churches respond to covid-19
February 17, 2020

3 Updates from Church Clarity

George Mekhail. Cofounder.

2020 is off to an eventful start at Church Clarity: our database continues to grow, web traffic has doubled since last year and we recently added our 500th Verified Clear church! As we settle into the new year, here are 3 quick updates to share:


1. Co-Founder Sarah Ngu Stepping Down from Leadership


As announced in Friday’s blog post, my good friend and colleague, Sarah Ngu, is taking a step back from her day-to-day leadership role at Church Clarity.


Sarah has had a profound impact as co-founder of our organization and has played a significant role at every level of the organization over the past 2+ years. Among other things, Sarah helped shape our scoring methodology and volunteer culture. I’m personally going to miss the leadership dynamic we’ve enjoyed since our first day working together. I’m immensely grateful for the many hours she’s invested into the work of Church Clarity and I’m excited for what’s next for Sarah!


2. Exclusively Scoring American Protestant Churches


One of the most important lessons of this work has been seeing how the need for Clarity is universally salient throughout the Global Church. As a U.S. founded organization, we’ve naturally gravitated towards a very America-centered database. Over 90% of the churches in our database are located in the U.S., while a total of 12 countries are represented among scored churches.


As we focus our efforts and refine our mission, it has become apparent that scoring international churches must be done by teams originating in their respective locales. Moving forward, we’re suspending scoring churches outside of the U.S.


We’ve been in touch with individuals and groups from all around the world who want to bring Church Clarity to their country Including Canada, UK, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Nigeria, and Singapore. We’re actively seeking international partners who are interested in licensing our methodology and applying our framework to their specific country, starting with the data we’ve already gathered. Email us if this is of interest to you info@churchclaritycom.


Additionally, it's worth re-emphasizing that our database contains Protestant Churches exclusively. The issues of Harmful Ambiguity we are addressing are uniquely present in Evangelical and Mainline Protestant churches. We simply don’t apply our current methodology to Orthodox Churches, Catholic Churches and Non-Christian Houses of Worship.


3. Helping People Find a Church to Attend


Here’s what we’ve learned after scoring over 3,000 churches: people utilize Church Clarity to find a church they can attend with confidence, knowing that it clearly aligns with their values. We’ve increasingly become a trusted resource for people looking for basic information about churches in their area, prior to attending.


The outcome of our work is that churches will be a more beneficial presence in their communities as increased transparency about their policies is prioritized. Here’s one very recent example of delivering explicit Clarity from Aikon Church in Kyle, Texas. Congrats to their leaders and the many others who will follow their bold lead. As more churches like Aikon continue to deliver clarity, church-seekers will simply anticipate and expect clarity as an initial step prior to attending. It will be the standard for churches to be transparent about how their beliefs are translated into actively enforced policies.


We’ll unpack all of this in more detail in the weeks ahead and update you about how our database continues to evolve and change. Feel free to reach out, join our team or share your story with us about finding a church with our database or being impacted by clarity in some way.


George Mekhail

Executive Director & Co-Founder