What if There Was A GORB for Church Leaders?

What if There Was A GORB for Church Leaders?

Have you heard of the new website called TheGorb.com? According to their home page, Gorb is “an online community of professionals where real life reputations are be earned and viewed by others.” They accomplish this by collecting personal and professional opinions from people all over the internet. They claim that their unique social network allows people to reveal, discipline and reward the good and bad conduct of others. In other words, using Gorb, you can rate people’s reputation, good or bad, online for the whole world to see...

Interesting concept.  They claim that there is accountability built into their system.  “If you provide an anonymous opinion about another person, and if the community around that person accepts your opinion as fair and balanced, then your reputation as a fair and objective person will be enhanced.  However, if you offer an opinion that is too positive or too negative, and the community rejects it, your reputation will suffer.  With our system, the truth will come out as opinions accumulate and are validated over time. We believe that most of us will have a positive score, but we also realize that sometimes it’s harder to identify someone with a good reputation than it is to come across someone with a bad one.”

One of the reasons that I find this concept interesting is that I was asked on several occasions (in my past life as developer at ChurchStaffing.com) about putting together a system like this for churches and church leaders.  “Wouldn’t it be nice,” church job seekers would say, “to have a way to objectively rate churches so that I as a prospective staff member could tell the good churches from the bad ones?” Meanwhile, church search committees and pastors would ask, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a way to objectively rate potential employees in a way that would tell us more about their local reputation?”

I have a couple of thoughts that come to my mind on this regard:

First of all, isn’t it sad that we have to separate the ‘good and the bad’ in church work?  I know, there are highly qualified and lesser qualified candidates in the church job candidate pool, but I hate it that we would need to do a reputation check on potential employees (on top of the standard legalbackground check).  Unfortunately, for many positions, this would be a real asset to have access to).

Secondly, since most people are more prone to complain rather than to compliment; wouldn’t a system like this automatically skew negative… would it really be a fair representation of an individual or a church?

And finally, (introspective person that I am), I wonder, “How would I do on such a reputation rating system?” Not just from those who read my words on the internet, but from those who know me personally?  And how would my church’s reputation be?  In our community?  By other pastors?  By our members?

So… today’s question for contemplation… How’s your reputation?  How would people rate you and your church’s reputation on a website like GORB?

Have a great week!

Todd