About Église Locale

She arrived the day before. New job, new neighbourhood, a box still sealed in the hallway. This Sunday morning, she simply wants to find a church. Not the biggest, not the most beautiful: one where people sing at nine, twenty minutes from home, and where someone will say hello.

She picks up her phone. She finds a page opened in 2019, whose last post announces a convention long past. A number nobody answers. An address in a chat group, with no street name. A video of a service, filmed from too far away, saying neither where nor when. At eleven, she puts the phone down. She won't go.

Three streets away

There was a church, though. It sings at nine. It greets newcomers by name after two Sundays. It runs a choir, a youth group and a food distribution on Saturdays. Its pastor lacks neither faith nor work. He lacks an address. He tried a website once: too expensive, a provider who could not be reached, a domain name that has since expired. Since then, he has announced his services in a messaging group of two hundred and fourteen members — the people who already come.

This church exists. It simply cannot be found.

The gap

Between a woman who is searching and a church that exists, that Sunday there were only a few streets — and nothing to cross them. This gap is not a matter of money, faith or goodwill. It is a matter of tools. The available platforms are designed for large organisations, billed in foreign currencies, and assume you know how to run a website. They answer a question nobody was asking.

Église Locale exists to close that gap. That is all, and it is already a great deal.

A church signs up in a few minutes, from a phone. It gets a dignified public page — name, address, service times, photos, story, contact — a place on a map and a listing in an international directory. It publishes its events; they appear in the public calendar. It announces its live service; it is visible from the home page. It writes to its members without any extra software.

Free of charge, with no time limit. The public page, the map and the directory have never been paid features and never will be: what is paid for are the tools of those who publish a lot.

Église Locale first shows what is close: your country, then your region, then your continent, then the rest — hidden by nothing, and brought back with a single click.

What we refuse

A directory is worth as much for what it refuses as for what it accepts. Every profile is checked by a person before it is published.

We also refuse to bill in an inaccessible currency: a subscription can be paid by card or by mobile money, from Cotonou, Lomé, Dakar or Antananarivo just as from Paris.

And we refuse to lock anyone in: every organisation remains the owner of what it publishes, decides what is public, and leaves with its content if it wishes.

We will never know whether she eventually found that church. But we know what it would have taken: that the congregation three streets from her home had an address, a map, a service time, and a page someone looks at. That is what we are building, one profile at a time.

Your church, your federation, your institution or your music has its place here.

Creating your space takes a few minutes and costs nothing. Create your space