This is a copy of my latest post on the Communitas Collective blog
I’ve been helping with churchrater.com, a website where anyone and everyone can post their rating of any church in the US.
This week ChurchRater was featured on Seattle’s King5 news and written about in the Seattle Times.
This publicity has brought more more feedback, some of it negative. Christians are worried that ChurchRater will damage the church and nothing good can come out of it.
I know you don’t all participate in church anymore, but even so, what do you think? Is ChurchRater likely to hurt or help churches?
I won’t take it personally if you don’t approve of it so fire away.
The thing about ChurchRater that I like is the idea that people are making (what I assume to be) honest critiques of churches, and too often I feel like churches need to hear some honest outside feedback about how it’s going. At the same time, as it was a while ago (back when Jim & Caspar first came out) it was giving ratings based upon what I saw as five points that did nothing to totally encompass all that a church is or does. Looking over the website now, I see that it has been updated to not include those ratings and is more generalized. At the same time, one of the downsides that I’ve seen of several ratings has been that the church is rated by long-time members, not visitors or newcomers, and I think is therefore less reliable as an objective rating (of course you think your church is good, that’s why you’ve been going there for ten years!).
As far as a church benefiting from a rating: a good critique will likely help someone only if they are open to listening to it. If a person (or church) is unwilling to look at/respond to any critiques with anything other than defensiveness or apathy, then they will not get any benefit from a system like ChurchRater. Too often, perhaps, I feel that this is what churches would do, rather than engage in serious contemplation of what the visitor/newcomer said about their church, they would simply dismiss the idea and continue on in their same path. This is too often true of us as human beings and too often true of churches (made up of human beings) as well.
The one thing that I think ChurchRater will not do is harm a church or the Church. Anyone who feels strongly that his/her church is good is not likely to respond with internal strife about their church. At the same time, anyone who is neutral or negative towards a church will only find proof of the church’s underlying positive elements or negative ones when they view a rating. This only helps people make a better decision about a church, though I would still give any church a try, even once, before I totally dismissed it.
Overall, I think that a system like ChurchRater has something to offer to the Church as a whole and I am always interested to hear what visitors/newcomers and even atheists or people of other religions are thinking about when they visit my own church (not that I get to hear a lot of that). The forum of ChurchRater helps those of us who are interested get an inside look into what people think, and finding out what people think is always a good thing. Jurgen Moltmann said, “Behind all this is the conviction that, humanly speaking, truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue.” And ChurchRater offers that at least somewhat.
Thanks for your comments, Fred.