Bless Every Home lets Christians know where you live and who you are. That's just for starters.

As if evangelical Christians trying to convert you wasn’t annoying enough as is, there’s now an app helping them do it—and the app knows where you live.

According to a piece by Elle Hardy at The New Republic, the “Bless Every Home” app allows users to target specific homes in their neighborhoods for conversion. Using what the developers claim is publicly available data, it’s easy to see who lives where in order to micro-target people in need of Jesus.

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As more people use it, the sharable notes function creates a database making it easier for members of a church to keep tabs on who might be especially vulnerable. And who has kids. And who’s not white.

It puts a lot of features at the fingertips of the faithful, including the ability to filter whole neighborhoods by religion, ethnicity, “Hispanic country of origin,” “assimilation,” and whether there are children living in the household.

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Kevin Greeson, Texas hub leader of Global Gates, a large missionary network and enthusiastic customer of Bless Every Home, explains the ways the app can be used. In one instance, he points to the sharable note-taking function and suggests leaving information for each household, such as “Daughter left for college” and “Mother is in the hospital.”

Asked by a trainee how to respond to concerns that people may have about the app during the training video, Greeson concedes that “this thing is so powerful—it’s an invasion of privacy”…

The app was created by the missionary group Mapping Center for Evangelism and Church Growth and has the support of organizations like Gloo, which powers the $100 million “He Gets Us” campaign.

Setting aside the privacy concerns for a moment, a lot of what’s in the app is pointless. I found this out first-hand after I downloaded the app over the weekend and began testing it out. I typed in the address of someone else in my neighborhood and quickly found the names and addresses of everyone nearby, including myself. It was easy to do. Too easy. From there, all I had to do was pick one home in particular to see buttons that say “pray,” “care,” “share,” or “disciple.” It’s a way to document all the ways you’ve annoyed your neighbors with Jesus, including ways that they never have to know about.

Do I care if someone prays for me? No. It’s a waste of their time.

Am I weirded out knowing that people can keep track of how many times they’ve prayed for me like I’m a meal whose calories they’re tracking during a diet? Yes.

By compiling notes, it’s theoretically possible for a local church to see who in the area hasn’t been subject to proselytizing—along with details about their lives, entered by church members, that might help make inroads with them. One missionary told TNR that he used information about which homes have children to send them invitations to Vacation Bible School. Harmless enough—just more junk mail—but it’s not hard to imagine how that information could be used for more direct forms of contact later on.

It gets downright creepy, though, when you realize these people aren’t opting into the system and have no clear way to get out of it. They’re not asking to be preached at. And yet the app can tell you when there’s fresh meat nearby: One of the products you can purchase is a “weekly list of up to 25 households that have moved into a 15-mile radius of your organization.”

As one of those bulletpoints makes clear, those families may be looking for a new local church, making them ripe for a visit from Christians (“Lights&rdquo in the region.

The “Community Connector” feature also offers demographic data that helps you go “from legally blind to eagle eyes on your mission field.” This kind of information is frequently used by commercial brands and political organizers, but there’s reason to be cautious when Christians can find out where all the Muslims and Jews live in order to go after them specifically. (One promotional video seen by The New Republic featured a Christian describing Houston suburbs with large Muslim populations as “shooting fish in a barrel.&rdquo

It’s not hard to imagine what some Christians would do in those kinds of areas: more door-to-door evangelism, more mass prayers near mosques or synagogues, more people attempting to “save” certain families, more bizarre “prayerwalking.” And that’s before you consider what they could do if Christian Nationalists take over the government after the 2024 elections.

It’s all in the name of the “Great Commission.”

It doesn’t take a leap of faith to appreciate that Muslims, Hindus, and Jews might feel uncomfortable seeing a group of hard-core Christians prayerwalk past their house or place of worship, seeking to drive out demons and force heathens to see the light. Equally, newly arrived refugees might well find a knock on the door from strangers with knowledge of their personal circumstances distressing—and that’s before these surprise visitors even begin to attempt to convert them.

Even if everything included in this app is legal, the idea that evangelical Christians might be invading your privacy (or at least privacy you thought you had) in order to win converts is deeply disturbing. If Muslim groups ever created a similar app to target Christians, you can guess what the headlines would look like on right-wing and conservative Christian propaganda sites. But when it involves the possibility of conversion—or a new church member who will pay dividends down the line—no intrusion is too much for the sort of people who make it their mission to notch another tally mark for Jesus. (Bonus points if those mission fields involve wealthier communities.)

It also shows how Christianity is as much a product for general consumption as anything else. There’s nothing special about it; it just constantly needs new customers. If the product was actually worth buying, it wouldn’t need to resort to these tactics to win people over; word-of-mouth would be far more effective. It’s not like people aren’t aware of the brand. We stay away because we’re familiar with it. But with apps like this, Christians have a new way to target people who would otherwise want nothing to do with them.

On a side note, the main social media accounts for Bless Every Home are currently inaccessible. It’s possible they want to avoid all the criticism they’re receiving since the publication of TNR’s article… or maybe they just want a little privacy.