Would the way your church is set up catch it,
or would it hide it?
This assessment does not evaluate anyone’s integrity. It does not ask whether your leaders are trustworthy. It assumes they are.
It asks a different question. If someone in your church made a decision they should not have made, how would anyone else find out? Those are separate questions, and most churches only ever ask the first.
The conditions, not the people
When Diana Garland’s team at Baylor University interviewed dozens of people who had experienced clergy sexual misconduct, the common thread was not a type of leader. It was a set of conditions: unobserved time, stacked roles, private channels, and a culture where raising a concern felt rude.
Those conditions exist in good churches run by good people. That is the point, and it is why this spends more space on conditions than on screening. Praesidium, which has worked in abuse prevention for over thirty years, is direct about it: very few offenders have criminal records. Screening is a floor. It is not a strategy.
Do not fill this out alone
The value is in the disagreement. Give it to your full board or elder team plus two or three staff members who are not in senior leadership. Everyone answers independently, before anyone discusses it.
Where senior leadership scores an item high and staff score it low, you have found something more useful than a score. You have found the gap between how your church looks from the top and how it looks from inside, which is the condition under which things go unseen.
How it works
You start a run and get two links. One is for your team, and you send it to everyone taking part. The other is yours, and it is how you read the result. They are different links on purpose, so that nobody answering the questions is also holding the key to the answer.
Nothing is scored while answers are still coming in. You will see how many people have responded and nothing else. When everyone is in, you close the run and the result appears at that moment.
Nobody reads the individual answers. Including us.
A person answering these questions honestly is disagreeing with their employer in writing. That only happens if the promise is real, so here is exactly what it is.
No one at your church can see an individual response, only the totals across everybody. No one at After The Fall can either. There is no screen for it, no export, and no permission that grants it. We do not ask for a name, an email address or a login at any point, and we do not record where anyone answered from.
The result is sealed until you close the run, and that is not a formality. If you could watch a running total you could work out one person’s answers by subtracting the total before they answered from the total after. So there is one snapshot, taken once, and nothing to compare it against.
A run needs at least three responses before it can be scored. Two people who know each other, averaged, are still two people. Our full privacy policy covers the rest of the site.
How it is scored
Every item is scored 2 if it is fully true, in writing, and currently practiced. 1 if it is partly true, informal, or inconsistently practiced. 0 if it is not true. Ninety points in total.
We do that as arithmetic. Nothing you write is read by a machine or by us to produce a judgment, because addition is not a thing that needs an opinion, and a score produced by a model is a score that could quietly come out differently next year.
There is also a not sure option, and it is worth using. It scores the same as a zero and it means something completely different. An item leadership knows to be true and staff cannot answer is not a missing policy. It is a policy nobody has been told about, which protects about as well as no policy at all, and it is usually the cheapest thing on the list to fix.
Where these questions come from
This assessment is built on published research about how misconduct happens in religious organizations, and on established standards for safeguarding and financial governance.
Observability, role separation and culture follow findings from Baylor University’s research on clergy sexual misconduct with adults. Reporting and disclosure, and governance and power structure, follow the twelve steps to institutional courage published by the Center for Institutional Courage. Financial controls follow standards published by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Screening and safeguarding follows the Evangelical Council for Abuse Prevention’s child safety standards, and screening and reporting standards reflects the requirements set out in California Assembly Bill 506.
After The Fall assembled it. It has not been through academic validation, and none of the organizations named above were involved in creating it, have reviewed it, or know it exists.
What that means in practice: this is a systematic way to look at your church using questions grounded in real research. It is not a certification, a compliance audit, or a psychological instrument. It has not been tested for reliability and has not been normed against a sample, so the score bands are informed judgments about where structure gets thin rather than statistically derived cutoffs.
Use the section subtotals, and the difference between leadership and everybody else. Treat the total as a rough indicator rather than a measurement. A score from this does not demonstrate compliance with any legal or accreditation requirement, and should not be shown to an insurer, a regulator or a court as though it did.
If somebody on your board asks whether Baylor or the Center for Institutional Courage helped make this, the answer is no. Their published work is part of what it is built on. Neither has any involvement with After The Fall, and neither has seen it.
Version 1.0 · September 2026 · items 573r90
Start one for your team
Two questions, then you get your links. There is nothing to sign up for.
Only so you can tell one run from another. Leave it blank if you would rather we did not hold the name of your church, and nothing else changes.
A rough number is fine. It is only used to tell you when everyone is in. Aim for your whole board or elder team plus two or three staff who are not in senior leadership.
Save both of these now.
This is the only time they are shown. They are not emailed to anybody, because we did not ask for an address. If you close this page without keeping them, the run is gone and you would need to start another.
Send this one to your team
Everyone taking the assessment needs this link. It opens the questions. It cannot see the result.
Keep this one to yourself
This is how you check how many people have answered, close the run, and read the result. Do not put it in the email to your team. If it goes out with the other one, everybody answering can read the score, and the honesty this depends on goes with it.
Anyone holding a link can use it, so treat them the way you would treat a shared document. If the wrong one goes out, start a fresh run and abandon this one.
If the result is hard to read, or you would rather work through it with someone, start with a conversation.