At a recent pastor’s seminar, the speaker asked pastors how many had websites for their ministries, and nearly everyone raised their hands. Imagine the speaker’s shock when he asked a follow-up question of how many used their websites in any teaching or evangelistic way, and their hands all went down except one.
For the majority of those pastors at the seminar, their churches’ websites were (mistake 1) nothing more than electronic brochures of their organizations. (Mistake 2) What is your website’s first impression? Does that first glance clearly communicate the ministry of your church? Are visitors clearly impressed with your website enough to visit your church? (Mistake 3) Is your website professionally organized? Does it reflect superior industry standards? Does every page contain the same banner and layout? (Mistake 4) Is your website adequately informative? Are you and your ministry leaders pictured on it accompanied by short bios and audio or visual testimonies of how you met the Lord? Is it up to date? (Mistake 5) Is your church’s website a powerful outreach tool? Are there answers for your community’s problems readily available on your website’s front page? Do the unsaved and unchurched in your community know you have answers for their lives’ problems? Have you considered how a website and internet TV can proactively outreach the unsaved, attract guests to visit, and be a powerful ministry tool?
I believe every website is a self-portrait of the person or organization it represents. For a church, that Person is no less than Jesus Himself and the Organization is His Church. I'm presently in a job position wherein I have the privilege of speaking with pastors all across our nation, and I collect all their successful ideas. Consequently, I've become a clearinghouse of website ministry ideas from all across our nation. One pastor from a small Florida church of only 70 members, who put all the above considerations into practice, experienced over 7,000 message downloads in one month. He said they did not have money to support an overseas missionary and, as a church, decided to focus on the Internet. With a website tracking mechanism, he reported their 7,000 message downloads represented all points around the globe.
What do you think? Would you like your church’s outreach to go from a few weekly pulpit hours to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and from inside the four walls of your church to an international presence? Have you considered Internet TV? Want to know some specifics of successful Internet and web TV ministry ideas?
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