Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
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Intro - George 0:00
What if there was a moratorium on arguing about theology for a second, let's just pause. Okay, I understand the arguments on the other side have been on the other side of those arguments. Cool, I'm probably not going to convince you, and actually, I'm done trying. So let's just suspend that conversation. And instead, maybe we can find something that we all agree on, which is to say, let them validate each other's theology because we, in some ways, both sides of the theological debate, see the other side of perpetuating harm.
But let's just suspend that for a second, and let's focus on clarity. What if both sides of the theological spectrum agreed that clarity was reasonable? I think what would happen is we would root out a lot and this ambiguity that exists in between the spectrum where it really has nothing to do with conviction. In fact, a lot of the worst offenders of ambiguity are these “large, hipster, evangelical megachurch, Hillsong” type places that don't stand for anything.
It's not even that they’ve fleshed out their theology and they believe it so intensely that they're, you know, they don't want to talk about it because it's resolved. It’s that they don't even know why they don't believe it or why their policies are what they are. And so I don't think there's any room for that, frankly, in the church world.
Seth 1:48
Hello there my friends, welcome back to the Can I Say This At Church podcast. A lot of good things happening today. A lot of good things happen today. I'm going to bypass the normal plea for patrons support. etc, etc, because you know that you should have already done that. And instead, I'm going to make a pitch for something different. And so the guest today is George Mekhail. And I hope I said that right, George and Sarah Ngu. They are to the people that are on the leadership team for the website, church. clarity.org. Some of you listening will know what that is. But I think the majority of you may not. And so let me tell you what it is briefly before we get into the episode and why that matters. So a few years ago, they started a website and they've outgrown that, the website is dedicated to removing ambiguity on two central topics in the church.
One is inclusiveness. They're not making a pitch for either case, and the other is women in ministry, and women in leadership in the church. And they basically raised churches, and they have outgrown the platform there. And so as opposed to making pitches for you to support this show, which hopefully you'll continue to do, and or feel led to do today, I would highly recommend hit pause, go down to the show notes. I'm gonna link it right at the very top. They have an Indiegogo campaign that expires, I believe at the end of this week at the end of November here. They need to be able to upgrade the website. There are a lot of churches in America. There's a lot of ambiguity in America. And there shouldn't be.
So hit pause, click the button, go throw them a few bucks, see if we can help them upgrade what they're doing. And so hit pause, click the button, throw my dollar or two. And let's see what we can do to help remove some ambiguity. With that little PSA out of the way. I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation a bit about the mission and the heart and the message and kind of where they see things going.
Perfect, unpause it you're back. Here we go. So I really hope that you enjoy this conversation with both George and Sarah from Church Flarity. Both of these topics women ministry and inclusivity or at least a stance on it are massively important.
They are the topics of the future of the church. And if you don't believe me, just Google it, and you will find people bickering, and their bickering because nobody knows where they stand. And so here we go, a conversation about churches removing ambiguity and becoming clear.
Seth 4:50
Sarah Ngu George Mekhail, and I'm aware that there's two ways to say your name and I've committed earlier to not butchering it. So I'm going to go with that version cofounders of the website, church clarity, which is a website that has I told people, you know, “Hey, friends, you know, I'm going to talk with the co founders of this website. And this and this organization“, a lot of them either said, Oh, that's fantastic. But the predominant amount of them said, “What is church clarity?” And so I want to get there in a minute, because I think that's a huge question that matters. But Sarah, I'd like to start with you. Can you kind of break us through, you know, briefly, who you are, how you came to do what you do and kind of, you know how, how you became whatever it is that you're doing right now?
Sarah 5:31
Sure. I am a freelance writer by trade, and I do a lot of journalism and reporting. And I came to contact with George after I published an article on Evangelicals in the church, I think that was summer of 2017. And I had just come up and experience of interviewing four queer gay folks about why they chose to leave or stay within their not affirming churches. And so I want it to just fact check whether it was true that these churches, you know, did not permit these people to, in one case lead worship and walk his take communion, and in another case like be members. And so I just sent an email asking them if they can you just confirm this is true; very straightforward, yes or no? And I was surprised to hear that none of them got back to me the only one who did one out of four who did got back to me on the condition that it was anonymous and in fact, was shocked and offended when I said that I was actually going to use the church's name. And it just became very clear to me that no matter how much I pressed him on, yes or no, did this person-was he not allowed to join the worship team because it was gay. They wouldn't give me a clear answer.
So I was like, either you think my interviewee is lying to me? Or there's something like deeply unhealthy with how you think the church leadership operates. So shortly after that I met George and he said, “You know, I want to do kind of a almost like credit rating, credit score, better business bureau, or Charity Navigator, version for churches” that kind of skipped over the debate of you know, should churches be affirming enough for me, and let's just focus on the problem that no one seems to be focused on, which is, let's just get your just to start being clear about the policies first, and then we can have a conversation.
Because if you're not clear, then the congregation does not know and then there's no conversation, because they just operate on their assumptions based on maybe the branding of the church. So right now I run kind of writing things for Church Clarity but I’m predominantly responsible for the database of the scoring of churches that are submitted to us. We have a team of 100 volunteers that review their church websites and provide a score based on how clearly the church communicates their LGBTQ and women and leadership policies. So it's kind of a score of your website because the idea is we want to incentivize, and kind of pressure churches a little bit, to be clear all your websites. Because really, in the 21st century, your website is your front door, and you should know this stuff before you step in the front door.
Seth 8:12
Can I ask a clarifying question? So you were interviewing humans, not the churches specifically about these certain questions? And then anonymity would be no, you're not going to tell anybody that this is “Seth” answering. But then you reached out to the church, and he's like, “No, no, no, don't reach out to the church, because they'll know it's me!” Is that what you mean by that or did I miss understand you?
Sarah 8:31
Yeah, I meant something different. So I talked to four people who are not anonymous, who are on the record about their experiences with their churches. I then reached out to the church pastors to confirm whether or not what their congregant said was true, essentially, whether they really had these policies. And the one pastor who got back to me, gave me this like really boilerplate response and was very angry at me and accused me of being divisive, whatever, when he realized I was going to use the church's name in the article. I wasn't just going to say like “church in your city” or “church in Queens”, that type of thing.
Seth 9:06
Thank you for that clarification, because when I heard it, I was like, All right. So who didn't want to be anonymous? I appreciate the clarification. George, how about you? What's kind of your story?
George 9:16
Yeah. So first of all, thanks so much for having us. I love the name of your show because it’s inquisitive. Can I Say This At Church, something that we always all definitely ask. I grew up in the church. The other the other pronunciation of my last name is the Arabic way of saying it. I was raised into Cairo, Egypt into the Coptic Orthodox Church as a deacon growing up. And so I was 11 or 12 when me and my sisters, after we had emigrated to America, wanted to sort of be around more of our friends and from school and things like that, and so started going to Young Life and more sort of picking up in evangelical circles, left left the Coptic church Arguing with my dad about, you know, the perpetual virginity of the Holy Virgin Mary and things like that.
So I've always been just really curious about the church and what holds it all together and the different manifestations of it. So that’s caused me to sort of jump around quite a bit, I would say started, started pretty standard evangelicals and got into pretty hardcore. Calvinism was at Mark Driscoll’s church for a little while. Then bounce over to progressive, more progressive evangelicalism. When the church that I started working for, Eastside Community Church in Seattle, started going down this this journey of becoming more more open with our theology, and inclusive and affirming of the LGBTQ community specifically.
So it was that specific experience and I would say, the response of the church community and specifically other pastors, that the idea for Church Clarity was originally conceived. And what happened was, after we went through this process, becoming open and affirming, and making this a very public thing we were in Time Magazine, we were one of the largest evangelical mega churches in the country, this was in 2015, to be this, I guess, public about the movement we were making.
So we heard a lot of encouragement, a lot of like, positive feedback from our peers in the church in the different churches that were associated with. Initially, you were cheering you on great job, all that kind of stuff. And that was great for you know, a week or two. And then this the call stopped coming and people got quieter and you know, for, for responding when you reach out were a lot slower and the private praise and encouragement was never followed up with public support or affirmation. And I thought this discrepancy was fascinating. And I think revealed a lot. And so I started to get curious about the differences between what pastors were saying privately and how they're communicating to their churches into the public and similar to the people they were inviting. This rhetoric around, “all are welcome”. When in reality, you're denying people baptism, or you're not allowing people [them] to volunteer in certain places, right, the question of, well what's the limit of some of these “welcomes” became really, really important.
And so, as Sarah mentioned, I was in a mode where I left East Lake, after a little while, and moved to New York, took a job at Riverside Church as Director of strategic partnerships with innovation, so I kind of completed my circuit around the entire landscape. Now at the main line progressive church. And it was, it was there that, you know, Sarah and I and our third co-founder, Tim Schrader, launched Church Clarity. And it was all kind of, for all of us as a side project, something that we were kind of just experimenting with and didn't expect it to explode into what it is two years later now, where we have 100 or 130, something volunteers who volunteer for us from all around the world, and over 5000 churches submitted to our website. And basically, you know, I know you mentioned a lot of your listeners haven’t heard of us, which I think is good. But as people hear about this, we are sort of becoming this household name, where more and more people are starting to understand that clarity is reasonable, and they're using our website to find a church to attend based on wanting to go somewhere that aligns with their values and isn't afraid to state their convictions?
Seth 14:06
Sarah, I want to go back to something you said earlier. So why do you think that churches don't want to actually say what they believe? Because I think most churches will say, you know…you go to there, there is a, here's what we believe, you know, the Bible is inspired this is that, services are held on Sunday. You know, there's a huge doctrinal statement there. But specifically on women in ministry, and especially on homosexuality. Why do you think churches won't plant a flag?
Sarah 14:38
I'll give my take. But George, in some ways can give a better answer because I've never been on the other side where George has been I think it's a couple of reasons for my conversations with pastors. And folks, I think, for some churches, that they their goal, particularly from the LGBT issues, is to change people. Change their orientation. Change your gender, like, get people from A to B, because that's what they think sanctification or redemption looks like. And so actually my mom said this to me, “if a church was clear, then how would people walk in the door and how could churches change them?”
So there's for some churches, I think a very brute level of like, this is intentional. We're we need to be a bit dishonest, but it's for the long haul, it's for the best. And I don't think that strategy is that different from the typical bait and switch tactics of evangelism, where, you know, we're going to host a movie night with youth and pizza and music, and truly young people. And then halfway through someone, someone talks about the gospel, and it's like, Whoa, I didn't I didn't sign up for a gospel talk. I signed up for a movie night. So, in that sense, it's not that the surprising you can think about something that churches deeply believe they're right about but are a bit embarrassed about it. And there is, you know, I've had another pastor say to me “I can't be” and he was pastoring a church in Chelsea which is a historically gay neighborhood in Manhattan.
He said, “You know, I can't be clear about my stance, the Church stance, because to do so it'd be equivalent to being registered on a sex offender list on the internet. If people look us up and they see this, it's going to be branded as bigots and as hateful”.
And I think pastors like him, tend to be too preoccupied with “look at my motivations”, you know, I'm not a hateful person, I have gay friends. I don't want to be misconstrued of who I am based on the policies. And you know, we are very deliberate in our language never say hateful, to never say bigoted because that would assign motivation whereas we're just trying to get the impact policy, because you could be affirming in theology, actually, but still not affirming policy due to like, maybe denominational disciplinary rules, as we've seen, like the ACC, and UMC.
But regardless, I think of that pastors like him I think are more preoccupied with how people think of them, then impact of the policies on others. So and George, I think has another answer that has to do with money.
George 17:21
Sorry, are you asking me? Because I'm ready to just say money.
Seth 17:25
Do it. Do it. Go for it.
George 17:28
I think seeker sensitivity. I mean, I think this this whole idea…I think it's failed. The Bill Hybels model of let's set up, you know, pizza night for Jesus and get people in the door or the Young Life approach of let's get all the cool kids. I think what it's what has happened, what's transpired over the last 15 years is pretty clearly showing that that just has not worked.
And like Sarah said, we are careful about assigning motivation, I don't want to say that everybody who is ambiguous is just “in it for the money”, kind of a thing. But I do think that once a pastor is confronted with the ways in which their ambiguity about their policies has harmed a real person in their church; you know, like you confused this person, this person thought they heard this thing. And then this is what played out in your church under your care. I mean, once that message is delivered, now, you can no longer claim ignorance-you can no longer be like, “Well, I didn’t know that people were getting hurt”. And I think when that happens but there is still a refusal to deliver clarity that I have no problem saying, Okay, well, then clearly, you're just trying to protect your kingdom. You're trying to protect your pocketbook, you're trying to make sure that nobody knows the actual policies that you're enforcing because if enough people knew they would stop coming here and tithing here. And that is obviously inconvenient for you.
And so there's there's two parts, I think, to what we're doing. The first one is awareness. And I think there is a recognition that not everybody is aware that ambiguity can be this harmful. There is sort of this innocence and evangelism that says, No, I just want everybody to know the good news. You know, if I die, I will go to heaven or make sure I told the new people as I could or whatever it is. And I think that's okay. And I think we do have in our system, ways in which that we are able to accommodate the people that are in that position, but it's when the awareness has been brought, that there are no more excuses. I think that's, that's the crux of what we're trying to do is just say clarity is reasonable. All you have to do is explain your policies. Nobody's asking you to change, no one is asking you to be something you're not. But you do have policies that inform you, what are they?
Sarah 19:54
I think, George, we should just quickly mention the actively discerning stuff because that can be confusing to people.
Seth 20:00
That is actually my next question. So you have a couple, you have a couple ranking. So you have you have clear, unaffirming, affirming, you also have something called verified and you have actively discerning can either one of you break in, I might have missed one entirely, as well. What are those? Like if someone goes to the website, and they're like, all right, where's my church?
Sarah 20:20
So there are, broadly two types of scores. One is a score that we give to the church website, which I mostly have covered. So we look at church, any church website statements, sermons, blog posts, social media things, any clues on policy, but every church that we do score based on a website, we're also email that a verified clear survey, which is about 10 questions that's just yes or no on hiring, weddings, and ordination of LGBTQ people and for women leadership was preaching teaching elders, you know, senior pastor, that type of thing. And regardless of how they answer the questions, they will receive a verified clear score. So if you answered no to everything “verified clear”; answer yes to everything “verified clear”. If you don't answer the survey, then the whatever score we gave you earlier will still stand.
And I should mention in that survey, you can answer actively discerning, which means we're unsure, we want to be clear about the fact that we are in process. And for those churches, we require that they set a date of resolution for their discernment within 12 months so that you're not just like perpetually discerning. Which is, you know, a little bit of a cop out in our opinion, because if you're truly are discerning, you actually are looking for answers and not just be like I'm open to the spirit but here's my stance right now.
And when it comes to the non-verified clear scores, there is an “undisclosed” which means we cannot find any kind of conclusive evidence. There is “unclear” which means the policy evidence was hard to find that we had to really dig. And there's “clear” which is (your policy) was pretty easy to find. It was like on either the homepage or, you know, there's a clear trail to get me to your policy or your denominations policy. Right now we we do distinguish, you know if it's clear affirming / clear non-affirming but the more important part is the clear and unclear distinction.
Seth 22:09
I want to shift gears to the women in leadership policies because I feel like that often doesn't have a big microphone. And so I'm thankful that that is there. It will get a big microphone when somebody says something and then Twitter explodes for half a week and then everybody forgets about it again, like Beth Moore a few weeks ago with with MacArthur and I'm not going to rehash any of that. How if you had to, are the two…and either one of you can take the question. Do you feel like those two issues are of equal urgency or does one kind of take a more urgent place over the other or does it vary based on church or community?
George 22:47
Mmhhm. That’s a good question. I think it's hard anytime you start ranking urgency on matters. I think the reality is contextually a different level of urgency for a lot of us depending on the where we're coming from, I would say that culturally like on a broad scale, there's certainly something to be said about the LGBTQ conversation being at the forefront of a lot of people's minds. And a lot of, you know, even even laws that were having battles about the LGBTQ people's right to basic employment and basic human rights. And so I think because of that, because of the fact that it's sort of front and center, at a more societal level, that it's also front and center, as far as the church is concerned. But I want to be careful not to say that, therefore, it's more important than making sure that women have clarity in terms of their, the limits of their leadership in the church or even other issues that we don't currently score for that, I think, still have a lot of relevance but, but again, it's just tough to put a number or a ranking on which one is the more urgent or the which we should be talking about as important.
Sarah 24:06
Yeah. I would just quickly add that we treat both scores a bit differently. From a scoring methodology perspective. To get a clear egalitarian score, that's how we distinguish egalitarian versus non-egalitarian…to get a clear score, let me phrase it this way. You have to have representation in addition to policy. There are lots of churches that say, “Oh, yeah, women, you're free to lead”, but then still have predominantly men in preaching positions, Pastorship, elder boards, etc. So we actually go through this somewhat, arduous and a little subjective process of counting, and making sure it's a 50/50 ratio. And if not, you actually get an unclear score.
Seth 24:54
50/50 ratio of staff or like deacons or elders or how to because not every church like I know myself church doesn't really broadcast who the deacons are or who anyone outside of staff is.
Sarah 25:07
Yeah. So what church do you go to?
Seth 25:10
First Baptist in Waynesboro.
Sarah 25:13
Oh, sorry. What denomination?
Seth 25:14
It is affiliated with both Cooperative Baptist and Baptist Association of Virginia. That's what it's called.
Sarah 25:22
And I'm curious, how do y'all’s leadership governance structures work? Because, you know, in the Episcopal church, you look for the Vestry and the ELC you have a church Council, and Presbyterian Church, you look for the Elders.
Seth 25:34
So we have a Church Council, which is comprised predominantly of the main committee. So like stewardship, the treasurer, the pastor, you know, facilities, and then outside of that we have deacons that serve a specific term that are elected by the church, and then those rotate in and out.
Sarah 25:58
Yeah, I think for us obviously, preference would be to take into account teams that have essentially like governance, this decision making power over the future of the church and the, you know, budget of the church, what have you. Because obviously, if you cannot find any leadership team and it's just the pastor, you know, then two other staff people. Now what we usually do sometimes if it's, you know, happens to be two women, and a staff of one man, it, you know, you guys are clear egalitarian score, if if, if we cannot find a lead on it, your team will just be give an unclear score.
And we cite that the reason we give an unclear score is because we cannot find the leadership team. So I don't think we're, we might we're trying to raise the standard a little bit for church websites and say, like, more and more people, when they go to church websites are looking at who's in leadership are looking at racial representation, look at gender representation, and so we are trying to raise the bar for churches to do that as well.
Seth 27:17
What has been the biggest push back and this is open for either one of you, you know you've been doing this for two years now. So what has been the biggest “Alright, well, I didn't expect people to yell at me about this. I thought this was pretty cut and dry.”
George 27:30
Yeah, I would say that it is there's a general misunderstanding. We're constantly having to reiterate the fact that when we're talking about clarity that we're talking about policies, and I think that they can get misconstrued that we are talking about beliefs or we're talking about somebody’s position or you know, whatever the language people use.
And so people sort of can can get so excited about what they see in what we're creating but then jump immediately to like, you need to be more clear on your stance and then just kind of fumble through it. And we're trying to do as good of a job as we can communicating that we're talking about policy policy policy, policy questions. And I think, once we are able to have conversations with people who don't understand what we're talking about, there's actually…there's actually understanding that that doesn't make sense. It's clear what I love about this is that people who have conservative theology and progressive theology can all agree that clarity is reasonable. If you have an opportunity to actually explain that nuance that, you know, we're just trying to get to the root of the fact that everybody does have a policy that they are enforcing, and they should just disclose it. So I would say that's probably the biggest one.
Seth 28:55
What other options and so this is based or predicated upon the the most recent blog post that's out on the website for you all there about a minister that basically had to leave his church because he had to take a position. I believe I'm I don't think I'm misstating saying that or over simplifying it. And that is a common, a very common theme. I had a chat message with someone that literally they may lose their licensure because of their stances, and then they may also lose their ability to teach at whatever school that they teach at. And so where do you see the church going? Because I think if it constantly stays, you know, you either agree with me or you're excommunicated from the faith. And I think that people have to expend energy creating something new, that the church is just going to shrivel up and just die. So where do you see the options for ministers or for members even, that need that either you know, that maybe they go to an SBC church because that's the only church in town that they live or they go to a denominational type church, but they they can't participate?
They can't do the community They can't get married, or they're a minister in the same boat like where does it need to be like where and five six years do you think based upon you're constantly looking at these churches, websites, you're looking at their, their statements, you're getting emails from people, I'm certain, where do you see it needing to go?
Sarah 30:19
Just to clarify your question is because I feel like you're asking a couple of questions.
Seth 30:22
Probably am; I tend too ramble.
Sarah 30:27
That’s okay it’s hard to do this - I've been on the other side (of the microphone) a few times. But you're asking for people who disagree with their churches policy stance, and they maybe don’t have other options, what should they do?
Seth 30:43
Or the inverse of that of, you know, I have gone to this church my entire life, and we hire a new pastor. That pastor has different views than we do. And for some reason, we didn't ask those questions in the interview process. What does the church do so both from the Go to this church side. And then the other part from the church is about to explode side, like, where does it need to be in the years to come?
Sarah 31:07
Um, I think, you know, from a Church Clarity perspective, we kind of that's where at least ,George correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we trust people to make the best decisions, given the information that they have. Our job is to deliver, as best as we understand it, information available already on church websites, that we're just doing a bit more searching and centralization. But I know plenty of people who are like, “oh, wow, I didn't know my church had this stance. Hey, but you know, I really still love the community. I am gay, but and I'm feeling really connected to the pastor here so I'm going to just stay and be, you know, and hopefully talk to people and get people to change their minds.” I know some people take that approach. Some people be like, I'm leaving right away. As we're Church vetting of hiring of leadership. I don't…I don't know. I don't really know how to answer that question.
Seth 32:00
Well, to be fair, you missed that part of the conversation. George has asked me that prior. That's actually how I originally found my way to church clarity. As we were looking at, I was on a search committee to find our new pastor. And it was just clicking around. I'm like, what's, what is this website? And then I went down the rabbit hole of literally googling every church that are not googling every typing in every church name that I knew, and then submitting my own because it's time to it's time to be…I believe y'all are right that it is reasonable to not be ambiguous.
You have like, I can't tell my wife. “I think I love you. I mean, I'm pretty sure that I might love you. Pretty. I'm fairly I'm 98% certain that I'm almost certain, you know,” George, where would you take that question?
George 32:46
Yeah, no, I love the question. It's really thought provoking. I think the nature of our work, in a perfect world if everything goes well, hopefully what we're doing is talking to the people attend churches and inviting them to embrace their own individual like free will and their own sovereignty and to activate their intellect and their hearts and their minds a little bit more in terms of like, what am I even doing here? Why am I going to this church? What is this church about? Why am I giving my money here, volunteering my time here? And because the accountability can't be solely through this organization, we can be a catalyst, but clarity very much is the first step and what there's a long path to any sort of potential healing that the church can experience.
And I think it starts with the people of the church, saying no more, we're not gonna we're not going to allow what was once a really sacred and holy tradition to be commodified in the way that it's become commodified. And let it be all about you know what celebrity goes here or what kind of shoes your, your pastors wearing or whatever. We need to get real in the fact that we're allowing this, collectively, we're allowing pastors and the structures that we've created to water down what was once something that required a lot of conviction and a lot of faith.
And so hopefully there's a return to that, there's a return to people embracing it for themselves, this idea that clarity is reasonable. And then through that inquiry, having there be accountability that doesn’t necessarily require this, you know, this website to hold you accountable. And hopefully the website can be more of a resource and a tool that can unify.
I think that the other part of this that I would personally love to see is okay, what if there was a moratorium on arguing about theology for a second for like, let's just pause to understand the arguments on the other side have been on the other side of those arguments. I'm probably not going to convince you and actually I'm done trying. So let's just suspend that conversation. And instead, maybe we can find something that we all agree on, which isn’t to say that we validate each other's theology because we, in some ways, both sides of the theological debate see the underside of perpetuating harm. But let's just suspend that too for a second and let's focus on clarity.
Like, what if both sides of the theological spectrum agreed that clarity was reasonable? I think what would happen is we would root out a lot and this ambiguity that exists in between the spectrum where it really has nothing to do with conviction. In fact, a lot of the worst offenders of ambiguity are these large, hipster, evangelical, mega church Hillsong(y) type places that don't stand for anything. There's no it's not even like they have fleshed out their theology and they believe it so intensely that they're, you know, they don't want to talk about it because it's resolved. It's they don't even know why they don't believe it or why their policies are what they are. And so I don't think there's any room for that, frankly, in the church world. So I think there is an opportunity for some, some quote unquote, unity, even among churches that disagree theologically
Seth 36:24
I want to pivot and for those listening, I will say pause right now and just go to church clarity.org and just see where your churches but from what I understand there's a backlog. So just know, if you submit somebody, it may be some time before it's there. But I have a question about your website. And so I had asked a friend, you know, hey, what would you ask the, you know, the founders of this organization? And he had said, you know, a database of information is fine, but how are we helping to point people to community, because people need to be…is there any portion of your website or as you're going into rebranding that you're like, yeah, you know what now that we know that there's this many people in Dallas or this many people in Charlottesville there's many people in, does it pick the city, it doesn't really matter. Is there any plans possibly to point people towards community as opposed to just having the data as like a white page listing of churches? Or no? I'm sure that that is a massive undertaking to figure out how to point things in specific directions.
George 37:26
Yeah, absolutely. There is a really exciting part of this next iteration is our emphasis on “verified clear churches”, which is our highest and best score, verify clear indicates that the church has completed a certain policies are being submitted to our team, about 500 or so verified clear churches now out of the 5000 or so that have been submitted. And so with that group of churches that is exactly what we're hoping to do. Encourage people to go to these churches that aren't afraid of disclosing their policies and do demonstrate conviction.
And then from there, looking for ways to maybe even connect those churches to each other and building an association of churches. So we have this opportunity for clear churches to become members of what we do. And so once you get scored verified clear, you can pay a small fee to become a verified clear member church. And what that does, is it gives you more visibility to our audience. And basically, that's, that's the only way we make money. So nobody, nobody works for church clarity. We are doing, we're all volunteers, myself and Sarah included.
Now hopefully, that's not always the case. I mean, we've been at this for two years. And we do hope that we can create some sustainability because it's something that we believe in and there's there's a lot of work that still needs to be done in practical realities of us being here to pay bills and that kind of stuff. But verified clear members is the vehicle that we see it sort of a long term what we want to build this this whole vision We want to verify their churches to sort of believe with this this message of “we're verified clear” and what's been really cool is that's naturally happening.
As we've scored churches verified clear, there's like, they celebrate like hanging some score verified, clear, but there's clarity we see received searches, like making videos, like celebrating this moment or putting our, you know, their verified clear badge on their website and being proud of the fact that like, you know we're not afraid to tell you, “here's where we're at”. And so as we get our systems in place more and get through technical challenges and this backlog that we have, that's something that we're really excited to lean into more.
Seth 39:38
To clarify on verified clear. That doesn't necessarily mean affirming or unaffirming. It can mean both correct, just as long as they're clear?
George 39:48
That is correct. And then another highly misunderstood part. So once we go from scoring a church based on our methodology that Sarah described, and sort of using the information that we have or the readily available. We give them unclear not affirming or clear affirming or whatever. If they then become verified there, we actually drop those other labels on affirming or affirming. And they just become verified clear with the list of their answers to the policy question.
Seth 40:16
The reason I asked that question and why I'm asking the next one is, I went to the website, I'm on it now. And I could not find a place to say, you know what, I support this. Let me give you $20. So my question was, how do you make money, but then there's also a banner at the top there that says we grew too fast and we need to scale up help us reboot the website. What does that actually like? What are you doing? What are you rebooting? What's it gonna look like? What's kind of your timeline? What are the goals there?
George 40:40
Like? I've been talking a lot lately, but sorry, let me take this one too.
Sarah 40:44
Yes. Okay.
George 40:51
So yes, we just launched an Indiegogo campaign and we are trying to raise 50k. Basically to have the ability to invest development of our site. So two years ago when we launch Tim Schrader, who's a marketing genius, bless his heart. We've created this WordPress blog with about 25 churches, I'm sorry, Squarespace blog. Thank you. But over overnight, we outgrew that based on the response. And so we had to rebuild the website really quickly in two days on a different platform. And we've sort of been bootstrapping, like patch working, like it's really it's like the most bandaged-backend system you've ever seen. But it works and it's actually quite brilliant. The mind that are behind it, are really doing an incredible job of making do with what we have, but we've now had another milestone where we're pushing up against the limits of the fun side providers that we have and blah, blah, blah, all the technical stuff that's happening.
Point is, we want to make our “search” better. You know, we want to be able to offer more features and more tools and resources, especially for our “verified clear churches” and especially for people to come To the website looking for a church, we want to make the experience overall better. We feel like we have, you know, proof of concept in terms of what we're creating, and there's definitely a demand for it. But we've just been really intentional about money from the very beginning, not wanting to create something that was super, like dependent on donations all the time.
We're always constantly having to do these campaigns and whatnot. And so it's kind of a big deal for us to step out and say, “Okay, we're ready…we're pretty confident in what we're building out”. So we're ready to ask people for money, who support that. So that's kind of the left of the spirit behind the campaign itself. We're trying to build additional capacity so that we can continue to grow and get through this backlog that we have, and ultimately, score every church in America ,every church in America, that's that's the goal and we are scoring globally to but we're just trying to keep our goals focused on what we feel like is attainable.
Seth 43:00
So Where do they go to push the button to say, yeah, sign me up. I'm happy to support.
George 43:06
Yeah. So thanks. Thanks so much again for allowing us to plug that it's just go to charity.org. You'll see that the banner at the top, it'll take you to the Indiegogo campaign. That's that's probably the easiest part of the link is in our profile, Instagram, as well. So whatever is easiest, any, any amount helps. We're also whatever one of the perks that we're offering, if you do have a church was caught up in the in the backlog, we have released a limited number of what we're calling fast passes, that will get you to the front of the line, get your church published.
Seth 43:35
So it works for Disney. So why not? Sarah, you have a big job with the database and the methodology? Like is there any way that people can help you? Because I think the more data points in the matrix, the better for something of this nature, because that's just how algorithms work. So is there any way that as people like if they can't volunteer money; is there any other way to help partner with with church clarity to go I can help and here's how.
Sarah 44:08
Yes, we have I think I mentioned briefly but 150 plus volunteers, students but also across the world and we train you in our methodology and all you kind of need is internet connection a laptop or desktop and a few hours of free time every week over the week. And at this point, someone in Stephanie actually is the main point person I oversee some of the high level but we have like multiple teams.
If you want to go to our website you can go to churchclarity.com and then on the menu bar look for become verified clear. I realized we don't really have really clear call to actions on our websites George but technically that is the form by which you become sign up to be verified clear as an individual which then gives you the option to join us as a volunteer. So the only requirement we have a volunteer is not whether you are affirming/unaffirming but whether you are willing to be clear by your own policy positions.
So that's one way to help. And we have a variety of tasks from like, really basic data entry, people who like like cleaners and efficiency and organization. And it's like relaxing to people who have a more of an investigative edge. I want to troll through sermon archives and stuff like that.
Seth 45:20
Thank you for that. I had given you a time commitment, and we're coming up on that. But I wanted to say thank you both for making this website. I do know what it's like to have to run all the backend stuff, although I have no idea what it is to break Squarespace or word or WordPress, I'm not there. And hopefully I never am because it sounds like it's a big hassle. But thank you so much for doing what you're doing. I genuinely think and I know, you know, I fully expect in the next year so this will come up in my local church because we are not scored as affirming because I'm pretty sure we are ambiguous; but I do know we also have 10-15 gay, gay people, gay couples, gay married couples, gay youth-and that matters. You know that it just didn't matters, you know that someone could be raised in a church and then when they turn 17, and they want to do something, and say something, and then they don't have a fellowship. It matters. It matters. It matters so, so much. So I do want to thank you both for making what you've made. I know it takes a lot to do that, but I think it's needed. So any final words from either one of you? If not, I will let you go.
George 46:24
Yeah, you’ve been great. I really appreciate the conversation. Thanks so much for the work that you're doing and for everybody.
Sarah 46:29
Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate you as well.
Seth 47:01
We should not have ambiguity. When we're talking about people and our beliefs, we have no issue was saying what we believe the Bible is with who we believe Jesus was what we think about the Trinity, what we believe about hell. And if we're honest, we have no ambiguity when we think about what our politics are, who we do and don't support, but to not talk about a conversation and a topic as big as what we just talked about, is damaging to every person in the room, regardless of their belief. I'm so thankful for things like church clarity, and the vision that they have. And I'm really hopeful that after they redo this website, and they can rebrand that some of those communities can begin to get built and be fostered and some of those communities can begin to be fostered. For people that need a home that have been ostracized on either side of the debate that they can begin to point people in those directions because it's just too hard to find the answers because churches just aren't willing to be upfront about the answers. I cannot wait for next week. It's December. Got some great guests lined up for December. And then it's going to be fun. I'll talk with you next week. Be good everybody. There.