21 Responses to "Ever Wanted to Rate a Church? Now you can!"

• Comment by: Jamie

  1 04/27/08 6:54 AM | Comment Link |

  I would say that you should have made it available for people to delete or change their ratings. Sometimes people’s opinions change. It would have been nice to have that option.

• Comment by: Helen

  2 04/27/08 7:05 AM | Comment Link |

  Thanks for your comment, Jamie. That’s a good point.

  Actually our system never had a feature allowing people to delete or change their own ratings or responses. People who wanted a change made on a rating of theirs emailed us and we made it.

  As best I know we’ll continue to do that.

• Comment by: Ron

  3 04/27/08 4:22 PM | Comment Link |

  And just when we were getting into the swing of things! I understand why, but I still think this was a good concept. Our church hired raters for $25 through our local paper. The three who did a rating were very positive–and that’s nice–but we needed something more. Seems that visiting guests tend to come in on the positive side in such a public forum, while disgruntled and wounded hearts take advantage of the public nature of the site to vent. We need a place for honest church evaluation from those outside the church. Darn.

  I think we’ll explore putting a rating page on our church website in the future.

  I want to thank you for doing this. The book as well as the ratings helped us take a good look at ourselves, and we’re still looking. It’s not easy, but it’s necessary.

• Comment by: Helen

  4 04/27/08 6:48 PM | Comment Link |

  Thanks Ron. We still like the concept too. Adding a rating page to your church website sounds like a great idea.

• Comment by: Stephen

  5 04/28/08 3:19 PM | Comment Link |

  I had mixed views reading the churchrater. Reading the many views and opinions of those who posted, provided an opportunity to check my own heart and account for any unfounded expectations we may have picked up throughout the years. It also was a clear wakeup call to me to reach out to those first, second and third timers who were hoping for one person to notice they existed. I appreciated the heartfelt posts from those who were hurt and disgruntled…for whatever reason they had, because it helped open our eyes to the needs of those wanting in from the outside. All too often, churches with closeknit members are too comfortable in their surroundings to even notice new attendees…when they first show up and when they leave…they never know. This website was a bold move and I applaud ChurchRater for shaking things up. If anything, we have identified four areas of weakness in our own church and are doing our part to strengthen them to minister to ALL who attend.
  My only concern was the lack of control for those who were responding to the posts, to criticize those posting. These people wanted nothing more than to use churchrater as a means to attack those brave enough to share their genuine experience of the church they rated. There should be more than two options offered to “Attending” and “Not attending” such as “previous member” etc. Anyone who has not attended should be given special consideration for their post or the host should clear them first. This is just a suggestion. Overall, I hope church rater can work on these areas and reconsider this ministry.
  Thank you.

• Comment by: Helen

  6 04/28/08 3:26 PM | Comment Link |

  Thanks for your comment, Stephen.

• Comment by: Jim Henderson

  7 04/28/08 5:49 PM | Comment Link |

  Great feedback

  if we go ahead with this again we will implement them

  Maybe we should form a pastors church rater group. That way those who are being criticized the most could respond directly and even make modifications to the site as they saw fit.

  Im sure we haven;t heard the last from those who were very offended by what we attempted - so lets hold off until we hear from them

• Comment by: Jay

  8 04/30/08 1:45 PM | Comment Link |

  While I certainly understand the need for having a leader who would give oversight to ChurchRater, I am very disappointed to find that you are no longer accepting new entries. I used this site as a course requirement in my Missional Ministry course here at Northwest Nazarene University. My students seemed to appreciate the ability to view other entries for churches they visited during my course, plus they could benefit from the dialogue that came after they added their own observations. My students and I will miss the ability to participate in ChurchRater as an integrated element in my course. Thanks for launching it — I hope you will let contributors know if you ever resuscitate it down the road!

  +>j

• Comment by: Jim Henderson

  9 05/1/08 7:54 AM | Comment Link |

  Jay

  I understand your frustration. Maybe we can discuss options off line sometime and see what we can come up with

• Comment by: Matt Casper

  10 05/13/08 4:41 PM | Comment Link |

  Imagine my surprise…! I know I haven’t been a diligent poster but, shoot, I am a busy guy…!

  So, farewell churchrater: we knew thee well enough.

  I think this comment gets to the problem quite well: churchrater provided “…an opportunity to check my own heart…”

  We need better metrics than what’s in our hearts…

• Comment by: Barb

  11 05/24/08 5:16 PM | Comment Link |

  I just read about this site in the Seattle Times this morning. We are currently looking for a church in the Bremerton area and I thought this was such a great idea… But you don’t even have any listings for churches in the Kitsap Peninsula area, and now you can’t! Oh well, back to the drawing board. Hope someone else tries this again. Seeing someone else’s opinion of a church (rather than an advertisement) could be really helpful to those of us who are looking.
  Thanks.

• Comment by: Meghan

  12 05/27/08 8:52 AM | Comment Link |

  I am disappointed to see this very innovative idea come to an end. It truly was a great feedback tool. Churches sadly enough are not self-critical. The ones that are, I suspect, will be magnets. They are willing to adapt to becoming servants of the Gospel and seek to serve the next person through the door.

  Please consider restoring the rating for All Saints in Atlanta. it was don ein the old format so perahps that is why you deleted it. There aren’t many **great** Episcopal churhces - or mainline churches.

  Thank you for taking the time to engage the imaginations of so many people. Great job, Jim!

• Comment by: Forrest

  13 05/29/08 9:34 PM | Comment Link |

  Superb! I am the 13th poster, so what better place for what the Roman Catholic church used to term a ‘devil’s advocate?’ (Wikipedia can explain if you have no idea what I mean)

  This website is a good idea. Deconstructing it because it is either inconvenient or perhaps imperfect seems to me like a bad idea. Ok cool, I sound like a Christian already (and certainly, unabashed, I am) with my “Let it be known! This good, this bad.”
  Books seem a great idea too as they are not subject to the immature whims of a passerby with destructive teenage tendencies. “Rahh! Opinion! Hear me! Get on my wagon or fight!” Maybe authors of books just don’t have the patience for the unmitigated whining that congregates on the internet (the land of anonymous but thoroughly staunch complaints, rants and intolerance).
  Conversations might even rank an echelon above books or open web discussions, since they require the use of two ears and, well, one mouth.
  The modern internet forum seems to quickly devolve into a bastion of anti-topic sentiment as quickly as the anonymous can say “nay” (that’s nay-saying to you). And don’t get me wrong; I do not think that a devil’s advocate is the same thing as a (or the) devil. Maybe an opposing opinion is healthy for balance once in a while, but like all things, it somehow becomes a cancer given excess.
  A casual unconcern from posters issuing axioms of “good,” “bad,” and “mine” are so easily mistaken for yet another position to latch onto rather than another person’s unique and important view from their own two eyes. It’s good to speak, but as soon as our word (or our feeble understanding of God’s) is a verdict and we have truth as a bauble, I think that makes us god and God…not God. Does that not sound like kind of crappy news to anyone? It doesn’t seem like good news to me. At least not the kind I want to listen to.
  And trust me, I know all about casual posters…we can smell our own.
  I liked Jim and Casper from what I read of them. I enjoyed the words and their stances and their candor and humor, both of them. The ideas and the hills they would die on for their beliefs alike were interesting to say the least, moving to say the most. Yes, stories are cool.

• Comment by: Forrest

  14 05/29/08 9:35 PM | Comment Link |

  CONTINUED!

  But what I really cared about was this (incredibly!) lost philosophy that whispers something along the lines of:
  We will not all agree, but may still all coexist… even LIKE one another, should we use our God-given gifts of volition threaded into self-awareness and humility, that separates us from ants, buildings and other ‘things’ in life over which we boast in our rule.

  The God I trust exists doesn’t shout at me, in fact I just don’t see myself as the Christian waving a flag because I heard God’s voice in thunder or when I got stung by a bee. Rather, I have to shut up pretty intentionally to even remotely think that God may be trying to tell me something.

  Oh, and “God-given” (way above) is assumed or trusted, since I can’t prove it. Neither can you prove to me that places exist without gravity, because we live in its shackles and I assume it’s reality out of a permeating sensibility that we’ve decided to give a name (again, see Wikipedia’s stuff on “lanuage” this time).
  YHWH or Yaweh or Jehovah is supposed to be unpronounceable, but we do our best to call him whatever we get accustomed to, don’t we? We seek definition because it’s assuring to believe in something solid while we are on a big rock spinning thousands of miles an hour around a ball of fire suspended on nothingness. That’s our modern day thumb to suckle, and I don’t think God made it that way accidentally.

  Too bad awareness is more commonly coupled with self than any other word. Too bad for haste and too bad for confusion that emanates.

  Prepare for a dirty word. Tolerance.
  At least dirty to eyes specked with self-indulgent and coincidentally self-proclaimed sole proprietorship of truth. It’s ironic that the dirt we see on other people is really more likely just on our lenses and hence on ourselves.

  We all sell, right? But what if truth isn’t a product though, and Don Miller’s conclusions/speculations are right and commerce is not the view from a hill on the moral compass or the origin of decency and cares? What if truth happens to be a deeper and less amalgamating thing, void of the inconstancy that our quick judgment wraps words around with silken, easy language? Language that makes me bigger but everyone else smaller (yeah, God too). For serious.

  What does that language purchase, if buying and selling is our chosen means of discourse?
  Is all that awareness without humility buys just one more faction to pile onto the countless religions who insist on their controlling interest in the market of absolute truth?

  Knowing rather than trusting is stagnant water.

To put it in much more homiletic terms, if I don’t trust my lover, how can I restrain bitterness, how can I even attempt intimacy?
  If I don’t serve others at my own expense and use my ears twice as much as my mouth, how can I ever learn more than I am incessantly proclaiming to know?
  St Bernard called what I am implying as a remedy “A virtue by which a man knowing himself as he truly is, abases himself.” Not too many people are unbalanced toward erring on the side of grace, I think.

  Were we to apply our capital c Church fundamentals inwardly before outwardly (yes, I am a Covey-nerd), maybe some of our language might be sensitive and reveal our insight to wisdom that others, coming before ourselves, are of infinite worth just because we trust that God made them with intent. Again, we can smell our own; I am a part of the big, all-in-one capital c Church, so this is my problem too.

  So with everyone reading this forum and also with the people I sometimes begrudgingly carry conversations with every day like an inconvenient cross… perhaps there’s more hope in what I just don’t “get,” but need to “do” anyway.

  I dunno. Haven’t seen it entirely, Heaven.

  But I’ve seen people leave 100% tips at a restaurant in a state they don’t even live in, departing without pandering for the gratuitous response of thanks sure to follow and appease. The point not being self-appeasement. The point being good for the capacity we have for good.
  So despite not having seen heaven, I have definitely seen people bring its semblance to earth.

  I have to wonder though, did Churchrater really fold because of a lack of an available leader? If so, what a waste. I get what the ever-over-quoted CS Lewis intended in one of his protagonist’s speeches:
  “I tried to find one, but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighborhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found.”

  After reading guys like Rob Bell or Jim Henderson with their obvious burden of actually giving a …. about other people who are not clones cut from Joel Osteen’s cloth (sorry… no offense Joel, anyone could have been used anecdotally and still serve the purpose of my point), it’s sad to read into a note of resignation like what prompted this ridiculously long diatribe.
  The way I read it was, “Well, I guess God doesn’t want us to do this after all since objective sharing isn’t too welcome on the internet without the assault of every idiot armed with an unfounded and uneducated negative word to spout…” Come on guys, that sounds like crazy religious people, not leaders pursuing a likeness of Christ who are willing to sustain a note of chorus while others falter. Without the people who keep on singing, we all just end up going back to the start.

  And that sucks.

  Then you never get through the song, and rather than it being a beautiful
  and yet imperfect living thing, it becomes the kind of stuff I have to doctor in the remedial programs made to perfect the imperfect. It’s what we call “polishing a turd” in the studio world.

  That’s not how you make something organic and authentic and real, like this site could be. That’s how you form top 20 Billboard stuff that is sucked dry of authenticity or heart.

  I know a guy who just finished up college with a degree in Bible-something-ology and Hebrew, and more of what I will never have a degree in. Short version of the story is he’s jobless because a modern upper-crust, white, suburban, comfortable and wealthy church can’t rationalize taking on a leader who doesn’t add merit (fiscally) to the king$dom o$f Go$d. Wow, things get weird when you just stick money into the equation, even weirder when business is the model of our stewardship God’s living room.

  So anyway, this guy teaches a Monday night study to about 10 to 15 of us in a community. This is another thing that’s like heaven coming to earth because when someone has a need, we don’t just issue a lip-service “Jesus loves you but I’m not doing anything that inconveniences me, brotha.” We go and fix flat tires and put our hard-earned money on the table without the agenda of profiteering.

  I meet and then know people like my friends one Monday nights, and this guy who leads the group… and frankly it helps me not be so critical, even of church, or of a popular website (go to http://www.churchrater.com …oh wait, nevermind) where suddenly a blur of mass interest soils it like a muddy boot in a clear stream. Again, the analogy of great music comes to mind, until it is sterilized for public consumption because a bunch of idiots get hold of it.

  I say anyway a lot…
  Anyway, guys like this leader on Monday nights can tell me that I have a propensity for dealing in absolutes and maybe that isn’t so healthy, and since we like one another, I can actually hear him instead of rushing to identify his own infirmities. All of this because I can trust his intentions are to heal and not to debilitate me for the sake of being right.

  Imagine that. And man, who came up with “being right” anyway? What an idiosyncrasy. My head asplode.

  Maybe a guy like that would be a candidate to lead the site in respectful reminders of conversation (which I’ve heard are more beneficial to men than mere instructions). Yo Jim, email me.
  This has got to be the longest rant of my life…I must be on the internet… Forgive me if I am shooting the hostage with any of this. I intend it to be a reminder, that’s all.

  Cheers, strength, shalom,
  Forrest

• Comment by: John Gallegos

  15 05/30/08 6:32 AM | Comment Link |

  Hi Forrest,
  What is the purpose of your rant?
  thanks,
  john

• Comment by: Forrest

  16 05/30/08 8:30 AM | Comment Link |

  Hey John,
  I wish churchrater would keep going; that’s really the sum of it. I’m sour to watch something go away just because of some negative sentiment.
  Forrest

• Comment by: John Gallegos

  17 05/30/08 3:29 PM | Comment Link |

  Yes I agree with you.
  Enjoyed it. Maybe Jim will bring it back soon, new and improved.
  thanks,
  john

• Comment by: Jesse Willard

  18 06/3/08 7:31 AM | Comment Link |

  I wish I had know that this wasn’t working out. I have been a minister before and was hurt by my former colleagues. I thought many times of venting here, by blasting the heck out of the old church, but knew that wasn’t the direction I needed to go. Also, I wish I had known that you guys were looking for someone to help in the sorting of what needs to posted and the unnecessary posts of people wanting to retaliate. I too, wanted this site to be a source of churches truly seeing themselves for what they are through the eyes of those they would never get the chance of sitting with and ‘debriefing’. There are soooooo many churches out there in all shapes and sizes. There is room for everyone, and it saddens me that there is no tool for the Body of Christ to check themselves and see if they might have veered off course or are they dead on. Don’t get me wrong, “NO WHERE IS PERFECT!!!”, but I long for the day when the “BRIDE” will become what “HE” desires and she fulfills “HIS” purpose rather than her own needs. A sad day indeed. Thanks Churchrater for giving the opportunity to allow some the chance to begin their healing and others to see and look into places where they might have never seen and find a place that fits them.

• Comment by: John Gallegos

  19 06/3/08 10:52 AM | Comment Link |

  “NO WHERE IS PERFECT!!!”, but I long for the day when the “BRIDE” will become what “HE” desires and she fulfills “HIS” purpose rather than her own needs.
  Great way to say it, thanks,
  john

• Comment by: John Bagorio

  20 06/4/08 5:06 PM | Comment Link |

  I just left the http://www.churchrater.com site and found that you are no longet taking entries. Our church is in the pre-re-launch stage and we hired people to come in last year and give us an honest opinion of what they thought. I am saddened to learn of this decision, because this process, has helped us as we prepare to re-launch in September of 2008. Thank you guys for your heart and I pray that we can see another vehichle in place soon. I think that we need to look at what we do very carefully, and realize that it is all HIS anyway!

  John

• Comment by: Gary

  21 06/16/08 3:51 AM | Comment Link |

  Add me to the chorus: HATE to see this resource end. My church was rated by a few people, and one semi-critical response really helped us fine-tune a few things. Of course we loved the “ooo, you’re wonderful” responses, but the negative one was the most useful.

  I love the other poster’s idea about a rating system on our website. We regularly pass out “How are we doing?” paper rating surveys in our weekly bulletins.

  Again, sure hate to lose this resource!

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