Combine Church Calendars Into One Calendar on Your Website

Worship and events live in your church management system. The youth group keeps a Google Calendar. The school, the retreat house and the room bookings each have their own. Visitors to your website want one answer to "what's happening this week," and staff want one place to check before they book a room. iCal Merge combines church calendars from any of these tools into one calendar: a live embed for your website and a single link members can subscribe to on their phones. It updates itself when someone changes an event at the source.

Why one calendar is hard to get

Each ministry picks the tool that suits it, and the tools don't talk to each other. Planning Center, Breeze, Pushpay's Church Community Builder, Realm and ChurchSuite each show their own calendar well, but not anyone else's. Copying events by hand into a master calendar works until the first change nobody copies. What nearly all of them do offer is a subscribe or iCal (.ics) link, and that link is all iCal Merge needs. If the term is new, the iCal feed explainer covers it in two minutes.

Step 1: Get the iCal link from each calendar

Look for Subscribe, iCal, ICS or Calendar feed on the calendar you want to share. Copy one link per calendar, ministry or room. Where it lives in the common tools:

• Planning Center: the Church Center calendar offers a subscribe link for its published events. Services and Groups schedules have their own subscribe links too.
• Breeze ChMS: each calendar under Events has a subscribe (iCal) link.
• Church Community Builder (Pushpay): public calendars publish an iCal feed you can copy from the calendar page.
• Retreat and room booking systems such as Retreat Guru publish a feed per room or venue, so each space can be its own source.
• Google Calendar: Settings, then the calendar, then Integrate calendar. Use the public address for a public calendar, or the secret address in iCal format for one that isn't public.

Step 2: Add each one as a source

Create a calendar in iCal Merge and paste each link in as a source. Name each source after the ministry or room, because that name becomes a label on every event: "Youth: Lock-in," "Fellowship Hall: Wedding rehearsal." A visitor scanning the week sees at once which events are theirs. You can set a different prefix, or none, per source. There is no list of supported church tools: if it gives you an iCal link, it works.

Step 3: Put the calendar on your website

On the calendar's page, open Embed on a website and copy the embed code. It is a single iframe snippet that works in WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or any page where you can paste HTML. No plugin to install or keep updated. Pick a month, week or agenda layout, light or dark theming, and an accent color that matches your site. When a ministry leader changes an event in their own tool, the website shows it on the next refresh. Nobody has to touch the website.

The same calendar has a subscribe link. Put it in the bulletin or the newsletter and members add every church event to their own Google, Apple or Outlook calendar once. The sharing guide has the steps for each app, if members ask.

Keep private details off the public page

Church calendars often carry more than you want on a public page: attendee lists, organizer emails, reminder alarms. Turn on clean feed and iCal Merge strips attendees, organizers and alarms from the merged calendar. For room calendars, the embed can show every event as Busy, so the website shows when the sanctuary or the hall is taken without saying who booked it. If you need a public calendar and a fuller staff calendar from the same sources, Pro adds extra links per calendar, each with its own rules.

What it doesn't do

iCal Merge combines calendars for reading. It does not copy events back into Planning Center or Breeze, take registrations, or replace your church management system. Events still get created and edited where they live today, which is the point: each ministry keeps its own tool, and the website stays current without anyone retyping events.