Ship of Fools Mystery Worshiper has been around a lot longer that this guy's website.

http://www.shipoffools.com/mystery/index.html

- Jay Vos

In general, I have a policy that I don't listen to feedback if it is anonymous or comes from a third party. If you can't take responsibility for your point of view, your concern doesn't exist.

I think this is important to retain the difference between being consumers and being members of a Christian community.

I think this is pretty interesting. Working with a congregation that's in process of a significant redesign of their worship space, I proposed we have an open house where parishioners invited non-church-going friends to come and tell us what they saw, what messages, declarations and questions they heard from the space. It hasn't happened yet. Some people were excited at the prospect of what learning it would bring. Others said, "People have to come and get to know us before they understand well enough to say anything we could trust." That second take is intriguing. I suppose it's obvious I don't agree with it on principle. If it were true, I think it would say something severely limiting about the possibility of the Sunday assembly or any gathering of the church community being a place/moment/event for evangelism.

In thirty years of building a church from tiny gathering to parish, I found the discipline of asking first time visitors what they'd experienced was always informative. Not that a congregation ought to shape itself by unfiltered conformity to opinion polls and first impression market research, but that what people get, understand and are touched by, and what they take to a surprising (and sometimes unwelcome or perplexing place) DOES tell us a lot about how we're communicating.

Bill, your good policy on anonymous feedback makes great organizational sense, but I think a review - theater, restaurant, church, whatever, offered by a reviewer who has simply slipped into the crowd (congregation, audience, dinner guests) offers a really rich opportunity to see what we don't see so clearly ourselves. I went back to read St. Gregory's Ship of Fools/Mystery Worshiper review from y2k -
http://www.shipoffools.com/mystery/2000/197Mystery.html
found it valuable to read again, got a sense of the 'who' of the reviewer in churchmanship and preferences with no idea of whether I ever met the person, and found myself thinking about the ten years since, where the church has grown, what changes have been made, what's constant, and thinking that a 2010 visitor would get a similar clarity of purpose and would, depending on who they were and what they wanted from church, probably give another useful take on what touched them and what didn't.

Looked up some of the reviews of Episcopal churches. First one was not promising: "Speaking to the dead in a dead language." Got better as I read about other congregations. A friendly welcome, a decipherable bulletin, contemporary liturgical arrangements (seating around the altar), rational preaching and good music all got consistently high marks.

While one has to read these reviews very carefully, it is helpful to see how others see us and nice to know we're not all dead.

Yes, Ship of Fools and this site share some common features. If I understand it correctly with this one your parish is paying for a rating (from a nonexpert). Ship of Fools is more like a restaurant ranking where you don't know if they are coming.

One thing I wonder is whether this service actually delivers a useful product. Let's assume it does.

It might be worth commenting on this post in conjunction with the previous one on church numbers. (We're not dead yet, but....)
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/congregations/decline_and_what_to_do_about_i.html

Don Schell makes a point that I appreciate. In the context of this church rating service, when would you use and why? Do you want to be rated, and are you willing to have it made public?

Another question. I wonder why churches aren't rated on the web like hotels, restaurants, books (on Amazon for example), electronics. Is it because it's not so costly to make a mistake visiting a church once, but it is to buy a bad meal, stay a week in a bad hotel, or by a TV you find out later is prone to defects?

John,

Another unsolicited source of reviews in San Francisco is Yelp (which exists in other parts of the country too).

Here's St. Gregory's review there:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/st-gregorys-episcopal-church-san-francisco

In our early, early days, we put a lot of thought and spent money on our Yellow Pages ad in the phone book. about 80% of our visitors came from the Yellow Pages. We phased it out when visitors/newcomers overwhelmingly said they'd come 'because of your website, of course. How else would we find a church?'

I think the free for all of marketplace reviews will increasingly become how younger church explorers decide whether to visit a place. Would I check on the website when I'm out of town and looking for a church? Yes, it's definitely become normal for me. Would I check the Yelp reviews? Probably not. But am I part of our church's missing demographic. No.

Hi John: I am one of the co-founders of ChurchRater.com. Glad that you came across our site. Just wanted to clarify that the reviews on the site are mostly unsolicited reviews by people who are not compensated by any one. A number of pastors asked us to send raters their way and that's the service we charge for, since we in turn compensate the raters for their time.

@ Donald - you are making a very accurate point re: my generation (I am in that 25-35 demographic). Online reviews and community feedback is already a driving force behind self-education and decision making. We are simply trying to provide a safe platform for a dialogue on our site.

Feel free to rate the ChurchRater - we have a feedback forum on http://www.churchrater.com/churches/churchrater

Julian Zegelman

I enjoy reading the reviews on Ship of Fools, and on one occasion I used them to find a church to attend while on vacation. But for the most part, their reviews are geared toward "insiders", people who attend regularly (or clergy) who know the vocabulary.

The church needs to be more outwardly focused, and needs to pay attention to how it is perceived by someone who just walks in off the street. How welcoming and user-friendly are we to the guest who comes for a baptism? They may have a very different perspective than the active, cradle Episcopalian who just moved to the neighborhood and is looking for a new parish.

If indeed we are serious about evangelism, then we need to take this site seriously.