December 20, 2025
Building LA Churches: Finding Sacred Space in the Sprawl
An interactive directory to help Angelenos discover churches across Los Angeles County.
Los Angeles is a city of distances. Fifteen million people spread across 4,700 square miles of basin, canyon, and coast. In a place this vast, finding community takes intention. Finding a church? Even more so.
That's why I built LA Churches—a simple tool to help people discover places of worship near them.
The Problem
When you move to a new neighborhood in LA, or when you're visiting and want to find Mass, confession, or adoration, the options are scattered across dozens of parish websites, diocesan directories, and Google Maps listings that may or may not be current. Some churches have beautiful websites; others haven't been updated since 2008. Some show up on maps; others are hidden in strip malls or converted storefronts.
I wanted a single place where someone could open their phone, see what's nearby, and go.
The Build
LA Churches is intentionally simple:
- Location-based discovery — Uses geolocation to show churches sorted by distance from where you are
- Interactive map — Visual clustering shows church density across neighborhoods
- Search — Find by name, address, or neighborhood
- Bilingual — English and Spanish, reflecting LA's population
- Mass times, confession, adoration — The practical information people actually need
The design is dark and minimal—a conscious choice. Churches are places of quiet and reverence. The tool to find them should feel the same way.
Why This Matters
We live in an age of loneliness. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called it an epidemic. And while technology often gets blamed for fracturing community, I believe it can also help rebuild it—if we build with intention.
A church is more than a building. It's a place where strangers become neighbors, where the isolated find belonging, where meaning is made concrete in bread and wine and the voices of a congregation. But you have to be able to find the door first.
LA Churches is a small tool for a large city. My hope is that it helps even a few people find their way to sacred space—and to each other.
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Try it at lachurches.org. If you know of a church that should be added, let me know.