A Church That Actually Cares.
Symptomatic of many dying churches is an overabundance of blue hair in the pews. Their progeny may have fled, but Mae and Ginny and company are gonna keep going to that church until it buries them. Their commitment is laudable, but unfortunately, if they’re the only ones left, the church will go with them. A website will not help this congregation, and doing one for them will probably get you a piece of Aunt Fanny’s cherry pie (which you would have gotten anyway) and not much else.
“But won’t it help bring in people?”, you might say. “Don’t people look for a website when looking for a church?”
To that I would reply, “Yes, but they look at the website as an indicator of the life of a congregation… and a dead website is showcasing a dead or dying church.”
What I’m getting at is that YOUR CONGREGATION HAS TO CARE THAT THEY HAVE A WEBSITE. Above all, number one, it has to MATTER. It’s everyone’s responsibility to keep the church clean, to mow the lawn, to take care of the buildings… and it’s everyone’s responsibility to help with the website.
See, you can’t PROJECT life onto a website; it’s organic. You can’t fake it – or at least, not very well. No recent pictures, or news articles, or events on the calendar = dead site. People look elsewhere. Why does the congregation have to care? Because they’re representing THEMSELVES to a potential member.
The other part of it, is that it takes a village to raise a website (thank you Hillary for that awful cliche). There needs to be a lot of people contributing. The congregation has to put people in positions that will capably handle the website. I’ll deal with that later, but for now let’s focus on the key point of responsibility the congregation has: it has to TELL PEOPLE ABOUT IT.
The biggest promoters of your site are the members of your congregation. Forget search engines, billboards, and the like; what will bring the vast majority of people in is associations with one or more members. And the website is a key tool in this. Giving people a web address to get real information about a congregation after you’ve done the basic “you should check us out” spiel is a big step. It gives credence to what you’ve said; a vibrant website will showcase all the things a prospective member can expect to experience, beyond what you’ve talked to them about. People want this, and expect it; when looking for a mechanic, how often do people Google that garage down the road to get more information on services, etc.? And they also use it to gauge the seriousness and viability of the business; if it looks like a three-year-old designed it, how do you know it’s not a three-year-old fixing your car?
I know there’s a ton of discussion on Facebook, Twitter, and other stuff a church can engage in online; I’ll discuss it in future posts, of course:). But forget all that for now; your members need to be able to say with pride, “Check our website out!”, without making excuses (if you’ve any hope of having your evangelism programs work). They have to own it, help with it, and care enough to not let the bottom rust out on it.