I was talking with my brother the other day (he is a worship leader at a church in the northwest) and he told me that 79% of churches with a congregation size of 500 or less do not have a web presence. Alarming isn't it. Why is that? Shouldn't churches be embracing the latest technologies to spread the gospel and unify their congregation as one body in Christ? It breaks down to two main reasons with one common denominator; age.



The first reason: A good portion of churches still has senior pastors over 50 years of age. As we all know technology doubles about every six months thus most of these guys just don't know what is out there. Since they did not grow up with computers and the Internet as a part of their daily life they are at a loss and a bit intimidated. How does the saying go? “You can't teach an old dog new tricks”. Don't get the wrong impression; I am not trying to sound mean. I am just trying to figure out myself why so many churches have not embraced the Internet as a means to communicate with and unify their congregation. My desire with this article is to encourage pastors to make good use of what is out there. I was talking with my pastor the other day about a new website I am building the church and it's features. I started telling him about the blog section and the ability to subscribe to the RSS reader. He was clueless as to how he could use this to his advantage. I told him he could do a bible study via the blog. This blog section is great. It allows people to subscribe and receive the blogs in their email as well as make comments. Whoever subscribes to receive his bible study can now do the work and ask questions right from their home and he (my pastor) can answer and teach right out of his home. In addition I told him how RSS could help. Let me ask a question: do you have a home page you go to when you get online (yahoo, igoogle, myway, etc…) if so do you notice how you get your information via little modules that you select. Well most of these sites also let you add your RSS subscriptions. I subscribed to my churches blog RSS and added it to my igoogle page. Now when I go online to my home page, along with my news modules I see my churches blogs. See how that works. It awesome!

The second reason is cost. A new church is struggling just to keep the electricity on. Even If they wanted a website they could not afford one. They would have to wait for someone in their congregation to offer to build one for free. Church Website Design can be extremely expensive; especially because of all the features most churches need or want. They need lots of server space for audio and video so they have to buy more expensive hosting plans, they want to send out newsletters thus they need a way to allow their congregation to subscribe and the a way to send out HTML emails, they need to let everyone know when events are coming up so they need a calendar of events, etc… I wont go into all the different features but you get the idea. To communicate with their congregation they need more advanced tools then a simple HTML page.

So there are a lot of churches that could use a website and it all comes down to age; too old or too young. Older ones need someone to hold them by the hand and help them through the door while younger ones need guidance to spend what little money they have wisely. If your church does not have a website encourage them to get one.