The 3am text

It started with a text from one of my best friends at 3am on a Sunday: “A map of every Christian church in the US would be pretty interesting to see.” I agreed, so I started to build. The spark had a spark, too—a couple weeks earlier I’d made an interactive world-conflict map in Figma Make for fun, so I knew exactly what the tooling could do. Swap the dataset, and 48 hours later a church directory existed: idea, name, domain, data, and announcement, all inside a weekend.

Here's My Church Iowa map with a New Hope search open and results listed above the search bar
Where it landed — search a state, pick a church. The directory from that weekend, usable.

Data does the design

The surprise wasn’t building the map—it was that no comprehensive, well-designed church directory existed. So the design work became data work: OpenStreetMap locations cross-referenced with U.S. Census and denomination records, all free and public. Attendance estimates were the fun part—building square footage, portioned down to a sanctuary and shrunk below full capacity, gave 40–50% of churches a realistic weekly number instead of a guess. Not perfect, but honest about what it is.

Iowa map with Filters open — verified criteria and attendance size ranges controlling which churches show Church detail card for Meadowbrook Baptist Church with estimated attendance, denomination, reactions, and bilingual estimate
“Verified” has a definition you can read. Attendance is labeled an estimate—and the card is where size, denomination, and feel live together.

Kept accurate by strangers

Church directories rot because updating them is a chore. Here’s My Church makes corrections anonymous—no account, just fix the field—and keeps the crowd honest with a review queue: every proposed change gets human eyes before it lands. 1,640 corrections and 74 churches improved so far, from people who just wanted the map to be right.

Update church info panel for Parkside Baptist Church with editable name, website, address, attendance, and denomination fields
Anyone can fix a field—no account. Every change waits for human review before it lands.

Where it stands

Over 244,000 churches across all 50 states—about one church per 1,368 people. It’s free, open source, and maintained: I steward the data and the map, and the crowd keeps it honest.

Tools & process

Claude

First pass of the interactive map and visual system in a prompt-driven visual build, then carried forward into production code.

React

SVG-based map UI with Motion for animation and Lucide for icons (not a generic embedded map widget); Vite for the production bundle.

Supabase

Backing database for church records and crowd-sourced corrections.

OpenStreetMap, Census & denomination sources

Blending free location and attribute data; attendance estimates refined with building footprint logic where available.

Product & data

Modeling what “accurate church data” means in the UI, review flows for edits, and ongoing stewardship of the map experience.