Rechurching Diagnostic Suite

The 20-point Rechurching audit as a live green / yellow / red operating system — scored from your own data, with a board-ready PDF on demand.

Category	Assessment
Church-health domain	All Three Domains
Data-privacy tier	High — giving + attendance + assimilation signals
Mastery-ladder target	Level 5 · Systems
Build stack	Next.js + Supabase + Vercel; Planning Center + giving export; headless PDF render
Prototype	A working demo of this idea ships in this repo — see /prototype on the hub

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Why this is the flagship

This is the build that ties the whole workshop together. The Great Dechurching — co-authored by Jim Davis and Michael Graham (both in the room) with Ryan P. Burge — documents that roughly 40 million Americans who once attended monthly now attend less than yearly, the largest religious shift in US history. The companion Rechurching Toolkit turns that research into a 20-point audit across the areas that most affect dechurching.

But the Toolkit is a static PDF, scored by hand, once. Reading the book doesn't change a Monday. This suite turns the 20-point audit into a recurring operating system: each area scored green/yellow/red, partly from the church's own Planning Center and giving data, refreshed continuously, with a board-ready export.

What good looks like

Twenty diagnostic areas, mapped to the Three Domains — Open the Front Door, Close the Back Door, Send Out the Equipped. Each area carries 2–3 signals: some self-assessed (abuse-prevention policy, doctrinal clarity), some data-derived (assimilation rate, retention, giving-unit attrition as proxies). The system pulls nightly, scores each area, writes a one-sentence diagnosis, and generates a board PDF on demand. The audit stops being an event and becomes a dashboard.

Market scan

The decisive finding: there is no live-dashboard product for this.

• The Rechurching Toolkit is confirmed as a free, two-part downloadable framework (a 20-point checklist + 20 worksheets), distributed via dechurching.com and Gumroad — a PDF, not software.
• The Great Dechurching (Zondervan, 2023) is by Jim Davis & Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge; TGC is closely affiliated and promotional (Davis is a TGC Council member and hosts As in Heaven; Graham works with TGC's Keller Center), though Zondervan is the publisher.
• Adjacent metrics tools — Church Metrics, Vitals, Pushpay Insights — track numbers, but none maps to the Rechurching framework.

That absence is the entire opportunity: nobody sells the audit as software, and nobody auto-scores it from Planning Center + giving.

Data privacy & security

• Same high-sensitivity profile as the Operations Intelligence dashboard: giving = high, attendance/assimilation = medium.
• Aggregate before scoring; never put donor-level rows in the PDF; anonymize before any LLM call; zero-retention API; synthetic demo data.
• Keep the soft items self-assessed. Abuse-prevention and mental-health-infrastructure items are guided self-assessment, not data-mined. Over-claiming that qualitative items can be scored from data is the main design risk — resist it.

How to build it

1. Re-key the 20 checklist items into a scored config (manual self-rating + data-derived where genuinely possible).
2. Reuse the Operations Intelligence pipeline for the data-backed items (Planning Center + giving).
3. Compute red/yellow/green thresholds per area.
4. Render the dashboard.
5. Generate the board PDF via a headless render (e.g., Puppeteer) with an AI-written summary over aggregates.

Rollout plan

• Q1: Do the audit the manual way once, and encode the 20 areas + which signals are data-derivable.
• Q2: Wire the data-backed signals to your dashboard; ship the green/yellow/red view.
• Q3: Add the board-PDF export; review the audit quarterly as a living instrument.

Effort & cost

• Build: ~40–60 hours — the extra effort is the rubric design, which is judgment-heavy.
• Run: ~$50/mo infra. Biggest risk is over-claiming data-scoring on soft items; keep those as guided self-assessment.

Sources

• The Great Dechurching (Zondervan) — https://store.thegospelcoalition.org/product/9780310147435/the-great-dechurching-hardback
• TGC review — https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/great-dechurching/
• dechurching.com — https://dechurching.com/
• Rechurching Toolkit (free download) — https://msgwrites.gumroad.com/l/rechurching
• Planning Center pricing — https://www.planningcenter.com/pricing

Confirmed: the Rechurching Toolkit is a free PDF framework, not software — the "no live-dashboard exists" gap is real. The Great Dechurching authorship and TGC's promotional (not publishing) role are confirmed; Zondervan is the publisher.