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:
- Who do we want to see using our church websites?
- 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 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.
