New website offers church reviews

May 22, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO

A graduate student at DePaul University, atheist activist Hemant Mehta avoided being a church hater by becoming a church rater.

Enlisted four years ago on a lark to attend about a dozen Chicago-area churches and honestly rate his experience, Mehta’s beliefs did not change, but his attitude toward organized religion did.

His journey inspired an interreligious group of entrepreneurs to recently launch ChurchRater, a new approach to church shopping modeled after Yelp, a popular website where users rate local businesses. By inviting ordinary worshipers to post reviews from the pews, the website aims to help Christians navigate the more than 330,000 churches across the U.S. to find where they fit on Sunday morning.

The Rev. Jim Henderson, an evangelical pastor from Seattle and one of the site’s founders, insists that Sunday morning worship is when most churches choose to open their doors to the public and hence invite critique. Churches should welcome the evaluations at churchrater.com, he added. While Henderson and his staff work to filter unnecessarily vile material to keep reviews useful, he said hard truths can hurt and help.

“We’re helping the church see themselves through the eyes of outsiders,” Henderson said. “This is the phenomenon that’s going on around churches and institutions. For a long time, lawyers and doctors didn’t want to be rated. ... Churches are not immune to this ... It’s an institution in our country, and consequently the church is going to be subject to being reviewed by people.”

Some say the site could cure a weariness among the faithful who, faced with a plethora of choices, increasingly reject religious affiliation. But several pastors in the Chicago area said they worry that the system fails to recognize the complexity of relationships within congregations and instead serves as a place to air dirty laundry and settle scores.

“Superficially, it appeals to how we do things,” said the Rev. Sean Wicks, pastor of Lakeview Church of Christ in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. His church received a positive review earlier this year.

“For people who are looking for a church, that’s a good way of sorting through the good and the bad. But to go deeper, I’m against that consumerism when it comes to community,” Wicks said. “People ought to choose to be part of a community and embrace the flaws of that community and work to fix them.”

In addition to inviting amateur reviews, ChurchRater also offers a consulting component. Churches can hire secret shoppers to parachute into the pews and generate a report based on their observations and interaction. Churches may choose to publicize the reports or keep them private.

Henderson and Mehta crossed paths in 2006 when the enterprising young atheist auctioned himself on e-Bay, offering to visit worship services at the whim of the highest bidder. In his book “I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist’s Eyes,” which was published a year later, Mehta chronicled how Henderson won his soul for $504. While Mehta sent the proceeds to the Secular Student Alliance, the pastor sent the atheist to church.

Mehta, who lives in Naperville, Ill., said he is pleased that the idea didn’t stop there. Even as an atheist, he appreciates a mechanism that holds churches accountable for practicing what they preach.

He sees potential for ChurchRater to make society a better place by opening a dialogue for the religious and nonreligious to collaborate and serve others.

“I’m not trying to make it better for the churches. That’s definitely not the goal of atheists,” Mehta said. “That said, all of these churches are not horrible places. Even if people may not convert to Christianity, there’d be a lot more collaboration and cooperation between the Christians and non-Christians.”

Bryan Hartman, 26, a member of Lakeview Church of Christ who posted a review in February, said he wishes ChurchRater had been up and running when he and his wife, Chelsea, started church shopping more than a year ago.

“It was one of the more frustrating experiences we’d gone through because there’s no solid information on church websites,” said Hartman, a junior high math teacher. “You have to actually go to services. If anyone in our generation could have clued us in and said, ‘Hey, this is worth seeing,’ that would have helped us out a lot.”

A regular user of Trip-Adviser when he travels and Yelp when he’s closer to home, Hartman didn’t give up and kept mining church websites. Information about the soup kitchen and clothes closet at Lakeview Church of Christ led them there one Sunday. A bike trip with the congregation to the Chicago Botanical Gardens sealed the deal, he said.

After ChurchRater launched last fall, Hartman posted an honest description of the congregation and a worship service. “The songs at the beginning of church are accompanied by children laughing and crying until they are dismissed for Sunday school,” he wrote.

Hartman said users of similar websites know to read reviews with a grain of salt. He personally would exercise caution when posting reviews about churches he doesn’t like, knowing it has a lot to do with personal preference.

But the Rev. Bill Nesbit, rector of Saint Charles Episcopal Church in St. Charles, Ill., said not everyone uses the same reserve. A negative review of his parish appeared in February.

“If you like music written after about 1820, though, or modern language, you’re in the wrong place,” an anonymous reviewer wrote. “Ditto if you’re big on pastoral care.”

A more positive rebuttal appeared in April. “I have to say my family and I have found a church home that made us feel welcomed and valued from the first day and continues to do so,” another anonymous rater wrote.

Nesbit said he worries that a third party like ChurchRater will prevent parishioners from working out their issues face to face.

“Christianity is about relationships — relationships with each other, right relationship with God. I don’t think that happens anonymously.”

Mehta disagreed.

He said the more reviews that are posted on ChurchRater — so far there are only 700 nationwide and 26 in Illinois — the more reliable the site will become. It’s also all about balance, Mehta said.

“One review doesn’t speak for everybody,” he said. “No church is going to have a perfect five-star review ... The more (reviews) people do, the better it’s going to be.”