on AChurchNearYou.com. This is to make sure you don't miss out on getting noticed by the boosted visitor numbers that come to find a church on AChurchNearYou.com at these times of year.
- Incumbent
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The priest who is in charge of church life in a particular benefice. Depending on the parish his/her title may be Vicar, Rector or Priest-in-Charge
For all information relating to A Church Near You including more detailed information about the above FAQs, please visit the Editor Help Centre, which is regularly updated by the team.
