I’m going to start of with a scary thought. Every time you communicate anything in ANY medium as a church, it’s preaching. That’s right, anything your church posts online, on the bulletin board, in the newsletter and shares with the community is preaching. Just because the pastor didn’t say it from the pulpit doesn’t mean it doesn’t count and it doesn’t make what I just said any less true.
Think of a seeker, someone who is new, unchurched, or trying to learn about your church. Anything they find out about you online, whether it’s true or not, whether it was intentional or not, is truth.
That can be an exceptionally hard truth when your church is giving out mixed messages or hiding the real message in a web of unimportant information.
What does it say to a seeker that visits your website, that you have no information for them about what your church is about. When every page is a tangle of insider information filled with things like UMW, UMM, SS and PPRC, do you think they feel welcomed or lost?
Let’s be honest, most churches have a website because they’ve been told to have a website or they believe they need a website. The same goes for Facebook and Twitter. Since we made it because we felt we had to, we didn’t have a good plan, so we fill it with information we need or want and rarely give much thought to what a seeker needs or wants. The problem is not that we put bad information on our websites, the problem is that we have the mindset that it’s a website at all. Instead we need to think of it as a web ministry. It’s our online ministry to those in our community. It’s the gateway for people looking (seeking) to find your church as their church home.
We need to learn that as the church we often forget what it’s like to be an outsider. We forget how it feels to be looking for information only to discover that you have to already be in the know to know what’s going on. Of course you have to balance that with those that do know what’s going on and want to get to the insider information quickly and easily. It’s not always an easy balance.
Here’s a suggestion. Create a big button or link on the front of your website that says something like, “New to Our Church? Read More.” Then fill that page with all the helpful information your church has for someone who is new. Worship times, sunday school times, names of the pastors, child care options, information about ministries the church is involved with. Don’t make a church fact sheet, but rather weave it into a genuine invitation and be careful to not use insider lingo like UMW, but instead make sure to spell out United Methodist Women and add the (UMW) so you can turn it into a learning experience. If you want to get really fancy, you can create a one or two minute introduction to the church video to post on that page as well.
When you stop thinking you have a website and start thinking you have a web ministry you’ll begin sharing the right message to your community.
