It is now possible to find your local parish church by typing your postcode into a little box. If you live in England at least. Up until this point the only way to find out which parish you lived in way to phone up a local vicar on the off-chance. Trust me – I had to do it last month. This website now makes such awkward phonecalls a thing of the past. As far as I know it only includes Anglican churches so far, and is a Church of England project so Welsh postcodes (for instance) don’t work. At least the one I tried didn’t. You can try it here:

A Church Near You : Find Churches in the Church of England

Well done to the Diocese of Oxford who have been working on this along with other dioceses. This page on their site explains a bit more about the project.

A Church Near You now has this advantage over the more ecumenical Find a Church, along with the ability to restrict your search to churches with (for instance), toilet facilities or a youth group. Although having said that you can search Find a Church by zooming in an a map, which is quite handy. Information on individual churches is patchy on both, but you can’t really blame the sites for that as they rely on people from the churches signing up. Find a Church has a wider coverage and charges a subscription fee for putting details of your church on the site. I’m not sure about whether you have to pay to have details added to A Church Near You. Both are projects worth supporting in any case.

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