Review Guidelines

Our reviews exist to help the next guest judge whether a church is a good fit — and to help churches welcome people better. They are deliberately not a public comment board.

Who can leave a review

People who visited a church (in person or online) through or alongside ROS Church Finder. Church staff and volunteers may share feedback about their own church, but it is kept internal and never counted in anything the public sees.

One current review per person per church. You can edit it later; a newer review replaces the older one rather than adding a second, so nothing is ever counted twice.

What we ask

• Structured scores on the things guests actually weigh: the welcome, how easy the visit was, the teaching, worship, connection, and care — each on a simple scale with words, not just stars.
• Two optional questions about prayer and about serving. You only answer them if you actually experienced that on your visit. "Not on this visit" and "prefer not to answer" are real answers — they are left out of every average rather than counted as a low score.
• Whether you would return, and whether you would recommend the church to someone in a similar season of life.
• What mattered most to you, and whether the church delivered on it.
• Two short written boxes: what helped your visit, and what made it harder. Describe what happened, not a person.

On the teaching question

We ask whether you could follow the teaching and understood what it meant for your life. That is a question about your experience, not a verdict on a church's doctrine — we don't publish judgments about theological correctness.

Writing something public

• Keep it brief and constructive: what helped, what would help next time.
• No gossip, no personal attacks, no naming an individual, and no details that could identify someone.
• No unverified allegations. If you are reporting something that may be abuse, harassment or a danger to a child, that is not a review — use the private safety route instead.

What is never published

• Allegations about a specific person, safety concerns, and disputes about doctrine. These are routed privately — they are not reviews.
• Personal contact information (yours or anyone else's).
• Anything a moderator judges to be an attack on a person rather than a description of a visit.
• The private improvement notes churches receive. Those are readable only by that church's own approved admins, and never appear on a profile.

How publishing works

Every review is held until a person moderates it. A respectful review with low scores is published exactly as written — a score we find uncomfortable is not a reason to suppress it. Churches see their own results as summaries and private notes — including the “what made it harder” comments — so they can actually improve. Seekers see a summary panel only once a church has at least five published reviews, so no single visit defines a church.

What the numbers do and don't mean

Every panel states how many responses it is based on and the period they cover. These are self-selected responses, not a random sample: people who had a strong experience are more likely to respond. We never break results down by a demographic group unless at least five reviews sit behind that group, so a small group is never put on display. We don't publish rankings of churches against each other.

These are our own guest questions. They are not a licensed research instrument, and they are not Barna or ChurchPulse measures — please don't read them as one.

A serious safety concern

If what you want to report involves a child's safety, abuse, harassment or something that may put people at risk, don't use a review. Report it privately here — it goes only to our team, is never published, and is never shown to the church. Recording a concern is not a finding about a church.

A note to churches

You cannot respond publicly to reviews here, by design — public back-and-forth helps no one. What you get instead is the full picture privately: your scores, where guests felt friction, and what they privately said would have helped. Churches consistently tell us that is more useful anyway.