Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep?

by Rev. Charles R. Lehmann

I am the pastor of a very small rural church near Accident, Maryland.  Our weekly attendance varies between forty and sixty.  It is a lovely group of people who have been faithfully receiving the gifts of God for the past 146 years.  There are a number of challenges that a congregation like Saint John’s faces.  One of the most significant is visibility.

Our neighboring LCMS congregation is right on the main drag.  You cannot drive through Accident without seeing Zion.  It’s absolutely impossible.  We are a mile off of the main drag.  Unless you know we’re here, you’ll never just happen to drive past.  Visibility is an issue for us, and the Internet has been a great blessing in increasing our visibility.  In the less than a year since we’ve put up the website below we’ve had 6 visitors and 4 new members who came simply because of this website.  For a congregation our size, that’s an enormous blessing.

The challenge, however, is extreme.  How can a small struggling congregation have a decent web presence when they have practically no money available for such things?

Website of Saint John's Lutheran Church, LCMS, Accident, MD

In this post, I hope to help answer that question.

Our answer started with Google Pages.  Google provides a wonderful interface that allows someone even with limited web knowledge to create a professional looking website.  If you do know a bit about HTML, you can tweak the code manually, but there are limitations.  For me, however, as webmaster, pastor, etc… the interface on Google Pages has been a godsend.

The site above was created by me and a friend (Dan @ NecessaryRoughness) in about a day.  The banner was created for me by free for a professional who has asked to remain nameless.  Sadly, I have fallen down on the duty of maintaining it well.  The basic information is there, but the sermon archive is out of date.  This is a pitfall for many pastors who end up doubling as webmasters.  It’s an important one to try to avoid.  After the first of the year, I know I’m going to need to do an updating marathon to bring the current site back up to date.

If you move around the site, you’ll see a lot of pretty amazing features.  The “How to Get Here” page has a gadget (free from Google) that will give detailed driving directions to the church from wherever you are.  There is a podcast of the sermons (which, sadly, I let get out of date… again shame on me), which if I had maintained it would allow storage of about a year of sermons at a time for free. (Google “free podcast hosting” for a number of good options).

Just about everything on the Saint John’s website was created using a free feature on Google Pages or by linking to another free service on the internet.  The only thing we had to pay for was the domain name (stjohncove.org) which costs less then $30 for two years.

A few things should be kept in mind when you create a site for your church.

1.  How it looks is important.  Look at the best church website you can find and replicate as many of the features as you can.  Many of these can probably be done for free by Google Pages or a similar hosting service.  No website is actually better than a bad website.

2.  Keep it up to date.  This is where I’ve failed.  People have tried to listen to sermons and currently can’t and won’t be able to until I fix that problem.

3.  Have all the basic information on the front page:  Name, address, phone number, name of pastor, service times, e-mail address.  It is also helpful to have something that gives people an idea of what kind of congregation you are.  That’s why I included the quotations from the Apology to the Augsburg Confession.  Having said all this, keep the site as simple as possible.

4.  Don’t make a page publicly visible until you’re ready for people to see it.  ”Under Construction” and other such notices are not helpful.  I have also chosen to make some of the pages not immediately accessible from the sidebar.  This is because too much in the menu can be overwhelming.  An example of this is that you can only find my blog or my academic work after locking on “Our Pastor.”

5.  Have a goal in mind.  The website doesn’t replace the services of your congregation.  The purpose of my site is to wet people’s palate.  I want them to want to come and learn more.

In all, remember that the website is a tool above all others.  It can be a great help to visibility.  Remember that when people look at the LCMS Congregation Locator that they might ignore congregations that don’t have websites.

Happy site-building!  What resources do you use in maintaining and building your sites?

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