Clicking On a Church
Last week in this space I was going to write about our experience looking for a church to worship in while on vacation. However, Laura Tschudin’s letter she sent me about looking for a church in Las Vegas was a thousand times more compelling than my story.
I look forward to sitting next to my wife in worship three or four times a year when I am on vacation. And I look forward to being led in worship, versus being the one “up front” leading the service. In the “old days” I would phone a church, but nowadays I type the church name into Google and look for their website. While we were in Palm Desert earlier this month, I checked the websites to two churches I was interested in attending. We had been to both previously, but I couldn’t remember the worship hours. One church still had its summer worship times posted, though it was the second week in October. The other church did not specify the difference between the services—traditional, blended or contemporary; choir singing or not. One church had a link to the newsletter, but it was the summer issue; the other had only the September issue. One church had biographies of all the staff, except for the senior minister, who had been there a while.
This is a good lesson for all of us who have some responsibility for websites. My responsibility is posting my sermon online each Sunday after worship, making sure the listing of services on the calendar tab is up-to-date, and sending the Carillon to the webmaster.
Websites are how people look for information nowadays for nearly everything, including churches. Our website received 604 hits in the past month. I noticed an uptick just after the weekend. Maybe that was persons looking at the sermon online. Many of the couples who call for wedding information have already looked at our website. For a memorial service last week, the family suggested people look for directions on our website. In August, when we had church members die over two weekends, I announced their deaths in worship on Sunday before I could meet with their families to plan their services. So I told the congregation they could click on the calendar tab, where I would post the time for the memorial service as soon as I knew it, which would be earlier then when folks received the Carillon. And I imagine many of the candidates we are considering for Associate Minister have already checked out our website to learn about our church.
Almost all websites need some updating, ours included. But they are sure more current than most anything else we can use to tell our story!
Senior Minister