The Bridge Church

The Bridge Church is an innovative fellowship based in Pontiac, Michigan, USA. Not surprisingly, the open and welcoming church ethos extends to the website too. Worship and communications leader Kacha Azema explains the ethos and ministry of the site.

'The site was built with two completely different user experiences in mind. First and foremost our aim was to present The Bridge and how we 'do church' to any casual site-surfer (churched or un-churched) in a way that would be appealing and informative. Second, we needed to develop a useful online location where our attenders could go for information about upcoming special events, schedules, ministry opportunities, prayer needs, etc. The site is built, therefore, in two tiers.

Tier 1, targeted at anyone who has never attended The Bridge before, is designed to answer the following questions: Who is The Bridge? What's it like? Where and when? Why does The Bridge exist? Tier 2, targeted at current Bridge attenders, is simply meant to be a wealth of continually updated information about life and community at The Bridge. The church is very different from 99% of other churches in the way that a typical Sunday Morning Experience flows. When we started this church, every accepted "norm" of what church is supposed to look like was thrown out the window. The Bridge was built from the bottom up as a place, and a Sunday Morning Experience, where the unchurched GenX individual could each week glean a new piece of the spiritual puzzle and move one (or ten!) steps farther down their journey toward, or continuing to pursue, a Christ-following life. I define our overall Bridge ethos for this reason: it is entirely due to this ethos that Tier 1 of our website looks the way it does.

Putting on a Sunday Morning Experience that is wildly different from the norm brings with it a certain uneasiness for first-timers. So we needed to develop Tier 1 of our website to really give people a sense of what The Bridge is like before they ever step foot inside the door. By answering those four questions above, we've been able to build a "digital model" of The Bridge, complete with brief but compelling descriptions of what the Sunday Morning Experience looks like, images that appeal to and interest the casual Tier 1 user, video clips of some Bridge "Stories" (personal stories shown on Sunday mornings that we can all learn from), and audio Mp3s of typical Bridge worship.

This all works together to allay the potential uneasiness of first-timers and give them a "taste" of The Bridge. Having tasted, they are more inclined to actually come on a Sunday morning because they already have a good idea of what they're going to see, hear, feel. Essentially, we're doing everything we can, with our website, to break down the barriers people may have about coming to church.

Tier 2 or our site, on the other hand, is really just an information storehouse for Bridge attenders. Ministry team schedules are provided, prayer requests are listed (people can even submit requests online), upcoming events for each ministry are detailed, the overall Bridge calendar of events is listed, etc. If Tier 1 answers the "5 W" questions (who, what, where, when, why & how), Tier 2 answers this question: "What do I need to know to be a regular part of The Bridge community?"

Both Tier 1 and Tier 2 have been extremely successful. We average over 100 visitors a day to the site and as we have a congregation of 70, this tells you how many "outside" people are taking in The Bridge digitally! Tier 1 is our most heavily trafficked area, and Tier 2 has proven extremely effective in giving our community a place to know what's going on around The Bridge. You constantly hear phrases like, "...so I was on the website looking for yada-yada-yada about XYZ Ministry..."

We love our site and have plans in the works to grow and expand it into a more comprehensive online community. Stay tuned . . .'

• Analyze the effectiveness – look at this site in depth
• Making church sites evangelistic – a resource guide full of ideas

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