I am on a listserv for pastors from my tribe (Free Methodist Church in Canada) and over the last couple of weeks there has been several postings of churches finally getting online.  As each one is posted I haven taken a look at it and am struck by one thing, there is nothing there that would compel me to return to the site or even think about going to that church.  In many cases I wonder if the site does a disservice to the vibrant ministries that are going on in some of these congregations.  While the church is finally "on the web", these sites miss the target audience that we need to be targeting in 2001-- those who use the web for more than a hobby.

To describe the new breed of users, Steve Jobs has been using the phrase "digital lifestyle" lately.  A life where our cell phones, notebooks, PDA's (personal digital assistants) and desktops are all a part of our daily lives.  A lot of us are living that right now.  My CD collection is located on www.myplay.com, my PDA is synchronised with my two desktop computers and my Thinkpad.  I would upgrade my cell phone but since I have lost a couple of them in the last year, there is something to be said for bargain basement phones.  I am addicted to my e-mail, more and more of my daily life is being integrated into my webpage at www.jordoncooper.com and  My Yahoo! is part of my essential everyday routine. For those times when I have to get away from it all, my Timex Datalink keeps my life and phone numbers in order.  When we got back from a vacation from Las Vegas, my photos we sorted into piles so they could be scanned and be posted online meanwhile it took two months to get them into an offline album.  I assume I am one of those people that Jobs talks about despite the fact that I use PC's running Windows and not a titanium PowerBook.

As more and more of us move into the digital lifestyle, the more and more I see a lot of local churches falling farther behind the digital culture and that is a frightening thought for church leaders at this stage of the internet's development.  As millions pour onto the web, many local churches have not convinced anyone that they are serious about using it as a serious communication and community building tool.

I have always wondered why it is that churches put so little effort towards their online presence.  It became a lot clearer last week when after talking with a friend of mine who leads a ministry targeted towards postmoderns.  He is knows popular culture exceptionally well and can communicate the Gospel clearly but there was always something missing.  It finally clicked that he wasn't part of the digital lifestyle.  He only used his computer when he had to and seemed to shun technology whenever he could.  The net is just another thing to add on to his already busy schedule.  He misses the point that we have finally come to a day and age where you can't be culturally relevant and not be net literate.  As Peter Drucker says, "If you aren't computer literate, people don't take you seriously". 

More and more I think that quote is true of churches in the online age.  If you are not net literate, postmoderns don't take you seriously.  If you don't speak the language of those in the digital lifestyle, your church won't be bothered by too many of them.  I don't know what it is within some circles of the church that makes it macho and a sign of strength of leadership to ignore the net.  It is almost as if they are saying, "I am such a strong leader, I don't need an e-mail address, real leaders write notes on their embossed letterhead."  Other leaders have just never caught on to the culture.  They can send e-mail and may have some favorites bookmarked but the web is something that is not integrated into their lives.  Regardless of why you are not part of the digital culture, the time in coming to an end that we can ignore it as ministry leaders.  As author Guy Kawasaki pointed out to an audience at Stanford Business School, "if you haven't bought a book off of Amazon.com, you are a bozo".

Bill Gates points out his book, Business at the Speed of Thought in which he says that we overestimate the impact of change over two years but underestimate the impact of change over 10.  I will suggest that our two years are running out and it time to re-evaluate our look at the internet and ministry.

As a political junkie, I spent a lot of time during the U.S. and Canadian election campaigns looking at websites.  They all reflected on the candidate.  A friend of mine e-mailed me during the election to comment on how the party he voted for in the 1994 election has seen its website become worse over the last four year and was in disbelief that he couldn't download another parties election campaign platform.  After spending a lot of time thinking about not voting, he settled on his original choice as his local candidate had a great website.  As a book junkie McNally Robinson is my local big box bookstore.  www.mcnallyrobinson.ca is a major reason why I go there when I do.  When I want a book, I want to make sure it is in stock.  I almost never go to the local Christian bookstore unless I am forced to or am really bored.  Their website has nothing on it so I usually end up talking to someone who has to look the book up on Amazon.com so they can order it through their wholesaler.  It became easier to go to Amazon.com and order it myself despite the beating I get in currency exchange.  A church or business website that doesn't answer my questions is going to send me to a website and then a brick and mortar building that does.

Most churches see the web in terms of a digital pamphlet and have that much content online.  Some pages with not much information, a few pictures, and nothing interactive outside of an animated e-mail link.  That isn't getting the job done now  and won't in the future.  I keep seeing ISP's offering to design a three or five page website based on a Frontpage97 template for cheap.  That isn't what you want to be the public face of your church.  Keep your brochures from 1992 in the display rack where nobody reads them, not online.

As we move towards a time where more and more of us are living out the digital lifestyle, the church needs websites that communicate to us.  The change in focus will cause us to re-evaluate at how we look at how we communicate on the web.  Most of us use the web as an advertisement for the ministries of the church.  We need to move to a place where our church's website becomes a portal for those who come to our church.  We move from allowing people to learn about our church to actually interacting with the church online.

Here is a quick list of things that I think wll help your ministry make an impact online.

1. Interactive forums.  To quote Guy Kawasaki,

   "WRONG WAY TO CONSTRUCT a Web site: Persuade yourself that you are Moses coming down from the mountain and passing on wisdom to the unwashed masses. I can guarantee in advance that your commandments will not be clear and your products will not be compelling. Most of the Web sites from corporations with the Mount Sinai attitude are, to be as charitable as I can be, nothing but on-line versions of brochures.
   Right way: Create a "many-to-many" Web site. Create a buzz for your company. Build an on-line community that will foster communication to the point of anarchy: employees, customers, venture capital sources, sales prospects, industry experts and even competitors, all interacting, unfettered.¹

   www.leonardsweet.com or www.theooze.com are two Christian sites where I can leave my opinions in front of the entire community.  If you aren't ready to allow people to say whatever they want to say about you, you aren't ready to have a website yet.  There is always the temptation to delete some of the comments that have been posted in my own message forums on jordoncooper.com but then I am not offering real community.  I get some criticisms about the site and about what I am doing ministry wise.  Messing with what is written is a sure-fire way to destroy community online.  A lot of sites have learned the hard way that messing with their online forums will hurt them quickly.  www.aquachurch.com is one that comes to mind.  It was a great site with some fun boards.  An upgrade to their message board software seemed to stop all the posters to the site.  A visit a couple days ago confirmed the online community that was forming there had gone the way of David Hasselhoff's singing career.  The Force.Net (the insanely popular Star Wars fan site) which has a very famous and extremely active online community saw their message boards slow down for weeks after an upgrade to their boards.

   One of the concerns is what happens if someone says something negative about your church.  I always respond, it is being said offline too.  Look at it as a blessing as once it has been said online, it can be addressed.

2. An e-mail newsletter.  I started to run one from Lakeview's site and from jordoncooper.com.  It has grown to couple different lists that reach out to hundreds of different people.  The people that sign up for jordoncooper.com or on www.lakeviewchurch.com are asking for more information.  If it is well done it will be something that people look forward to it everytime you send it out.  One of my favorite ones is done by a church plant from Minneapolis called Spirit Garage.  It is put out by Listbot and is sent out every month and is simple yet well written.  It doesn't matter how many e-mails that I have when that gets to my inbox, I read it.  I signed up for it and I look forward to it. 

   It takes a lot of time and effort but my favorite e-mail newsletter has nothing to do with ministry, it has to do with venture capital and comes from Garage.com.  Every morning, Geoff's Gems arrives before I get my coffee and gives me 5-7 news stories to do with high tech capital funding.  It is short and a way to start off my day in an area I find interesting and know nothing about.  That and if I ever need to raise ten million dollars to launch a dot-com, I will be well informed.

3. Interactive calendar of events.  This can be as complex as using Matt's Calendar script using CGI or as simple as using www.calendars.net.  I use Sidekick 98 for my personal organizer and it like Lotus, Microsoft, and Corel's organizers all export calendars to html.  At Lakeview we use Pagemaker to create our church's calendar and a quick conversion to Adobe Acrobat.  I decided to take a class a local Bible College and wanted to find out what classes were being offered, when classes started and when reading week was.  I went 0 for 3.  I kept thinking, I am going to get cutting edge information from the 1980s.  The site was awful and I almost said forget it.  When I am looking for information about a church, I don't want to phone the office or go through the backseat of my car to find the information I want.  I want it to be online.  Considering how simple it is it get the data online, there is not excuse not to have it there.

4. Some good content and make it easy to find.  Lakeview's content is all stuff that we had created anyway.  Sermon transcripts and RealAudio come from sermons that had to be preached.  Our media gallery comes from our weekend services.  Our discipleship/teaching information comes from what we teach.  Our Future Mapping e-mail newsletter comes from my reading across the net. 

   One of the things that we made a mistake of when we redesigned Lakeview's site a couple months ago was the navigation.  We had to guess on what areas the content was in.  While Yahoo! hasn't revolutionized the area of web design, you can find what you are looking for in a hurry.  I can't think of the amount of time I have said, "I saw it last week but I can't find it now".  Information is useless if you can't find it.  Make the most important info reachable within one click of your main page.  If you don't people will get frustrated.  Add a search engine.  If your ISP doesn't have one, companies like Atomz or Picosearch who offer free and easy to use search tools.  If you have a large site, take some time and build a sitemap.  You have no idea how much people will appreciate it.

   Yahoo is another good example of how content is king.  It is the simplest of all the portals but who is the one making money?  When people are looking for something, they want it fast.  Yahoo understands that, so should churches.

Guy Kawasaki in his book, Rules for Revolutionaries says to eat your own dog food.  In other words use your site to keep up-to-date with what is happening at your church.  Sit a group of seekers down at your website and see if they can find all the answers to their questions.  See if the new staff person you hired can have all of their questions answered by your church intranet (don't have one yet?).  Can a person who just missed your Board meeting get the minutes or does she have to wait until you mail it them?  Does your church website a reflection of how we all use the internet.

A couple of years ago I was saying the churches need to start looking at their websites as portals for church members.  In hindsight I was wrong.  Our websites don't need to be starting points for the web, they need to be a place where people can come to have their questions answered.  Kind of like the local church.

¹http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0615/6112136a.html

Jordon Cooper is a pastor at Lakeview Church in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. He is married to Wendy and father of Mark. He is addicted to Amazon.com, and Fast Company, and thinks the Toronto Blue Jays will catch the New York Yankees. He is online at www.jordoncooper.com. He is currently "eating his own dog food" with a ministry called "Upper Room."