Hopefully, not much, if my recent experience at a local pet store is the norm!
My nine-year-old daughter has a pet betta fish. Last weekend, we visited our local pet store to buy some fish food. When we came to the counter to pay, I noticed that the clerk’s t-shirt had an interesting message printed on the front:
People like you are the reason people like me take medication.
As we walked out of the store, I thought to myself sarcastically, “What a wonderful message to send to your customers.”
That got me thinking: in what ways are our church websites unfriendly to unbelievers? What do we include on our websites that leaves a bad taste in our visitors mouth, so to speak, and perhaps even keeps them from visiting our community of believers?
Here’s a quick list to get you started:
- Pictures of the church building rather than of people
- Use of “Christianese,” language which is largely gibberish to unbelievers who visit our sites
- Site navigation which is difficult to understand or follow
- Websites which are not accessible - I’m as guilty of this one as anybody; see today’s article at Boyink.com for further discussion, and thanks are due to Mike that this item occurred to me for inclusion in the list)
Can you think of anything else? Feel free to leave comments with other ways our websites can be unfriendly to believers, or ways in which our websites can be friendly to unbelievers.
One last link: HealYourChurchWebsite.com is always a good resource for improving our websites. Pay Dean a visit and see what you learn!
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.
