Newsletter #114
On Church Websites
Essential or not?
www.doweneedachurchwebsite?.com
Recently our church embarked on the unenviable task of updating our website. I say unenviable because despite the supposed excitement which surrounds fresh starts and new aesthetics, designing a website can be rather tedious.
Our situation is helped by two main factors. First, we aren’t designing the site in-house. I’m not one of those pastors who moonlights as a web designer, but we have a competent young believer who we’ve contracted with on this job. Second, while the project does involve redesigning and rebuilding, many of the features of our current site—which has served us well for many years—will be migrated over to the new site.
Nevertheless, we are having to think about color palettes, fonts, layout, and more.
Such choices raise a fundamental question: do we even need a church website? Conventional wisdom says, “Yes, websites are the modern-day ‘front door’ to the church. Thus, if you want to be found and be accessible to newcomers, you must have one.”
The “front door” metaphor is a bit worn since it has been deployed in so many ways in the last few decades. However, it generally works. It’s empirically true that most first-time churchgoers seek out and check out a prospective church online prior to setting foot on the church’s property. We hear this again and again from first timers. It especially makes sense from the vantage point of moving to a new community. You can only trouble your neighbor for so much information about where to shop, where to eat, and where to worship. If your neighbor isn’t a believer, then getting a clear answer to the last of those questions is unlikely.
One might counter that this type of search makes most sense for someone who is already a believer. What about someone who isn’t?
I stand by the assertion I’ve made for years: the church members themselves should be the primary front door to the church. Since they constitute Christ’s body, they should be visible, proactive testimonies to His grace. They're the best church sign and front door.
By extension, making people aware of where they gather as God’s people is a logical next step. I don’t think I’m being idealistic; I think I’m being biblical.
But we also want those who don’t live around us, work with us, or bump into us each week to “find us”, too. Websites can help make that happen. Much like a good church sign that conveys, “We’re here, we’re a church, and you’re welcome,” a functional website in our online-dominated social context is next-to-essential. (I only say “next-to-essential” because I want to avoid equating it with biblical preaching and other true essentials as much as possible.)
What do good websites do? At minimum, they convey our existence, our location, our gathering times, and a bit about who we are. Admittedly, the last part is where debate arises. However, some sense of the church’s identity, beliefs, and/or history help orient people to what kind of situation they can expect to find when they show up.
www.whatcountsasagoodwebsite?.com
I’ve heard criticisms in either direction concerning the amount of information some churches include on their website. Some have suggested we need not give too much away in terms of who we are or what we believe. We don’t want to deter people unnecessarily.
Another reason for this more cautious approach is that we don’t want to let our ministry be defined by people’s interpretation of what we’ve said. “Let them come first. Let them get to know us and experience gospel community. Let them hear our views in the context of the larger teaching emphases of the church.”
Both arguments have some legitimacy, but part of how we end up making this decision seems to rest on two issues: the purpose of the site and its primary intended audience.
If you’re more of a “front door” kind of person when it comes to the website, you’ll think exclusively about the newcomer, the outsider. Your purpose will be more introductory in nature, and thus your aim is to welcome, communicate basic facts, and possibly attract.
If you think of the website more as a “member portal” or “member tool,” then you’ll design it differently. You’ll aim to equip and inform on a greater scale.
How we judge the quality of a website should be constrained by the issues surrounding purpose and audience. Nevertheless, we’ll inevitably struggle to make a proper judgment of our sites (and others’ sites) for two reasons.
First, people will use your site however they want, insomuch that its design permits that kind of usage. You can have whatever specific purpose you want, but once the site is live, it’s live.
Second, most of us are trying to straddle the line between two intended audiences: the newcomer (unbeliever or believer) and the member (believer). We’re providing some features for both groups, and presumably some are intended more for one group. Yet both can see the information, unless of course the site has been designed to limit access to some features.
Like most things, we may judge our website one way according to one set of standards, but the user/visitor to the site may judge it another according to a different set of standards. As with anything in life or in ministry, we need to be sober-minded about this fact.
www.whatisourchurchwebsitecommunicating?.com
Let’s make a distinction between two often interchangeable phrases: what information is on our church website, and what our church website is saying.
As I imply above, the information and/or features of the site will implicitly speak to one group or another, at least generally. The clearest example of this is “I’m New,” or “Plan My Visit.” These have newcomers in mind, and how information is presented should reflect that.
But there’s a final dimension of church website design that I’ve often thought about that I don’t think garners much attention: what our website is saying. I’ll illustrate in two ways.
First, if your website isn’t regularly updated to reflect changes in calendar/season, ministry emphasis, staff/leadership, etc., we’re conveying, “We’re not putting a lot of stock into this site.” At worst, we’re conveying, “We’re not really on top of things.” This is one of the great challenges of employing any ministry tool, website or not. Will we steward this tool in a way that augments the ministry, and doesn’t detract from it?
Second, if our website is state-of-the-art, modern, and/or contemporary, but the ministry a person encounters when they show up is backwoods, antiquated, and/or traditional (lowercase ‘t’), then we run the risk of doing a bit of bait-and-switch. This point might be a bit more controversial, but I’m going to mention it anyway. If most people have the smallest sense that signage, advertising, and/or the public facing aspects of an organization should, to a significant degree, represent the internal life of that organization, then we have to consider this factor.
To restate this second point differently, if our church website is halfway operational, unappealing aesthetically, and leaves major details obscure and or absent, we wouldn’t be surprised if people didn’t show up. Why? Because the only impression the website viewer could reasonably form, on the basis of the little information they have about the church, is that these people really don’t care.
Of course, this could be far from the truth in other ways! The church could be kind, warm, loving, truth-oriented, attentive, and a thousand other positive things. Yet therein lies the tragedy: they allowed themselves to be defined by something which misrepresented them. It would have been better for them not to have a website at all! A simple, well-maintained Facebook page (or no page at all!) would have been better.
We’re often saying something even when we’re not speaking. In an increasingly digital world we must steward digital tools prudently. Churches may choose to resist the digital ethos of our age (and I think we should in many ways), but we should ensure that the ways in which we do participate in the digital world are thoughtful, measured, and excellent.
Follow-Up:
In Newsletter #112 I wrote about the efforts of Christians to gain evangelistic traction, especially in their church. I alluded to a remark Thom Rainer made to some in the Hope Initiative Beta group about the need for pastors to be personally involved and invested in the evangelistic ministry of the church. He expands on this in a recent post entitled, “7 Reasons Why Pastoral Leadership is So Critical to Producing an Evangelistic Church.”
What I’m Reading or Rereading:
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel.
Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World.
Quote of the Week:
In the common parlance, in the older system, an A refers to really good work. A B refers to good work. A C refers to okay work. A D means the work was subpar. And an F means that the work was unacceptable, or perhaps not done at all.
But because we live in a time when self-esteem has become the watchword, this has transformed the meaning of grades for many. Instead of an A meaning that the work done on the assignment was really good, an A has now come to mean that “you are a valuable person.” By way of contrast, a C now means that you are a waste of skin, and ugly on top of that. Because we remember that this is the era of self-esteem, we never want to make that kind of assessment, of course not, and hence the grades tend to go up.
There is no reason why a C should not be considered an honorable grade. In awarding a C, a teacher is saying that the student grasped the essentials of what is going on, such that it would be appropriate to send him on to the next level. If we send him on to the next level, we won’t be saddling the Algebra II instructor with a student who hasn’t a prayer because he didn’t get the basics of Algebra I down.
Douglas Wilson, “Expectations and Grade Inflation.”
Common Grace Wisdom (CGW): Kids and Smartphones: A Horrible Combination.
The data has been pouring in over the last couple of years about the deleterious, extensive impact that smartphones (loaded with social media apps especially) have had and are having on America’s youth. I’m deeply concerned about this. Yet I’m also heartened by the educators, researchers, public officials, and parents pushing back.
I’ve said it before but let me say it again: none of our cultural insanity will be cured without gospel transformation, but some of it can be mitigated by God’s common grace. Thus, I appreciate articles like this one by Melanie Hempe: “How to Delay the Age at Which Kids Get Smartphones.”
We need common sense (enabled by common grace) to start turning the tide in contemporary parenting and educational practices. Take a look at Hempe’s article, and also be sure to check out Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.
Parting Shot
Congratulations to the South Carolina Gamecocks for capturing their third NCAA women's basketball championship!
