We are in the process of developing our own church web site. I mentioned this a few days ago and a link appears in the sidebar to the right for our current offering. Our initial efforts are primarily for the purpose of providing audio sermons for our church people to use themselves and to pass on to family and friends. However, I want to do more with our web presence than that. I want to make our web site a tool for reaching our community with the gospel.
Church web sites are everywhere. And… well… I don’t like most of them. I suppose they serve their purpose as their designers intended, but I find most church web sites to be little more than giant yellow-pages ads. Really, folks, we need to do better.
By God’s grace, I hope that the little we do will be a bit better than what you typically see. As I am preparing our site for a wider audience, I ran across some info that I think every on-line fundamentalist pastor should consider.
I found the information in the latest newsletter of an online evangelism coalition called the Internet Evangelism Coalition. I want to especially direct your attention to this page and this video presentation that comments on reaching your local community with your web-site. The video presentation is the work of two men from a church in Chilliwack, BC, a community just across the Georgia Strait from us. The church is not a fundamentalist church. They are self described as ‘seeker sensitive’, a good deal of their philosophy would be incompatible with us. However, they have seriously thought about their website and using it as an evangelistic tool. I highly recommend that any fundamentalist pastor or other interested people take the time (about an hour) to watch the video. I think you will find it quite interesting.
Two other web sites owned and operated by the church are HikeChilliwack and ChilliwackLife. These two sites are explained in the video. A handout for the video presentation is here.
The whole presentation is quite interesting to me because the presenters are saying things I have been thinking about church web sites in general. I suspect that as fundamentalists, there are some things these fellows do or suggest that we would not feel comfortable with. But… there are some tremendous ideas in this presentation that we could very well put to use or adapt in our own local ministries.
I hope that you might find the presentation useful and that the Lord might use it to bring some souls into the kingdom through your ministry.
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
You have some key things already on your website: directions, doctrinal statement, photos.
Suggest you consider having a google calendar (or other calendar with same functions): ability to subscribe to, ability to add event to one’s one calendar, color coding, etc.
Suggest that church prayer requests be kept confidential (I’ve seen way to many specifics on some other sites)