Tony Morgan, one of the pastors at Granger Community Church, wrote an intriguing article for his blog a few days ago entitled “Good For Nothing Websites.”

In the article, Tony talks about a few different websites of companies, organizations, and individuals for which he has a certain passion. The manufacturer of the car he drives. The baseball league in which his son plays. His favorite professional baseball team. A leadership organization to which he belongs. Authors whose books he enjoys (or has enjoyed in the past). His old bank and his current bank. What seems to come out of his article is that he consistently uses the websites which offer him something, which in fact are useful to him. Those that are not useful are ignored.

Then he asks a pointed question: “Does your church have a website.” Although I had to read his article 2-3 times to at least come to a place where I think I get his point (I can be dense at times, especially at the end of a long work day!), I’m still not positive. Maybe it’s meant to say different things to different people.

But here’s what I got out of the article and the question: Does your church have a useful website? The answer to that question, I would say, depends on a couple of things:

1. Who do we want to see using our church websites?
2. Is what we offer useful to them?

Unless we answer the first question, we’ll never be able to answer the second.

From my perspective, as you already know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, I want to see unbelievers using our church websites. And the most useful aspects of a church website to unbelievers are the stories of real people in our congregations — their joys, their struggles, their interests, their hopes and dreams, their crushing disappointments, etc., etc. Not their Christian testimonies. But their stories.

The real stories of real people will be intriguing to unbelievers because those stories are the stuff of real life. Are you telling the stories of the people in your congregation and are unbelievers in your local area intrigued enough to want to meet the people in your congregation in face-to-face relationships. Is your church website, through its stories, drawing people into the authentic community of Christ lived out in the everyday lives of the believers in your area?

I was gratified this morning to find an article regarding podcasting on the website of one of my denomination’s primary publications: The Pentecostal Evangel.

In the article, Kirk Noonan gives a good overview of the advantages and challenges of podcasting for the church. He quotes Mark Batterson (pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C.), Mark Kellner (the author of God on the Internet), and Mark Hunt (Vice president and Publisher of New Media for Zondervan). All have interesting things to say.

I was especially heartened by Mark Batterson’s clear assertion of the purpose and proper use of podcasting in the church:

Podcasting is not a substitute for church, it’s a supplement. There never will be a substitute for the human touch or the corporate worship we experience together in church. Our goal is to evangelize people and get them to check out our church in a nonthreatening way, and podcasting allows us to do that.

It’s good to see the Assemblies of God recognizing the value of technology in reaching the lost.

For those who have been reading the earlier post on this site entitled The Purpose of a Church Website, I wanted to let you know that the conversation is not only continuing in the comments to that article, but Paul Steinbrueck has posted a follow-up article which is also getting a good amount of intelligent discussion.

Thanks also to Paul for the willingness to discuss contrary opinions and for his open spirit.

In a blog post entitled Supercharging Sermons With A Blog, Paul Steinbrueck of OurChurch.com talks about three purposes of a church website:

1) to help people looking for a church home;
2) to assist people already attending the church to know what ministries and activities are available for them; and,
3) to help people grow spiritually by providing additional resources that complement the services and ministries.

Regarding those three purposes of a church website, it seems to me (just my opinion) that there are better ways to accomplish the second and third purposes than a publicly available church website (I would advocate approaches which convey information to already-existing members and attendees through face-to-face community — small groups, for example). My fear is that in trying to be all things to all people, we will end up serving no one.

Tim Bednar of e-church has refocused his blog. In his own words:

As the Internet is arguably one of the most powerful forces of social change conceived by humankind, this topic will be the new focus of my blog. I’m going to focus on how the Internet is changing the congregation; thus, transforming the church through its wisdom from the bottom up.

The first three entries (of a planned 20) represent Tim’s understanding of how modern internet-based innovations which are transforming congregations from the bottom up, transformation which is often happening without leadership’s knowledge or understanding:

Beta from Google
Gmail from Google
Folksonomies and Tagging with Del.icio.us and Amazon

Whether or not you agree with Tim’s conclusions (I’m not certain so far, but they have the ring of truth to me), these articles are definitely thought-provoking.

I would encourage you to head on over to e-church and begin grappling with the implications. Start here.

Thanks to Church Marketing Sucks for the heads up.

I found an intriguing piece of copywriting on a church website today - the website of Seed Church in Bothell, Washington. The welcome message on the front page of the site begins with these words: “It is time for you to lose control.” Eight simple words - definitely unexpected words for a church website. And in that alone, I think the website of Seed Church will intrigue unbelievers. Even their domain, dyingtolive.org, evokes curiosity.

The words we choose to use on our church websites are very important and deserve careful thought.

February 22, 2006 Update: A local news channel, WNDU, ran a story about the sermon series and the use of billboards by the church. Note the complaint from a local resident. Something to keep in mind with regard to this particular subject matter, whether you are thinking about using billboards or cinema advertising. It’s the subject matter which makes the use of the billboards suspect, however, not the strategy in general (at least it seems to me). Thanks to OldTruth.com for the heads-up on the news story.

Recently, we wrote about a campaign called IHateMyMarriage.com, devised by NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina. Now comes news of a similar campaign called MyLameSexLife.com from Granger Community Church.

The additional twist here is that Granger Community is not only using billboards but cinema advertising as well. Great idea for a community like mine which doesn’t allow billboards.

Read more about the campaign, with additional links, at Church Marketing Sucks.

Recently, I’ve run across two (relatively) new websites for church webmasters:

If Jesus Had A Website
With a tagline of “Helping Church Websites Improve Their Digital Homes,” Greg Nilsen (webmaster for South Pittsburgh Assembly of God) helps to answer questions and provide guidance to Christian web designers. Each week, Greg provides articles that focus on different parts of the design, operation, and technology of websites to help Christian webmasters make their site more functional and appealing to both Christians and seekers.

So You Want A Church Website?
With a tagline of “Resources for the Accidental Church Webmaster,” Jason Fowler (webmaster for First Baptist Church Fairdale in Fairfale, Kentucky) offers help to church webmasters who want to “build a functional, useful, and possibly beautiful website for (their) church.”

Why not visit these two sites and drop a line to Greg and Jason to encourage them in their new ventures?

Mark Batterson is blogging this week about an innovative marketing campaign created by NewSpring Church in Anderson, South Carolina.

NewSpring’s pastor, Perry Noble, preached a sermon series in early 2005 called “I Hate My Marriage.” To advertise the series to the unchurched, NewSpring advertised the domain name ihatemymarriage.com on billboards in their area.

Currently, the site includes some introductory text and links to .mp3 files for the 5-part sermon series. You can see what the site (presumably) looked like during the series by checking out the archive.org version from February 2005.

If you think along these lines, you can probably come up with some good ideas to promote your own sermon series. A couple of interesting thoughts have occurred to me:

1. I wonder if domains such as this could be used by multiple churches?

2. I suspect that using a similar approach, but choosing domain names which correspond in some way to cultural distinctives in your geographical area could be quite effective.

My friend Neil Cox has started a very interesting project: ModelChurch.com. This website presents a fictitious church in a fictitious neighborhood community.

The stated purpose of the ModelChurch.com website, from Neil’s IndyChristian website:

Church-leaders are often asking us these days how to start building out a free, easy, team-oriented set of highly-functional websites. So we’ve started fleshing-out that question, starting with a ‘model church’ website for discussion…. We call it “Model Church.com”. From there we’ll be linking off to sites of our people in that neighborhood or community. In fact, it’s more than that—you might say we’re using the internet to centrally sketch out a model of some basics that reflect what ANY LOCAL CHURCH might start looking like in reality… given the increasingly ‘connected’ nature of the local Church body.

Very interesting and something to keep an eye on.

Ben Dubow, the pastor of St. Paul’s Collegiate Church at Storrs in Storrs, Connecticut has written a masterful article for BetaChurch.Org called Ten Things To Know About Your Church Website.

Ben begins his article with these words:

Eighteen months ago I knew virtually nothing about websites, web design or anything else .... But after a year of working through website stuff for the church, here is what I’ve learned.

And Ben has learned a lot! And even better, it seems to me that Ben has learned the right things! His analysis is spot-on!

If I could somehow imprint one part of Ben’s article on every church leader’s mind and heart, it would be this:

Do not follow the path of least resistance…you will regret it. I almost made this mistake. I knew we needed a website so I thought something was better than nothing. And in today’s world you can get a website up and running pretty quickly and pretty cheaply using services like Register.com or using a volunteer with frontpage. If a website is all the things we have been talking about, then take the time to strategically think through what you are trying to accomplish.

Now go and read Ben’s article in full. Nail it to the door of your office and call it “Ben’s 10 Theses on Web Design for Churches!” Well, okay — maybe not, but please read it!

Walt Wilson’s column in the December 2005 issue of Christian Computing Magazine is all about podcasting. It’s a great challenge to churches to take advantage of this technology, and the article also has some interesting thoughts about the advantages of podcasting over traditional radio and television. The article requires Adobe Reader.