How much thought has gone into your church’s website? Aside from the original though, “Hey, weneed a website!” has any thought gone into your church’s website? There is a harking reality that most church websites are a hastily-posted page (or group of pages) built by someone with just enough experience to be dangerous. Not to discredit the efforts of those who donated their hard-earned free time, but we do need to face reality here; those dated and shoddy websites “looked bad then, and they look positively prehistory by today’s standard.”^[1] If your website looks like it could be a Sega or Super Nintendo game, that’s NOT good, and you would be more effective by taking it down.

(Credit: Bridge Element, CreativeMYK)

Most websites used by churches today do little—if anything at all—to serve the community the church resides in. Think about it like this, the Bible clearly tells the church to serve where they are, ergo; all extensions of the church should as well (James 1:27, 1 Peter 4:10f, Romans 12:1f). This means the website, or online presence, of the church should serve the people just as the church should be. (Now, if your church isn’t serving the community to start with, that’s another conversation altogether.)

How does a church website serve its community? Simple! Who is