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The goal of this site is to share
information regarding the location of churches of Christ having specific
practices and characteristics.
These churches, uniquely, have no earthly headquarters or formal organization
structure above the local congregation, making them challenging to find
without this kind of directory. These churches also have somewhat distinctive
practices discussed in more detail below.
This site is a part-time hobby of Earle West of Marlboro, NJ USA
and many others.
This information therefore is absolutely "unofficial" and should only be considered
a casual work, subject to errors and omissions of all kinds, and numerous ad-hoc contributors.
Earle can be reached at ehwest@gmail.com or (908) 216-5054 in the US.
Updates and new records may be input on-line at any time by anyone. However,
all records are quality-checked for very basic consistency before publishing. Errors do
get through, and email is a good way to fix any point of confusion.
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Many Sources
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In the fall
of 2000 a significant amount of US directory data was seeded
in into the project by Dennis
Kelly, Searcy, AR, USA. Eighteen months later, non-US
data was provided by Mac
Lynn, Nashville, TN, USA.
In 2002, Salvador
Cariga, The Philippines, Roy
Davison, Alken, Belgium, Randy
Matheny, Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil, Theodore
Lucas, India, Graham
Fisher, the United Kingdom, Kim Voraritskul, Thailand,
and Fielden Allison, Kenya provided guidance and/or data for the project.
In 2003, an
(unamed-by-request) team of people have provided a
very large database (20,000 records, since reduced to 16,000)
of churches of Christ in India. In early 2004, Wendell
Broom provided to us a copy of his nearly 4,000 (since
reduced to 3,600) churches of Christ in Nigeria in 2004. During
their May, 2004 visit to the US, Lendal
and Peggy Wilks brought over their list of 107 churches
in Mozambique and more than 1,700 churches in Malawi.
In July, 2008, Bren White provided
a list of 319 French-speaking Churches of Christ around the world, which is the work of Barry Baggott, Doyle Key, and Bren.
In February, 2010, Ruth Zimmerman, Ontario, Canada, provided detailed records for 175 congregations in Papua New Guinea.
All
records, from every source, are generally vetted and matched
to our global database of latitude and longitudes for the
nearest poplulated place, based on a US government gazetteer.
Starting November 30, 2014, we are replacing most all of our lat/long
values with new, much more accurate, values from Google.
Thanks to Matt Prewett
of the Saturn Road church of Christ in Garland, TX for providing
funds for providing county-level data for the entire US and
all of the Canadian postal codes.
The United States government has also provided a significant amount of
free geographic data that is needed to provide the unique
"find-within-radius" feature of the site worldwide.
The data these
folks provided is protected under United States copyright
law, and is used here by permission.
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Transactional
Web, Inc., a privately held for-profit corporation, owns
all of the software, data, presentation, intellectual property,
and patents pending that are embodied in the system at this
time. Copyright protections are asserted to prevent economic
and/or other forms of abuse. The same underlying software
system is currently used for commercial purposes for SkiWhere.com.
Of course,
this site would have very limited value if it were not for
people like you, who silently provide an incredible non-stop
stream of updates for everyone to share. Please check out
all the listings you know about. Click
here to update a listing right now!
We openly list
all other known similar directories and occasionally use them
to verify new or changed listings, and to harvest new listings
from people who post to those sites. If you know of other
relevant directories, please write.
Check our list of other directories.
The good news
is that hundreds of thousands of seekers
are served with information about the congregation nearest
them.
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| Practices
and Policies |
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ChurchZip
is a ministry, not a business.
We do have a limited amount of commercial
advertising on the site to cover hosting expenses.
Our
goal is to make it easy to find the church of Christ wherever
someone might want to find one. By offering up each congregation's
own local web site, we encourage further inquiry into each
congregation's practices.
ChurchZip does NOT include all churches of any kind or type.
Churches listed in ChurchZip are limited to those disclosing certain highly distinctive
New Testament practices. We list only those churches satisfying all three:
1) those not served by any official denominational directory, 2) those
adhering to names for themselves that can be found in the New Testament,
and 3) those who adhere to the profoundly distinctive New Testament
practice of using acappella music during worship services.
We rely on leaders
within each congregation to tell us whether or not they fit these
characteristics. We ask no questions about what anyone
'believes,' but we do ask about what is practiced. We also
don't consider "theatrical" events of any kind to be defined as a worship service.
Why do we limit
this list? Very simple! Most people using ChurchZip are looking
for churches just such as these!
Please write if
you know of any listing incorrectly identified in this category.
We can probably point you to other directories, should this one
fail to meet your needs.
We browse all possible sources on the Internet and elsewhere to check for accuracy and changes.
Trustworthy directory operators are always willing to make corrections and/or additions
you provide to them.
Don't EVER pay someone to correct their own records. We welcome your corrections
and/or new records. Freely we receive, freely we give.
Help
Wanted!
We are always looking
for contributions of data describing churches around the world.
If you have directory information we don't have, or have updates,
join the effort!
If you have any direct knowledge of mission outposts or churches of Christ
in countries outside of the United States, we would be pleased to update our records accordingly.
If your congregation is involved in funding such outposts, your good stewardship may well
lead you to provide that information for all to share.
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| Technology |
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ChurchZip is a very
special kind of directory. Once you specify a particular place for
the center of your search, our radius-based listing crosses boundaries
of all types, including all local, state, and national borders.
The results are listed in an order based on distance (as the dove
flies).
ChurchZip is built on the latest server and database technology available from Amazon
Web Services.
The current database contains detailed records for more than 40,000 churches.
Because ChurchZip costs are so low, there are
no costs to any users.
Now in it's 13 th
year of operation, the ChurchZip system is one-of-a-kind software
application that uses numerous open-source (free) software and data
components. The application software is about 5,000 lines of custom
code. We use the CentOS distribution of Linux, the Apache web server,
the PHP web application server, and mySQL database server.
A technology refresh is currently underway at in the last two months of 2014.
We have used the United
States National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) data for latitude
and longitude of many non-US locations and the United States Geological
Survey (USGS) data for US locations. We have relied
on NIMA's public repository of non-US place-names (and spellings)
approved by the Foreign Names Committee (FNC) of the United States
Board on Geographic Names. (We know they have erred in numerous
Latin renderings of Japanese and Chinese place names, and will continue
to report specific problems to them as needed).
Starting in November 2014, we are updating all location data
using Google map data and images. This is known to be very accurate, world-wide.
There are exceptions, however, so we provide for updating your own location should you wish to do so.
Our basic goal for
ChurchZip.com is to serve up free data from the world's largest
and most accurate directory of churches of Christ.
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