Church Web Applications

by Nigel Swinson, Website Ministry Leader since 2002, Carrubbers Christian Centre. May 2008

"For God is not a God of disorder but of peace." 1 Corinthians 33

Running a church is a team effort, (hopefully) headed up by our awesome creator. He chooses to do much of His work through volunteers who only see each other once a week on Sunday, or perhaps through one or two additional meetings throughout the week. To facilitate that team work, much communication is needed, and where it is absent, friction often creates stress in our relationships, or the quality of the work deteriorates. The church should therefore look to take advantage of communication tools to streamline and optimize that communication. This article discusses where the internet might be able to help and how.

Why use the Internet?

Information placed on a website could be accessed:

From home, from work, even on the go
From anywhere in the city, country, or even abroad
24 hours a day
Without having to explicitly use anyone's time to give you that information
At reduced cost
With minimal publishing delay

But the internet isn't just about publishing web pages, it also hosts e-mail which is:

Good at one-to-many communication
Good at relaying action items
Quick
Reliable
Minimal cost
Well established

Dynamic content

While church websites need a quantity of static content, perhaps detailing the location of the church, it's doctrine, information about it's chosen worship style, or maybe even some articles, the internet is capable of so much more. Dynamic Website Applications should allow users to not only view data, but dynamically update/add/interact with it. It is at this point that a church website becomes not only becomes interesting to the local fellowship, but it could start to save time and reduce effort.

For Example?

Here's a number of ways in which Carrubbers Christian Centre have used the internet to help with their internal communication. Hyperlinks are provided to take to to see those applications which may require you to log in. You may find that you don't have sufficient permissions to access those areas of the site, in which case you can contact the webmaster to gain access.

Email aliases Everyone at the church has a [firstname].[lastname]@carrubbers.org email alias. Mail sent to these addresses is forwarded on to member, providing a way to guess email addresses without having to have explicitly asked them for it.
Address book: An online address book containing postal addresses with Google Maps integration, phone number and other personal "attributes" of the membership. Also the correct spelling of their name and email alias should you be unable to guess their alias correctly.
Groups A master copy of all the sub groupings of folk at the church. This includes:
- Members: Community based groups that allow you to meet more people round a shared interest.
- Teams: Those who are involved in each of the ministries, join one to get more involved
- Newsletters: For keeping in touch with news and/or prayer requests from a group or individual
- Homegroups: Smaller fellowship groups that meet midweek in each other's homes
- Ministries: Those who receive requests on behalf of their ministry
- Leaders: The leaders of each of the ministries
- Groups: General purpose group, usually for gaining more permissions
Each of these groups is backed up with an email address, so you can email everyone in your team or homegroup by sending an email to one email address, and the mail server will take care of re-directing this to all the relevant people.
Rotas A record of who is assigned which duty related to which events, including the ability to detail when you are unavailable to serve, publish to your digital calendar, or manage swapping of slots
Service Planning The ability to construct a service, searching for songs, adding other items such as readings, prayers or special items, re-arrange the order, add comments to items, upload attachments, and then email the service round all the team.
Song statistics What songs have been chosen when, how often, and by whom. Not only useful for establishing what copyright needs to be covered, but also helps avoid "burning out" songs by choosing them too often.

Inclusive

Before making more use of the internet to help your church, you need to make sure you aren't excluding some members due to lack of access, or knowledge of the technology. At Carrubbers, most of the congregation are already online, and the city has many internet cafes, but even then, demanding that all the teams use the web applications, and check email reguarily would be unwise. We've found usage of our web applications increase over time due to our members "wanting" to use them rather than being forced into using it, which is much better for team unity.

Options

If you want to make more use of the internet to help your church here's a few options: