Many of us have churches that we call home – but what happens when we move? It can be hard to find a congregation in an unfamiliar area. I remember when I was a freshman at Grove City College, trying to find a church that was close but also matched my beliefs was a challenge. I spent over a month visiting churches before I finally found my “college church-home.” This process can be confusing and kind of lonely. A company attempting to solve this problem is FaithStreet.
Their easy-to-use website helps people find churches in their local area and connects people into congregations. FaithStreet started by locating a pain: the sometimes extreme difficulty of trying to find a church. If you move to a large city, there could be potentially hundreds or thousands of churches; that’s just too much for any one person to sort through on their own. Additionally, the company helps users to give to their church. Their mission with giving is to help people “invest in the practice of giving, not only the moment of giving.”
With the pandemic changing how we have to do church for right now, FaithStreet responded by launching a new app in 2020. The app allows users to enjoy faith community through the sharing of prayer cards and reflection questions from the user’s pastor. Churches can upload their bulletins so the congregation can stay up-to-date and people can watch or listen to sermons every week. FaithStreet has a three-pronged approach to tackling the common problems that plague the modern church through 1) Discovery, 2) Giving, and 3) Connecting.
In 2011, Founders Sean Coughlin and Glenn Ericksen recognized a problem. They wanted to help people find a church, not feel stressed about giving, and grow spiritually. They started a free service as a directory and started going door to door to churches in/near Brooklyn, New York to ask them to sign up. Soon, the directory expanded to encompass most of the churches in New York City, eventually going national. FaithStreet is proud of the progress their website and app have made and how many people they have been able to help. Today, 25,000 churches manage active profiles, 300,000+ churches are listed in the directory, and more than 10 million people have found a church through the service.
Finding a church can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be thanks to FaithStreet.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faithstreet-com-helps-churches-digitally-connect-with-worshippers/
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