The Purpose of a Church Website
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.
For example, I’ve said before that most unbelievers don’t care about our ministries because they can’t envision a time when they would ever want to be involved in those programs. In fact, I would venture a guess that the “Ministries” page on most church websites would actually deter many unbelievers from joining us because most church ministries are so focused on those who are “in the know” - with descriptions couched in Christianese, with very little real focus on unbelievers, and with little thought given to how an unbeliever might perceive the nature of those ministries.
In addition, my fear is that with limited resources and budget, efforts to maintain a church website will naturally gravitate to those items which serve already-existing members and attendees while items which are targeted toward unbelievers (which a church website is uniquely poised to deliver) will fall by the wayside.
I might also add that the first purpose (to help people looking for a church home) only targets a small segment of people outside the church. The vast majority of unbelievers are simply not “looking for a church home.” They think we are irrelevant.
I would much rather see us focus our efforts on using church websites to intrigue unbelievers enough to want to join us in our gatherings, and I’m not sure we can do that effectively while including a major emphasis on serving people who are already part of our churches.
Some churches create two sites — one site for members and attendees and an additional site for non-attendees. Other churches create a special members’ section, accessible through a login. I’m not sure I like either of these approaches as they both tend to create a presentation which inadvertently says to unbelievers, “You’re not part of our club.” For that reason, I’m not particularly enamored of either of these solutions.
I recognize that I am almost certainly in the minority with my opinion on these issues, so I am genuinely interested in the perspective of others and further discussion. Please feel free, as always, to comment.
Related Article
Effective Church Websites For Emerging Generations
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.
