Nobody pays to rank higher.

What the order is made of

You tell us what matters — in the quiz, in a conversation, or by searching. Each answer becomes one thing we look for, with a weight showing how much it matters to you. Every church gets a score out of 100: how much of what you asked for it actually has, divided by how much you asked for.

That is it. No popularity, no engagement, no how-recently-they-updated, no hidden thumb. If two churches match your answers equally, the nearer one comes first.

The things we look at

11 practical things, 9 things about what a church teaches, and distance.

We describe what a church teaches. We never grade it. There is no ranking of traditions anywhere in this product, and the words we use are meant to be ones a church would recognise as fair about itself.

If you did not answer something, it does not count

A question you skipped changes nothing. Neither does answering “no idea yet” — that is a real answer that costs a church nothing, not a shrug we quietly score against it.

This matters most with beliefs. If you never told us anything about baptism or communion, your results are exactly what they would be if we held no belief data at all. Silence never filters.

Deal-breakers remove churches, they do not push them down

If you tell us something is a deal-breaker — you need step-free access, an interpreter, a service in Spanish, a particular synod — churches that fail it are taken out of the list rather than shown lower down. We say how many were removed and why, and you can put them back in one tap.

One exception, on purpose: if a church simply has not published a position on something, we do not exclude it. Removing a church because our information is missing would hide the church you were looking for and tell you nothing.

Low scores are explained, not hidden

Churches that are further from what you asked for still appear, under their own heading, with what is different about them. Telling you a church is not your fit is this product working. Quietly dropping it is not.

Every result has a “How we got this number” link showing which of your answers counted, what each was worth, and what the church actually is. There is no part of the score you cannot see.

What a church can and cannot pay for

This is enforced in the code, not just promised here. The part of the system that scores churches cannot read anything commercial about them — it is built so that adding such a field breaks the build, and a test checks that a paying church and a non-paying church with identical details score identically.

Churchfit is free, and always will be

There is no paid tier for people looking for a church, and there will not be one. Churches pay to manage their own listing. That is where the money comes from, and it is the only arrangement that does not eventually corrupt the list.

When we are wrong

Service times change and churches move. Anything we have not checked in 90 days says so on the page, and every fact has a “this is wrong” link. Please use it — a wrong service time sends someone to a locked building on the one Sunday they worked up the courage to go, and that is the worst thing this product can do to a person.