How We Score

Ground Pews is a project of One True Light Ministries. Its baseline is historic Protestant orthodoxy, expressed through a Reformed doctrinal framework. We do not read from nowhere. Every interpreter brings convictions to the text, so we name ours plainly. When we assess something, we’re telling you how it lines up with that standard, and we say so plainly.

Every piece of content is read against seven enduring questions. These are the pillars the church has always had to defend, because the old errors never really die; they just change clothes.

• God. Is God rightly confessed as one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, holy and sovereign?
• Christ. Is this the real Jesus, fully God and fully man, crucified, risen, returning, or a counterfeit that keeps the name but strips something essential?
• The Spirit. Is the Holy Spirit honored as God and person, the effectual agent of every saving grace, neither ignored nor treated as a force to be seized?
• Humanity. Is man rightly seen, God's image-bearer with real dignity, fallen in Adam, accountable, and unable to save himself? Or is he recast as basically good, merely wounded, or his own way out?
• Salvation. Is it grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, unto good works, or has works crept in as the cause?
• Scripture. Is God's Word treated as the final authority for what may be known and believed about him, or is something set above it?
• Last Things. Is Christ's return and the hope of resurrection kept in view?

Scripture is the standard by which every pillar is measured. It sits at six because the pillar that follows it, Christ’s return, the resurrection, the final judgment, cannot be tested without it.

Not every disagreement is the same size, and treating them as if they were is its own error. So we weigh on two levels:

A difference within the faith. Faithful Christians disagree about real things, how the end times unfold, how grace and human response fit together. How the church practices baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and how traditions understand Christ’s presence in them, are differences within the faith, not errors. What the Salvation pillar tests is something else: whether anything, sacramental or otherwise, has moved from being the fruit of salvation to being its cause. We’ll show you where content lands in these debates and name each for what it is. Disagreeing with your tradition is not the same as being wrong about the gospel.

Another gospel. Some teaching does not merely differ. It denies something the gospel cannot do without, the true Christ, salvation by grace, the authority of Scripture, the resurrection. When that happens, we mark it soberly, the way a brother would warn you, not to condemn a person but to protect the truth. We hold ourselves to the same standard. As Paul said, even if we ourselves preached another gospel, we would be wrong.

Making that distinction is an act of charity. It lets us hold real disagreement as real, without treating a brother as an enemy.

We give an alignment reading, Strongly Aligned, Worth Watching, Caution Advised, or Scripturally Misaligned, and for the gravest cases a distinct Heresy Highlight. But the number is the last thing we show you, on purpose. First comes the reasoning and the Scripture, because that’s what you’re meant to weigh. The score is a summary, not the final word.

Every assessment is rooted in Scripture, with the references shown so you can look them up yourself. We won’t ask you to take our word for it. The Word is the point.

Alongside the biblical reading, we flag persuasion techniques, appeals to fear, manufactured urgency, loaded language, and the like, because how something argues matters, not only what it claims. Naming a rhetorical move isn’t calling anyone evil; it’s helping you read with clear eyes.

Ground Pews is not a weapon for scoring people you disagree with, and we have built it, in its tone and its limits, to resist being used that way.

We’re not telling you what to think. We’re training you to think biblically.