Take Flat Jesus
The beloved Flat Jesus tradition, given a real home: a living map of where your church family travels all summer. Families snap a photo, and it appears on your church’s own interactive map and gallery.
We’re getting ready to help churches run it — and we’d love to know if yours is interested.
Right now, the summer photos
scatter. This keeps them together.
Families share a photo
They scan a QR code and add a picture from wherever the summer takes them. No app, no accounts.
It lands on the map
Once your church approves it, the photo appears on a shared interactive map and gallery.
Your church stays connected
All season long, the congregation watches the map fill in — a picture of just how far your church family reaches.
Would your church want to run this? Let us know.
We’re lining up churches for the first season. There’s no cost and no commitment to add your name — you’ll just be first to hear when it’s ready, and you’ll help us shape it. It takes about thirty seconds.
Add your church to the early list
Is this ready to use now?
We’re preparing for the first season and getting churches lined up. Adding your name puts you first in line and helps us build it around what churches actually want.
Do our families need to download anything?
No. They scan a QR code and add a photo from their phone’s browser. Nothing to install, no accounts to make.
Who approves the photos?
Your church does. Nothing appears publicly until someone on your side approves it, and exact locations stay private.
Do we have to run it ourselves?
Only if you want to. We’ll offer options from “do it yourself with our kit” to “we run the whole thing for you.” Adding your name is a good time to tell us which sounds right.
What is Flat Jesus?
Flat Jesus is a simple summer tradition in churches: a paper cutout of Jesus that families take with them wherever they go. To the beach. To a grandparent’s kitchen table. On the long drive to a national park. Someone snaps a photo, and Flat Jesus comes home at the end of the summer having been just about everywhere the congregation went.
It borrows its shape from Flat Stanley, the children’s book character who gets flattened by a bulletin board and mailed around the world in an envelope. Churches adapted the idea into something closer to a practice than a craft: a way of remembering that faith travels with you, and that the congregation is still a congregation in July, when the pews are half empty and everyone is somewhere else.
Nobody knows precisely which church did it first. That is part of its charm. It spread the way church ideas usually spread — one Christian educator mentioning it to another, a photocopied cutout passed along at a conference.
Why churches keep coming back to it
Summer is hard on a congregation. Families travel, programming pauses, and the rhythm that holds a church together through the year loosens for three months. Flat Jesus does something small and specific about that: it gives people a reason to think about their church while they are away from it, and a reason to bring something back.
It also works across ages in a way that most children’s programming does not. A four-year-old and a retired deacon can both take a photo. There is nothing to learn and no way to do it wrong.
How a Flat Jesus campaign usually runs
The church prints and distributes cutouts, usually in late spring, often as part of a Sunday service or the last day of Sunday school.
Families take Flat Jesus along through the summer and photograph him wherever they end up.
Photos come back to the church — historically on a bulletin board, by email, or in a Facebook group.
The congregation sees them together, usually in the fall, as a display, a slideshow, or a service that marks the return to the ordinary year.
Where the photos usually go wrong
Step three is where most Flat Jesus campaigns quietly fall apart. Photos arrive in four places at once: a church email inbox, a private Facebook group, a few texts to whoever is running it, and a shoebox of prints from the family without a smartphone. Someone volunteers to gather them. That person has a job and a family. By September the photos are scattered across three accounts and nobody can find the good ones.
The tradition is not the problem. The tradition is lovely. The plumbing is the problem.
What the Flat Jesus Project is
The Flat Jesus Project is a photo map for churches running the Flat Jesus tradition. Families scan a code and add a photo from their phone’s browser. Someone at the church approves it. It appears on a map and gallery that belongs to the church, at the church’s own web address, and it stays there.
There is no app to download and no account for families to create. Exact locations are never shown publicly — a photo taken at a family’s home appears on the map by town, not by street address. Nothing is visible to anyone until a person at the church approves it.
It is built and run by a WordPress studio, not sold as software. The church does the part churches are good at — the people, the cutouts, the Sunday morning announcement. We handle the rest.