AChurchNearYou.com is the Church of England’s official church finder tool, and it also offers free websites for churches and benefices.
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.
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.
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').
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.
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.
- Online giving integration - Add an online giving button to your homepage
Registration
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).
- Register and 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.
Getting Started
To get started, try these steps:
- Edit your homepage, adding a welcome message, photo and current news and events.
- List your regular and one-off services and events in the events calendar.
- Create custom pages to reflect important aspects of church life.
- Add contact details to the get in touch page, including an email address for messages from the public. The email address won’t be visible to the public, but when the public contact your church through the AChurchNearYou.com contact form we will automatically send their message to your specified email address.
- Tell people how to find you on the Find us page. Bus routes, parking information and the numbers for local taxi firms will help new visitors feel welcome.
- Add information about your facilities such as building accessibility, groups, and community projects, to help local people find your church.
Once you have these details in place, visit the Marketplace to find out about other features you can add, such as the online donations feature and the Life Events Diary which makes it quick and easy to manage enquiries about funerals, weddings and baptisms/christenings.
What if using AChurchNearYou.com as my main church website isn't right for me?