By Libby Clarke
I've been photographing church signs.
What a congregation displays on the front of its building, or chooses not to display, tells us something real about how it understands its relationship to the neighborhood around it. A pride banner facing the street is a public statement. So is a blank wall in June.
That statement alone cannot tell us whether a congregation is truly welcoming. Signage is not congregational culture. But it is public witness, and public witness is observable.
Once Everloving Pride was up and running, I began looking for ways to move beyond anecdotes and toward research. I want to help churches better understand how they communicate welcome to LGBTQIA+ people, and that work needs to be grounded in a clear picture of what congregations are actually saying to their communities.
This summer I am launching the first version of Pride Unfurled, a pilot study of how houses of worship publicly communicate LGBTQIA+ welcome through outdoor signage. The central question is simple: what do congregations publicly signal about LGBTQIA+ welcome, and does that signal persist beyond Pride season?
This is a pilot study. The methodology will evolve as data arrives and participants offer feedback. I'm building the instrument in public because I believe the best research questions are strengthened by the communities most affected by them.
What We're Measuring
Pride Unfurled collects photographs of outdoor pride signage at houses of worship. Submissions come in through a tool at prideunfurled.everlovingpride.com, accessible on phone or desktop. You photograph or upload a sign, rate it on three dimensions, and submit the result.
The tool captures location data from photo metadata when available and falls back to browser GPS or manual city-and-state entry when it is not, allowing submissions from both mobile devices and desktop computers to be mapped geographically.
Each rating dimension reflects a specific research question.
Boldness
Boldness runs from meek to bold.
Does the sign require a congregation to take a visible public stance? A small rainbow sticker in a window communicates differently than a large banner facing a busy road.
Boldness is partly about visibility and partly about perceived risk. Because perceptions of risk vary from place to place, local knowledge matters. Volunteers documenting signs in their own communities often understand the cultural and political context surrounding a congregation better than someone viewing the image from a distance. That contextual awareness is part of what this pilot seeks to explore.
Address
Address runs from “no one in particular” to “the queer community specifically.”
This dimension captures who the sign appears to be speaking to.
“All are welcome” is a broad statement. “We see you, we love you, you belong here” addresses a particular person standing outside, deciding whether it is safe to walk through the door.
For people who have experienced exclusion or harm in religious settings, that distinction can matter enormously.
Welcome Signal
Welcome signal runs from “the door is open” to “we were thinking of you.”
This dimension reflects the distinction between general hospitality and specific recognition.
A progress pride flag may communicate welcome. Language that explicitly names LGBTQIA+ people, same-sex couples, trans people, or queer families communicates something more particular. It suggests that the congregation considered who might be reading the sign and chose to make those people visible in its public language.
A fourth data point records whether the sign relies on religious language, pride imagery, or a combination of both. Do congregations that make explicit theological claims about LGBTQIA+ welcome communicate differently from those whose message is primarily symbolic? The study may help illuminate that question.
My hope is that the resulting data will provide useful insight for church communicators, clergy, and congregational leaders seeking to understand how public welcome is expressed and perceived.
The Longitudinal Piece
What makes this a study rather than a simple survey is the follow-up.
Participants provide an email address and are contacted at three points after the initial June submission: July, December, and April.
The July check-in is particularly important. When Pride season ends, some signs come down.
The percentage of congregations that maintain outdoor LGBTQIA+ welcome signage after June 30 may be one of the most meaningful data points collected. It offers an observable measure of the difference between seasonal participation and sustained public commitment.
December and April extend that question across an entire year.
Is a congregation that displayed pride signage in June still signaling welcome during Advent? During Lent? In the months immediately preceding the next Pride season?
Are there congregations where LGBTQIA+ welcome is a permanent feature of how they present themselves to the neighborhood? If so, what distinguishes them from congregations whose signage appears only during June?
What This Study Can and Can’t Claim
As with any pilot study, there are important limitations.
- The sample is self-selected. People who discover the project and choose to participate are not a random cross-section of congregations or communities. Early submissions will likely skew toward Episcopal and mainline Protestant churches, particularly in urban and suburban areas of the Northeast. That is one reason I am seeking volunteers from a wide variety of regions and denominational contexts.
- Inter-rater reliability remains an open question. Two people viewing the same sign may interpret its boldness or specificity differently. This fall I plan to conduct a calibration exercise using a sample of submitted images, asking multiple raters to score the same signs without reference to each other’s results and comparing scores to identify where the rating scales need refinement.
- This study measures signage, not congregational culture. A congregation may display thoughtful public signage while offering a difficult experience to those who walk through the door. Another may have little or no signage while providing genuine care and welcome. Pride Unfurled does not claim to measure the lived experience of LGBTQIA+ people within congregations. It measures what congregations choose to communicate publicly to the communities around them.
That is only part of the story, but it is a part worth measuring.
Building the Methodology in Public
One purpose of this pilot year is to collect data. Another is to improve the instrument itself.
Pride Unfurled is an attempt to measure something that has not, to my knowledge, been measured in quite this way before: how houses of worship publicly communicate LGBTQIA+ welcome over time. The categories, scales, and assumptions built into the project are not fixed. They are working hypotheses.
As data arrives, some aspects of the methodology may prove useful and others may prove inadequate. The pilot may reveal that certain questions are poorly framed, that important dimensions are missing, or that some categories overlap in ways that make analysis difficult. Discovering those limitations is part of the work.
For that reason, I welcome feedback from people with experience in any of the following areas:
- Research design and survey methodology
- Congregational studies and religious sociology
- Communications and public messaging
- Statistics and data analysis
- GIS mapping and geographic data
One of the advantages of building this project in public is that improvements can happen in public as well. Better questions lead to better research, and I expect the study to evolve through conversation with people who bring expertise and perspectives different from my own.
Understanding the phenomenon clearly matters more than defending the framework I started with. If this year’s findings suggest a better way to approach the question, I will revise accordingly.
How You Can Help
I am looking for volunteers willing to act as field researchers in their own communities.
- During June, photograph outdoor pride signage at houses of worship in your area and submit it through the tool.
- Return in July to report whether the sign is still displayed.
- Check back again in December and April.
You do not need to belong to the congregation, identify as LGBTQIA+, or even be religious. You simply need to be willing to pay attention to what houses of worship are communicating to the people who pass by them every day.
If you work in church communications, your participation carries particular weight. You understand the decisions behind public messaging, the institutional conversations that shape signage, and what it actually costs for a congregation to make a visible statement.
That context may not appear in the data, but it shapes the questions we ask.
The tool is available at prideunfurled.everlovingpride.com. The signs are up. Help us document them.
Why I’m Doing This
I’ve spent the last decade working in church communications after a lifetime in design and activism. Over those years, the question of what congregations say publicly — and what people outside their doors actually hear — has become central to my thinking.
For LGBTQIA+ people, that relationship carries a weight others may not notice. Many of us have learned to scan religious spaces before we enter them. We notice signs, banners, flags, websites, bulletin boards, and the countless other signals congregations send into the world.
Yet the data on how those signals function over time is thin.
Do congregations communicate LGBTQIA+ welcome differently in June than they do in December? What forms of welcome remain visible when Pride Month is over? What can public witness tell us, and where does it fall short?
Pride Unfurled begins as an attempt to ask those questions with some rigor.
The answers may challenge some assumptions. They may raise better questions than the ones I started with. Either outcome would make this project worthwhile.
This is a small beginning, but every study begins with someone deciding to pay attention.
There is a broader claim underneath this research. The rainbow flag carries an aspiration of all-encompassing welcome — its three original creators, Gilbert Baker, Lynn Segerblom, and James McNamara, built it that way in 1978 with more than thirty volunteers. Segerblom developed the dyeing process, McNamara sewed the flags, and Baker conceived the design. McNamara died of AIDS in 1999 without public credit; Segerblom has spent years correcting the record. That erasure is part of the story too.
But aspiration and practice are not the same thing. Studies have found that queer people of color and trans people have had to fight to be included in spaces that flew the flag without seeing them. The Progress Pride flag exists precisely because the original was not keeping its promise to everyone.
What Pride Unfurled is watching for is the distance between symbol and specificity. A congregation that learns to name queer people in its public language — to say you, specifically, are who we had in mind — is building something more than an inclusive policy. It is building the muscle of specific attention. That muscle, practiced on one community, extends. The congregations that see queer people clearly are more likely to see immigrants, people experiencing poverty, people carrying grief the dominant culture would rather not look at. This is what the tradition calls us to. A house of many dwelling places is not built by putting up a flag. It is built by learning, one community at a time, how to make room.
Pride Unfurled is a project of Everloving Pride and Stoneroller Cooperative. Submit a sign at prideunfurled.everlovingpride.com. Volunteering as a field researcher? Read the field observation guide. To get in touch, write to love@everlovingpride.com or use the contact form at prideunfurled.everlovingpride.com.