Mass Finder: find nearby churches and services

On Pentecost this year, I released the Mass Finder app on the Android playstore along with the more generic Faith Finder app. Initially the app had about a hundred churches mainly in Bangalore and few others in India. But once the app got released I got requests from different places starting with Sydney, Australia and the Bay Area, California. Checking the search query logs, I found requests from other places including the Philippines and Singapore. To serve our users, the database grew and now we have over 17,000+ churches in 400+ cities in 200+ countries. Most of the common fields are based on the Google places search results including the GPS lat, long co-ordinates, the City, State/Province and Country, the Rating and the number of Reviewers.

If you do a "Find a Church" query, you get a list of nearby churches within a radius of 5-20 kilometers (you can select the range) sorted by proximity and you can click on the Car icon to allow Google maps to take you there (we do not believe in re-inventing the wheel and since G-maps does this job very well, we just allow it to help you get there). If you click on the > link, you get more information about the church, including Address, Contact details and Mass timings. These fields may or may not be present and we are on an ongoing mission to fill in these gaps. Here are the features planned in the upcoming releases:

1. On first use, collect preferences and provide quick help
2. Add Adoration and Confession schedules and provide "Find a Confession/Adoration" service
3. Provide the days Mass readings text or audio to help users prepare for the Mass and if it is in a different language they can follow the readings this way
4. If when a "Find a Church" or "Find a Mass" search is performed, there are no results in the vicinity and the church data is not present, inform the user and provide an option to probe using google to find nearby catholic churches. These may be added to the database after verification
5. Enable search of churches at different location from current GPS co-ordinates
6. Provide points and badges for volunteer contributors and promote when they earn badges
7. Integrate google sign in so that volunteers can just use their google id and not have to remember a separate username/password for their volunteer account
8. Provide a language list selection in preferences (currently single language is available)
9. Provide church verification and mass schedule verification option and also feature to report inaccuracies and out of date information

Faith Finder is the sibling of Mass Finder and is meant to be open to all Christians so that all can find their churches and join the services in their respective churches.

Many people helped bring this to where it is now, but especially I want to thank my wife and family for their support and encouragement and facilitating me to work on the app. I want to thank my friend Snehan Solomon for his initial contribution to the codebase and Kevin Rodrigues for early testing and feedback, Gideon Santiago for designing a beautiful logo and icon for the app (you can find Gideon's profile and work here: https://gidsant.myportfolio.com/work) and Amanda for sharing lots of data about churches and Mass timings in Bangalore. With the continued collaboration of our growing community of volunteers and helpers, I'm sure we will be able to improve the database and the app and bring many more people closer to God through the Church.

Catholicism and the Lord of the Rings

Reading "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R Tolkien was such an overwhelming experience that had me glued for so many days. I borrowed a single volume edition of the trilogy and could hardly wait for the reading time before bed each day, journeying with the author into the lands of middle earth.

I'm not surprised therefore, to know of its overwhelming popularity - a survey by online bookstore Amazon gave LOTR the numero uno status, adjudging it the favorite book across countries and continents.

Fr Barron is the man behind http://www.wordonfire.org/, he's the exciting sensation on Catholic blogosphere, leveraging the power of the Internet to reach hungry online audiences through videos, talks, articles and other media. Catch him speaking on how Tolkien, a practicing Catholic, wove the story of the Lord of the Rings around his Catholic faith:

Part 1


Part 2

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

This past Monday brought to a close the "Week of Prayer for Christian Unity", which started the previous Monday (January 18th). Each year at this time, Christians pray the prayer that the Lord Jesus Christ prayed and that the Apostle John recorded in his Gospel [John 17:11].

I recently finished reading the book "Rome Sweet Home" by Scott and Kimberly Hahn, on their journey to the Catholic Church. Scott and Kimberly were Prebyterian Christians steeped in the Scriptures and faith and practices of their Church. Scott describes their journey to Rome as follows:

"In truth, the journey began as a detective story, but soon it became more like a horror story, until it finally ended up as a great romance story - when Christ unveiled His Bride, the Church."

Peter Kreeft, author of "Handbook of Christian Apologetics" says in the foreword:

"Because of the intrinsic drama of its subject - man's quest for his Creator and his for him - all conversion stories are worth listening to. But not all arrest you and sweep you along like a powerful river as this one does."

Scott writes that as he grew deeper in faith along his journey, he began to realize the great desire of God for unity in the Church - that all believers join together so that they share the communion with one another and with Christ and so that the world sees a visibly united Body of Christ. This, unfortunately is not so today.

It is for this reason, that every year from January 18th to 25th, we observe the "Week of prayer for Christian Unity". This observance began in 1908 with the "Church Unity Octave", an experiment started by Lewis Thomas Wattson (1863-1940), an Episcopalian, at Graymoor, New York, to encourage Anglicans and Catholics to pray together for unity in response to Jesus plea to the Father: "I pray that they may all be one" [Jn 17:21a]. Almost as tangible proof of the efficacy of this prayerful exercise, Wattson, together with the Society of the Atonement founded by him on 7th October 1898 entered the Catholic Church on 30th October 1909.

Does the claim that the Catholic Church is the one true Church sound egotistic and self-righteous? It is not so, because it is Jesus who established the Church. We cannot not follow Him. To deny that the Church that Jesus founded is the true Church would be egotistical. We have a duty to the seek the Truth and once we find it, hold fast to it and defend it. It is honest for people to argue for their faith, even if they think we are wrong. But it should be done with charity and respect for the other person.

Indeed we can learn a lot from someone who has come to the Church from without. Scott Hahn was so overcome by the richness of Catholicism, especially the Eucharist that he feels they (Protestants, though we should rather call them separated brothers and sisters) have the menu while we Catholics have the meal. As cradle Catholics, we have in the Church and the Eucharist, great riches, but how much do we really appreciate it. In fact, if we really did, we would prepare for it sufficiently - the lines for the Confession would be full. Why is it that so few come for confession on Saturdays not only at our parish, but everywhere?

It is upto us to work on our relationship with God daily. We need to pray regularly and read the Bible and go for Mass often, because without this, we cannot face the enemy on our own. Only with God's help and with Jesus by our side can we courageously face up to the challenges of living out our Christian vocation. How can we share something we don't have? We need to know Jesus more and more - through prayer, the reading of the Scripture, listening attentively to homilies and teachings, reading books about the faith and about the Catholic Church. We should know Jesus to the point of overflowing with the desire to share Him. Jesus is not happy to see so many of our separated brothers and sisters not part of His one Body.

Therefore I urge you, dear brothers and sisters to pray to God our Father for the unity of all Christians. We need to join forces because our enemies are not our Christian brothers and sisters nor any other people, but Satan and all his wicked plans. He comes only to steal, kill and destroy. We fight against our own selves to master the desires that take us away from God. This is our greatest need - to be made more like God. But we should be faithful and help each other by our prayers, life and witness. For Bangaloreans, the book "Rome Sweet Home" is available at Pauline Publications, temporarily shifted to Albert Street.