toledoblade.com --

LONDON - Singing hymns and clasping hands in prayer, they look like regular church-going Christians. But the worshippers at some Sunday services in Britain definitely are not.

Instead they are mostly nonbelievers paid $60 a pop to rate churches in Britain on everything from sermon length to after-service refreshments.

For decades, businesses have used "mystery shoppers," researchers dispatched to retail stores to pose as consumers, to evaluate customer service and quality control. Now, churches are turning to "mystery worshippers" to visit and rate their performance.

The program was launched in November by Christian Research of London and expands this month before reaching nationwide in May.

Religious experts agree that the research could be beneficial for any church seeking to understand how to best draw and keep worshippers in an age of declining attendance.

"Any self-respecting organization is, or should be, alert to useful criticism of its modus operandi," said Sam Berry, an expert on religion at University College London.

"I would regard the mystery-worshipper approach in the same way I would hotels asking people to fill in a form about their experiences at the hotel."

Attendance at Anglican church services has dropped by 50 percent in 40 years as Britain has grown increasingly secular.

Only about 6 percent of Britons attend church regularly compared with about 40 percent of Americans, according to Christian Research.

First to be assessed as part of a pilot project were 13 churches in Telford in northern England in November. Most of the churches scored higher than expected.

Another larger round of assessments will be completed on Jan. 13 when mystery worshippers will visit a secret list of dozens of churches in and around Birmingham, England. By May, mystery worshippers are to be dispatched across the country.

The project is being carried out by Retail Maxim, a British firm that has provided mystery-shopping services to retailers for years. The researchers score churches on exterior appearance, warmth of welcome, quality of the sermon, and even on whether other parishioners make eye contact.

"It can be quite daunting for people who don't have the tradition of going to church to act as a mystery worshipper" said Stephen Goddard, of Liverpool, England, and co-editor of Christian Web site www.shipoffools.com, who is assisting Christian Research with the initiative.

Churches in the United States also are beginning to recognize stealth research as a valuable tool for measuring efforts to gain and keep members, said John Swinburn, executive director of the Mystery Shopping Providers Association in Dallas. He said a small but growing number of churches in the United States have made use of mystery worshippers since the late 1990s.

Derek Wood, president of Guest Check Inc., a guest satisfaction assessment service in Golden, Colo., said many U.S. churches are experiencing declining numbers and they want to understand why.

"They look at the Sunday-morning experience similarly to how one would look at a dining or shopping experience," he said. "Were the staffers friendly and welcoming? Was the sermon substantive, easy to follow, and relevant to daily life?

"Then, in addition, was the church clean and in good repair?" he said. "All these things should be part of an effort to gain or at the very least maintain attendance."

Tim Blewett, warden of Launde Abbey near Peterborough, England, said the abbey has benefited from the visit of mystery worshippers. "But the one possible difficulty is that the scoring system at one level is quite subjective and therefore it can only be seen as a snapshot," he said. "Even so, snapshots should be taken seriously."

Mr. Goddard said that the British initiative could result in the creation of a church "league table" by which churches are ranked according to their scores.

"But this is not a name-and-shame effort," he said. "The very last thing we want to do is to McDonaldize churches so that they all look and act the same.

"The idea is to give churches the chance to see how accessible they are and to compare themselves against other churches," he said. "We want to celebrate the diversity of churches."

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