Nope. No personal areas at all. I’ve avoided them successfully for 4 years, and have no interest in implementing them. We have 4 staffers, and so no need for an intranet either...only a networked set of work computers.

The question is what if it was dead simple to have a church intranet? Would your church use it? If it integrated with the ChMS?

Tim - when you reference a church intranet, are you talking about a private area for members (the subject of my original question), a private area just for staff members (which is what I think Anthony is talking about in the second part of his comment), or both? Just trying to understand what we’re talking about in the comments.

I’ve implemented a sort of intranet for a denominational office which has different levels of access depending on whether one is a member of the denomination’s staff or a minister, so I do believe they can be useful and once I thought through the various membership levels (in fact, there are about 7 different levels on the site I’m thinking of), it wasn’t particularly difficult to implement.

With regard to private areas for churches (online areas which only church members and attendees can access), I’ve shied away from recommending that in the past for a couple of reasons:

1) the issue of what to do when someone leaves the church (the situation I referenced in my original question); and,

2) the subtle impressions unbelievers may have that the church is, in fact, a private club and that they are not welcome.

I asked my original question to see if people had come up with solutions I hadn’t thought of that would address those two issues. I’m perfectly happy, though, to discuss private areas for church members, intranets for church staff, or both! Whatever sparks your interest.

Our church wouldn’t use any sort of intranet, as we’re somehow way behind the digital curve. I created our website 4 years ago, and a lot of members don’t even know it exists...let alone ask for podcasts or mp3 sermons. It’s all I can do to promote an email prayer list and an email information list. Our secretary finally let me make her an email address six months ago!

This despite the fact that we’re in the Denver suburbs, which is a highly-concentrated tech area.

Hello Frank,

Many of the church websites I have developed for larger churches over the years have had members-only sections for their websites.

Part of the extended software for http://www.manageyourchurch.com has included online directories of members, direct pastoral contact, internal message systems, and many other “members only” features.

So, how does one define “a member”? I have done both of the following: (1) managed a list of actively signed church members on an internal database table (part of manageyourchurch) and (2) via a direct connection to a churches MS Access database.

I have found an amazing number of folks like the ability to log into a members-only section of a church website to be able to access church-members-directory and such. These days, keeping track of a paper-bound-church-directory is a lot harder than keeping track of a url and password.

Obviously, these type of systems are put behind a SSL Cert and user access is controlled by a churches IT department. Different churches have distributed username/password accounts in different ways… but most seem to hand them out after the individuals have gone through some sort of membership class and signed their membership papers to become signed members of the church.

As for your question, “what about when a person moves or leaves the church?”

The answer to that one is simple… if you have a church secretary, it’s HIS/HER JOB to keep the list of active church members updated at all times. If they aren’t keeping that list updated… fire them!

This is one of those topics I’ll be discussing at this years 2006 Lay Leadership Summit in Sacrament o California (http://www.layleadershipsummit.cc/) in my Advanced Website presentation. Hope you can make it!

Blessings to you Frank!
John B. Abela