Improving Your Parish Website Ted Mollegen Senior Deputy

Improving Your Parish Website – Part 1 of 3 The parish home page should convey the sense of a warm caring community for both families and singles. A photo of a Baptism is a great choice for the home page. The photo of the church building may make present church members feel warm and fuzzy, but to others, it may convey something less attractive. Say: “Our kids love to come because we have a great Sunday School and youth group.” Convey that worshippers here usually feel that they have experienced deeply meaningful and joyful contact with the Divine. (PS: The services and the individuals’ coffee-hour conversations must convey that also, not just the website.) Convey that providing the visitor with the experience of God is of utmost importance to us. We don’t ask people to subscribe to a list of theological propositions. Convey that there is continuing education for all ages. The photo of the church building belongs in the “directions to our church” section, and the directions should end by describing both where the entrance to the parking lot is, and which door you should use to get into the building. .

Improving Your Parish Website – Part 2 of 3 Convey that “families” here includes: single-parent families, nuclear families, unmarried couples (with or without children), and singles. Don’t make singles activities sound like “find-a-mate” sessions; you don’t want to covey that there’s something wrong with being single. Have a “comparisons” section: TEC compared to others. We represent the historical church brought up to the 21st century. TEC is jointly governed by four orders of ministry, providing a check and balance system among the four orders: Bishops in the Historic Succession Priests and Deacons ordained by bishops in the Historic Succession Lay people in Mutual Ministry (lay people participating in leadership) Until the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America received the historic succession from TEC in a recent agreement, TEC was the only major US Church with these characteristics. Convey that we wear our name tags to all church events. This is single most important thing that a congregation can do to make newcomers and visitors feel that you truly want to include them. (Don’t say it unless you do it.) But do it.

Improving Your Parish Website – Part 3 of 3 Make sure that the words ‘spirit’ and “spiritual” appear somewhere on the homepage (so that a seeker’s search engine can find your website.) Remember that the basic question in the back of the mind of a seeker or a website visitor is likely to be: “What things that are meaningful to me are going on in this church?” On the whole, we need better answers than we usually give to that question. Good answers may depend on whether the seeker is a boomer, millennial, silent-generation person, Anglo, Latino/Hispanic, etc. We also need to counter mistaken impressions that people may have: Christianity is NOT anti-gay Christianity is NOT anti-evolution Our Churches DO NOT deny their faults rather than fixing them Henry VIII DID NOT establish the Church of England because he wanted a divorce . [Being a good Roman Catholic, Henry sought an annulment. His request was denied because the then-Pope was under the control of King Philip of Spain, a political enemy of Henry.] .

Improving Your Parish Website – Part 4 of 4 Many churches built websites some time ago and do a good job of keeping them up to date. However this falls short of capitalizing on the opportunity provided by today’s digital social media, which are regularly used by millennials, a group that the Episcopal Church generally is not reaching effectively. The parish should also be a regular user of Facebook, Twitter, blogs. and /or YouTube. .