pH Check Stage layer prototype
The instrument does not change. What changes is which of its eighteen subscales a congregation is asked, and what its scores are reported out of.
The questions this page exists to answer. Everything else is scaffolding.
The pH Check is a validated instrument. Whole-instrument reliability .97, subscale reliabilities .83 to .94, normed on 3,892 people across 58 churches. None of that is in question and none of it changes here.
What is in question is the administration. Every one of the 115 fields on the live survey is required and none offers Not Applicable, so a congregation with no youth ministry is compelled to take a position on nine statements describing one, and a church younger than five years is asked what it has done in the last five.
Looking atThis is a working prototype of one idea: that an administration should know what kind of congregation is taking it and ask only what applies. Click through it. Nothing you enter is recorded, and it is all still here when you come back.
Not builtNothing here talks to the live pH Check application. It renders from the instrument's own documents, and scoring a real administration is a separate build that has not started.
Bellweather Covenant Church in Kessler Bend, planted March 2024, about 74 adults. Invented down to the town. Its participation target of 60 is real arithmetic from the instrument's own published table.
A church answers these once, when it sets up an administration. Every respondent then gets the same form.
TestingThe stage sets these switches. It does not decide them. Pick a stage and watch the defaults move, then change any of them. A two-year-old plant with a full children's ministry turns that switch on and is asked all nine items. An established church that closed its youth ministry turns it off. Neither is an exception to the design; both are the design.
Where is this congregation?
What this church will be asked
TestingThe denominator moves, and it says so. A score out of 220 compared against churches scored out of 240 is not a comparison. Whether a reduced form can be banded at all is the one question that gates this whole concept, and it belongs to Meryl Herr at GoodWorks rather than to anybody building software.
The live survey already asks this, at the end, as twelve demographic items. Asking it first is what lets the form know whether 5 Voices is required of you.
Which of these describes you at Bellweather Covenant Church?
Pick the one that fits best.
Looking atThe live instrument captures this as two separate items, one for elected leadership and one for paid staff, plus a third asking Leader or Attender that the first two already establish more precisely. One question replaces three.
Looking atNot a new assessment. The free 5 Voices assessment is already a live step in the church planting assessment process, where a candidate follows a link and comes back. This is the same arrangement for the same reason: 5 Voices runs on giantos.com and has no callback, so the Voice Order comes back by self-report until that changes.
TestingRequired for staff and elected leaders, offered to everybody else. Ministry volunteers get a nudge rather than a gate, because a volunteer is the person friction costs most. Is that the right line?
Demo controlEverything below responds to the switches on the setup screen. Go back and change one, and the items appear or grey out here. Greyed items are not asked and are not scored, which is the difference between this and hiding a number on a report.
Looking atTwo screens, because two people need telling. This is the one the respondent sees. The one below is what the church gets, and neither exists in the live application today.
Your answers are in. They are anonymous and nobody at Bellweather Covenant Church sees them individually.
Bellweather Covenant Church, administration closed.
TestingThe norming version is on the receipt. Nothing in the live application records which reference sample a result was scored against, and seven churches have already taken the pH Check twice across a re-norming that moved every threshold. A band can change without the church changing, and today nothing says so.
Not builtNothing is emailed, nothing is scored, and no band is assigned. Scoring a reduced form against a reference sample filtered to churches that answered the same subscales is the open question, and it is Meryl Herr's to answer before any of this is built.
@ai in a note and it goes to the drafting queue, and the reply comes back on the note. The same page is also published as a Claude artifact, which is the copy to use if you would rather comment there.