I was asked yesterday by a reader of this blog for a list of church websites I like. I responded to the email, but thought it would make a good subject for a series of articles, so here goes.
To be honest, because I have some fairly strong opinions on these issues, there are not a lot of church websites I like. But in this series, I’m going to mention a few that I admire, along with the reasons for my admiration and any further information I might have. I may not like everything about these sites (and I’ll tried to point out what I don’t like), but there are aspects which are encouraging to me. Where I list contacts, some are people I know (almost always virtually), but some I have never met.
Feel free to suggest other church websites you like in the comments section, but if we can, let’s try to point to church websites who are effectively using the web in terms of their strategy not just websites that look good (which is not bad in itself, but good-looking websites without an effective online strategy are irrelevant, in my opinion).
Church of the Resurrection
Leawood, Kansas
http://www.cor.org
The main reason I like this site is because it features “normal” people. If you visit the Resurrection Stories section of the site, you’ll find brief testimonies of normal people from within the congregation. One of the strategies I advocate for church websites is to include an extensive set of life stories of believers in the congregation. These are then used to promote the church to various segments of society. While I am not a big fan of religious testimonies on church websites (which the stories on this site resemble to some extent) — largely because the vast majority of unbelievers won’t initially care about religious testimonies — I do applaud the prominence this church gives to the “normal” people in its congregation. In an earlier version of the site, the photos of the people and their stories were prominently featured on the front page, and I would like to see them go back to that, but in general, the fact that they feature people from within the congregation means I don’t get the sense that this is primarily an institution — instead, it’s a group of people.
Contacts: the folks who write the Appian Way blog - Clif Guy, Brian Slezak, Chuck Russell, and Leo Johns.
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
