Press Release: Church Clarity Scores Outreach Magazine’s ‘100 Largest Churches in America’

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact: media@churchclarity.com

Church Clarity Scores Outreach Magazine’s ‘100 Largest Churches in America’

(New York, NY) - Church Clarity, a crowd-sourced database that scores churches based on the clarity of their actively enforced LGBTQ+ policies, has today released new data which scores the 100 largest churches in America as featured in the Christian publication, Outreach Magazine. Outreach’s annual list is based on self-reported data from churches and represents over 1.1 million Evangelicals in America. Church Clarity scored these churches not only on their LGBTQ+ policies, but also on the race and gender of the church’s senior pastors.“ This is a sneak peak into the future of our mission and represents our first attempt to deliver clarity when it comes to gender and racial demographics at the most senior levels of church leadership,” said co-founder George Mekhail in a statement on their website.

Their research highlights some startling facts regarding America’s 100 largest churches including:

• 0% of Outreach’s 100 Largest churches have affirming LGBTQ+ policies
• Only 35% have CLEAR LGBTQ+ policies on main pages of their websites
• 65% of these church websites either obscure policy language (54% UNCLEAR) or entirely omit (11% UNDISCLOSED) their actively enforced LGBTQ+ policies.
• 30% of non-denominational churches, who make up 43% of the list, are CLEAR about their LGBTQ+ policies
• 7% are led by a senior pastor of color (for context, people of color are 38% of America’s population)
• 1% are led by a senior female pastor, who is listed as a co-pastor with her husband (for context, women are 50% of the US population; for a corporate comparison, women are 8% of the CEOs of Fortune 100)

“While we’re not organizationally focused on delivering change, we hope that increased clarity will inspire necessary questions and waves of change within the church. As we close out 2017, we’ll continue to verify church submissions to our database and score churches’ actively enforced policies that impact LGBTQ individuals,” Mekhail said, “We are gearing up for our next phase which will score policies that impact Women in Leadership, partly inspired by the stories shared courageously using the #metoo / #churchtoo hashtags. We’re looking forward to delivering on that promise in the early part of 2018.”Since the site launched in October, over 1,200 churches have been submitted for scoring using Church Clarity’s crowd-sourced platform and 500 churches have been published on the site. Additionally, nearly 80 churches have verified their scores becoming “Verified Clear” churches, the clearest score a church can receive.To learn more about the Church Clarity study and to view the churches and other information, please visit this link.

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Church Clarity is a crowdsourced database that scores churches in order to create a new standard for clearly communicated LGBTQ+ policies.