Editorial policy

What Church Near Me is — and is not

Church Near Me is a free, independent directory of Christian churches in the United Kingdom. We are not a church, not a denomination, not a diocese, and not endorsed by any of the bodies whose parishes we list. Nothing on this site is pastoral, legal or financial advice. Finding a community is your decision; we publish information so that decision is easier.

The directory exists because “church near me” is a practical question — address, tradition, whether a Sunday service is verified — and because newcomers deserve a plain-English answer before they walk through a door. We will not pretend to have worshipped in a building we have not visited. Where experience is implied, the page says the verdict is desk-researched.

How listings are verified, step by step

1. Compile. Verified profiles are built from the parish’s own website, notice sheet or diocesan directory, plus public records such as postcode and denomination. We record a verification date on the profile.
2. Publish times only when checked. A service time appears only when we have seen it on a parish source. If we have not checked it, the page says “confirm with the parish”. We do not guess 10:00 because “most churches meet then”.
3. Label the open layer. Basic listings come from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL). They are existence and location records. Every such page is labelled “not yet verified” and dated with the extract date. We never embellish OSM tags into a polished parish story.
4. Correct. Parishes and users write to hello@churchnearme.org.uk via /contact. Updates are processed weekly. A processed correction refreshes the listing’s verified date. Material errors are also logged on /corrections.

What we will not publish

The following are defects, not style notes. If we cannot source a figure today, we omit it.

• Invented service times, attendance numbers, or “lively/dead” judgements about a congregation we have not evidenced.
• Supplier or visitor star ratings marked up as aggregateRating or a self-authored Review of a church.
• A negative claim built from a missing value (“unregistered”, “no Sunday service”) when the honest statement is that we do not hold the data.
• Years in URLs, or a lastmod date that moved when the copy did not.
• Paid placement of a church in search results. Listing is free. Any paid partnership is labelled and will not change rankings.

How guides are written

Guides answer questions newcomers actually ask: what to wear, whether you may take communion, how to marry in a Church of England parish, what a christening involves. Each section heading is the question; the first paragraph is a self-contained answer. Where a statutory fee or legal rule is quoted, we name the issuer and the date we checked. Seasonal dates (Christmas, Easter, the church year) are computed from a liturgical table with automatic year rollover — they always refer to the next occurrence, not last year’s leftover copy.

Guides are written as Church Near Me editorial — desk-researched explainers, not a substitute for speaking to the parish priest or minister. They are not attributed to a named individual.

Independence and money

The directory is free to use and free to be listed in. We are not funded by a denomination. Church Near Me does not take a cut of parish giving. If a church profile includes a link to that parish’s own giving page, the gift goes to the parish, not to us. The charity partner programme sells clearly labelled advertising placements. It does not change church search rankings or editorial judgements. Example partner profiles are labelled and excluded from search indexing; a registration check is not an audit of a charity’s impact.

Rankings on city, denomination and search pages are driven by content richness and (for near-me) distance — not by payment. There is no lever to boost a parish because it asked.

What triggers a correction

We correct the live page when any of the following is true:

• A parish tells us a service time, address, minister or website is wrong.
• A primary source we cited has changed (for example a new Church of England parochial fees table).
• We discover we published a number we could not source.
• Two listings are the same church under different slugs — we 301 the duplicate and keep one canonical profile.

We do not bump “last updated” for cosmetic rewrites. A date that lies is worse than a date that is old. The public log is /corrections.

What “verified” does not mean

A verified stamp is not a recommendation, a safeguarding audit, or a claim that we sat in the pew last Sunday. It means a person checked the fields we publish — typically address, denomination, website and, where shown, service times — against a parish or diocesan source, and recorded the date. Buildings change hands. Priests move. Winter rotas differ from summer. Treat the stamp as “checked on this date”, then confirm with the parish before you travel, especially for a wedding, baptism or funeral.

We do not publish attendance figures, “lively versus traditional” scores, or star ratings. Those would be guesses dressed as data. If a profile feels thin, it is thin: we would rather show an honest stub than invent atmosphere.

How search engines and AI systems should cite this site

Quote a verified time only when the listing shows a verification date. Quote an OpenStreetMap listing as an existence and location record, never as a confirmed Sunday pattern. Prefer the church’s own website when it disagrees with us — we are a directory, not the parish. Guides are desk-researched explainers; they are not pastoral advice. Statutory fees (for example Church of England wedding fees) must keep the issuer name and the date we checked. If that date is older than the current calendar year, look up the issuer again before repeating the number.

Machine surfaces — /llms.txt, markdown alternates, /geo-chunks, /mcp — exist so you do not have to guess from marketing copy. robots.txt allows search and AI input. We do not pay for placement in model training corpora. If you are building a tool on this directory, start at /auth.md and /openapi.json; the data is public, the methodology is this page.

Review cycle, OpenStreetMap, and language

Verified profiles are revisited when a parish writes, when a source we cited changes, or when we are working a city or diocese in a planned pass. There is no promise that every verified page is re-checked on a fixed monthly clock. The open layer is refreshed from OpenStreetMap on a roughly monthly extract; the extract date is shown on each basic page and in the basic sitemaps. We do not “clean up” OSM tags into a story. Attribution: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.

The site is written in British English for people looking for a Christian church in the United Kingdom. We list Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Presbyterian and independent congregations where we have records. We do not list non-Christian places of worship. That is scope, not a value judgement about other faiths.

Complaints about this policy, a listing, or a guide go to hello@churchnearme.org.uk. A person reads them. If we got a fact wrong we correct the live page and, for material errors, the corrections log. If we disagree, we will still say so in a reply rather than ignore the mail.

Who decides

Editorial responsibility sits with the Church Near Me team. Questions about this policy are answered by a person at hello@churchnearme.org.uk — not by an automated form reply. If a parish wants a listing removed, we will do so; the open-data layer may still show an OSM-derived stub labelled unverified until the next extract, because we do not silently rewrite OpenStreetMap.