Finding a Safe and Challenging Church

Mike McHargue (self-described "Christian turned atheist turned follower of Jesus") talks often about safe and challenging churches (S&C). These are places where the people are open to questioning their faith and accepting of everyone who is interested in following Jesus. Reading through his posts, I love the idea of the S&C church, but how do we find them?

My initial thought was to create a website (duh, everything's a website) that would give a description of what S&C Churches are and then a Find a Store type search option. The initial results would be churches where Mike has spoken (very limited), but then expanding via user suggestions.

There are some options out there for finding a church. Unfortunately they aren't what I'm looking for. They focus on 1-5 ratings with a description. So to find a S&C Church you would be wading through all of the text to try and find reviews that highlight the features of a S&C Church. I think a better approach would be a curated list. A list where someone has personally identified each church as a Safe and Challenging Church.

The big roadblock is how to properly identify a S&C Church. It would be terrible to send a searching, possibly hurting, person to a place where they expected to be welcomed, and instead have them be "shamed and shunned". I've been thinking it over, and I don't see any option but to do the legwork. Users submit churches and then site volunteers that are familiar with the S&C Church tenants call the pastor of the church and discuss listing them on the S&C Church website. Perhaps there is a questionnaire that lists the thorniest issues that would trip up most churches in order to make the call as quick as possible. Are atheists and agnostics welcome? LGBT as well? Of course this assumes that pastors would answer frankly, or are even truly aware of the culture at their church. I don't know if that's a safe assumption or not.

I do know that having no idea where to start is demoralizing. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting a push in the right direction. If an idea like this could get off the ground, it could help people.