How we verifyHOWWEVERIFY

What the badges mean

Two separate questions, and a listing answers them independently: who checked the facts, and who controls the listing. A congregation that has never claimed its page can still have been checked by a person, and that is worth saying out loud rather than lumping in with everything unclaimed.

Not yet claimed

Everything here came from public sources — a denominational directory, or the congregation’s own website — and nobody has confirmed it directly. It is still shown, because a church you can find and phone beats a blank page, but it is labelled every time.

Verified

A person checked this congregation against its own source and confirmed the details on the date shown. Nobody from the church has claimed the page yet.

Claimed

Someone from the congregation controls this listing. What they tell us outranks every other source we hold and is never overwritten by an automated check. Claiming is free and stays free.

Sponsored

This congregation pays for a labelled slot above the results in its town. It does not move them up the results, and it never has — relevance decides the order on every page here. What sponsorship is.

The line at the bottom of every listing

Separately from the badge, each listing carries a line of provenance: where a detail came from, and the date it was last checked. That date is the oldest check among the fields you would act on: the address, the phone number, the service time. Showing the newest would flatter the record.

The badge above says who stands behind the listing. This line says how good the details are right now, and it has three states.

Confirmed

The detail came from the congregation’s own website or its denomination’s official directory, and we checked it on the date shown.

Not yet confirmed

We found the congregation, but nobody has cross-checked this against a primary source. Shown anyway, and labelled every time.

Disputed

Someone told us a detail is wrong. It comes off the primary display until we re-check it against the church’s own source.

Where the details come from

In order of authority, and the order we prefer:

• The congregation itself. Once a church claims its listing, what it tells us outranks everything else and is never overwritten by an automated process.
• Denominational directories. A denomination’s own list of its own congregations. These are authoritative about affiliation and usually reliable about address.
• The church’s own website. The best source for service times, and the one we check them against.
• Web search. Used to find congregations we don’t have yet. Anything sourced this way and not cross-checked stays marked as unconfirmed.

What we don’t do

We don’t copy listing details out of Google Maps. Names, addresses, phone numbers, hours, ratings, and photos on Google are Google’s to serve, not ours to warehouse. Where we have a Google place identifier we use it for one thing: a link, so you can get directions in a tap.

We don’t invent service times. If a church’s own site doesn’t publish them and nobody has told us, the listing says they aren’t verified rather than guessing at a 10:00 or 11:00 that would be right most of the time and wrong often enough to make somebody drive for nothing.

How often it’s re-checked

• Service times — the most volatile field and the most valuable. Re-checked on a rolling basis, oldest first.
• Name, address, phone — re-checked when a listing comes up in the queue or when someone reports a problem.
• Claimed listings — never overwritten automatically. The congregation owns them.

Where this stands today

9,675 North Carolina congregations are listed. 1,951 of them carry confirmed service times — which means most do not, yet. North Carolina has roughly 15,700 congregations, so what’s here is a start on a long job, and every page is written to say so rather than imply otherwise.

Found something wrong? Tell us. It gets re-checked against the church’s own source, not just edited.