Intriguing the lost

Many church sites are designed along predictable lines, purely to minister to the church members. Sadly, this means that a great opportunity is being missed - to reach out into the community with a welcoming, non-preachy, jargon-free website. Christian Life Center stands at a refreshing angle to convention. Webmaster Frank Johnson tells the site's story.

My home church, Christian Life Center in Santa Cruz, California, USA, purchased a domain name (clcsantacruz.org) four years ago. Over the first two-and-a-half years, they worked with two different designers to develop a website. For a variety of reasons, things didn't work out, and the website was never completed. The senior pastor knew that I had been doing some website design (I was actually employed as an Internet Strategist at the time), so they approached me and asked me to develop a site for them. I told them I would be happy to do it, but that I wanted to talk to them about my philosophy of church websites before getting started.

Somewhere along the line, I had become convinced that most church websites were missing a great opportunity. In trying to provide resources for members, we were failing to use the Web to present the community of believers to non-Christians in an effective manner. I told the senior pastor that most of my friends at my day job thought of the Christian church in less-than-favorable terms: "I have to wake up early on a Sunday morning, get dressed in uncomfortable clothes, get my kids dressed to go to a place they've never been instead of playing, drive across town, walk into a building where the only people who say 'Hi' are the people at the door and the minister (and it's their job to say 'Hi'), turn my kids over to a stranger (!), be asked for money, have to stand up and introduce myself to a hundred or more people I've never seen, and then hear someone tell me what's wrong with me for half an hour."

I shared with the senior pastor that I thought the best use of a church website would be to target it toward non-Christians and address some of those misconceptions. Over time, the concept grew in our hearts to a point where we felt that the primary purpose of the church's website should be to intrigue the lost, so that they would be motivated to make contact with real people who could then share the Gospel with them in face-to-face encounters. From this germ of an idea grew a system of online profiles and interviews with church members designed to present the community of believers to non-Christians who have similar life experiences and interests to those we profile on the site. The result was, I think, a very non-traditional church website.

Although the senior pastor and the college pastor (who was my main contact regarding the website) agreed with my philosophy whole-heartedly, there were others who envisioned a more "normal" church website - Acrobat versions of the bulletin, service schedules, a greeting from the senior pastor, department activities, etc., etc. I started to say the same thing over and over again: "People don't care about our service schedule because they don't plan on attending." It was an almost shocking statement for some, but I believe it reflects the truth in our very postmodern area of the world. But I was convinced we could use the website to address the deeper issue of most people's perception that the church is irrelevant.

The closer we came to launching the new site, the more people became interested in it and the more I had to spend time persuading those people that our original philosophy was the appropriate course. Once I had gone through my reasoning with them, they invariably came away thinking it was the right approach. But to be honest, by the time we were a couple of weeks away from launching the site, I had grown somewhat weary of having to defend the concept. Now that the website is launched, everyone seems to love it, but there was definitely a need to "champion the cause" which is something I did not really anticipate when I first agreed to develop the site.

If I had to do it over again, I think I would ask for a session not only with the senior pastor, but with the entire pastoral staff, the church board, department heads, office staff, and anyone else involved in the leadership of the church to first "sell the concept" before developing the site. By doing that, I think the development process would have been shorter and I also think that many more people would have caught the vision of web evangelism, which would be a wonderful thing!

• Analyze the effectiveness - in-depth questions about the Santa Cruz site
• Making church sites evangelistic - a resource guide full of ideas

PDF papers by Frank

• Effective Church Websites for Emerging Generations - a more detailed explanation of the principles Frank gives on this page.
• Reaching your area using a community outreach - Frank shares his vision for a similar style of web evanglism within a local area.

Printed from Web Evangelism Guide © 2008
Can be freely reproduced in print in any non-profit situation with attribution to web-evangelism.com. This page content can also be inserted into your own web-page by copying a simple Javascript insert code into your page - explained in the online version of this page: guide.gospelcom.net/resources/
Please do not copy the text of this page onto your own web-page - search engines do not like hard-copy duplicate content on different sites.
To receive the twice-monthly email newsletter Web Evangelism Bulletin, visit the Guide.