Radical Civility

by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

. . . Because I Visited Your Web Site

Reprinted from Tony Morgan’s blog, May 14, 2005:

1. Avoid telling me what’s going to happen at your church this weekend. I found churches that had weather reports but nothing about their upcoming weekend service. I found two churches that had prominent information about upcoming golf scrambles (which I appreciated as a golfer), but nothing about this weekend’s service. Why would I come if I don’t know what I’m going to experience?
2. Put a picture of your building on the main page. After all, ministry is all about the buildings.
3. Use lots of purple and pink and add pictures of flowers. Really. Are you expecting any men to show up? And, for my benefit, please don’t put any doves on your website. Doves scare me.
4. Make me click a “skip intro” or “enter site” link. I don’t have time for that and it’s very annoying. If I have to wait for something to load or have to click around intro pages to get to the real information, I’m probably going to skip your church service.
5. Add as many pictures and graphics as you can to the main page. My life is already complicated. I don’t have time to figure out what’s important at your church. If you dump everything on the main page, I’m assuming you don’t know what’s important either.
6. Use amateur photography. And, for the record, it would be helpful to have at least one normal looking person on your site. Do us all a favor and hire a graphic designer, a professional photographer or purchase some stock photography.
7. List every single ministry you have at your church. Frankly, I don’t care what ministries you have. I just want to know whether or not I should visit your church this weekend. My first step isn’t the men’s Bible study or joining your church’s prayer partners ministry.
8. Make it as difficult as possible for me to get directions, services times, or find information about what will happen with my kids. It’s important that my kids have a great experience. If you can’t convince me that that will happen, I’m probably not going to risk visiting your service.
9. Put a picture of your pastor with his wife on the main page. That tells me it’s all about a personality, and I see enough of those people on television. I actually found one church that had not one but two pictures of the senior pastor on the main page. He was looking mighty dapper, though, in his fancy suit.
10. Try to sell your church rather than telling me how I will benefit from the experience. I don’t care how great your church is. I just want to know if visiting your church will help me and my unchurched friends take our next steps toward Christ.

By Andrew Sullivan
TIME, May 15, 2006 [published online May 7, 2006]

Are you a Christian who doesn’t feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women’s equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them–and respecting their neighbors’ choices. That doesn’t threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God’s real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one’s beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term “people of faith” has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone.

Full Column

It occurred to me that there must be a lot of online resources relevant to good church web site design. Sure enough, there are. Here are a few:

Internet Evangelism Day, which despite the odd-sounding title has a lot of thoughtful ideas about church web site design. See especially 70+ Tips For Effective Church Sites.

Great Church Web Site Design - A guide to hundreds of the best designed church web sites in the United States. Some content is available only by subscription, but much is free.

Create a Church Website - From Wrightsboro Baptist Church, Wilmington, NC

Designing Congregational Web Sites - From the Hartford Institute for Religious Research

Ten Internet “Best Practices” For E-Ministry - By Terrell Sanders. From Pastors.com, aka Rick Warren’s Ministry Toolbox.

Godbit Project - Christian web designers on a quest to make church web sites not only better aesthetically but more efficient technically. Geeky but useful.

Church Marketing Sucks - Useful blog (with, needless to say, an attitude) maintained under the auspices of the Center for Church Communication.

This list is far from exhaustive, but I’ve at least skimmed each site and all of them look helpful.

By David J. Kirkpatrick
New York Times
May 15, 2006
WASHINGTON, May 13 — Some of President Bush’s most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion.

“There is a growing feeling among conservatives that the only way to cure the problem is for Republicans to lose the Congressional elections this fall,” said Richard Viguerie, a conservative direct-mail pioneer.

Mr. Viguerie also cited dissatisfaction with government spending, the war in Iraq and the immigration-policy debate, which Mr. Bush is scheduled to address in a televised speech on Monday night.

“I can’t tell you how much anger there is at the Republican leadership,” Mr. Viguerie said. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Full Story

I’ve been away a lot since the end of April: first to Washington, DC, Virginia, and North Carolina; and subsequently to the state of Washington. Now that I’m back, I find that I’ve more or less agreed to take over my church’s web site, which has needed to be updated for quite a while. My predecessor did a nice job of setting it up, but as so often happens, these things are difficult to maintain, particularly as his interests and life circumstances shifted. Anyway, this seems to be an area where I can be of help, so I’ll do the best I can.

My first thought was that I’d have to transfer the church domain. But it turns out that no one is particularly wedded to the existing one — “northucc.org” — and anyway everyone calls the place “North Church.” Neither “northchurch.org” nor “north-church.org” is available (a certain famous church in Boston owns one of them), but plenty of similar ones are. I’ve sent a list of possibilities to the pastor. The main thing is to find a domain name that we like and that is more or less intuitively obvious to anyone looking for North Congregational United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio.

Once a domain name is registered (which takes only minutes), my initial thought was to build the site around two platforms: a web site per se (similar to what has already been done — I’ve downloaded the existing files and can use them as a basis); and a WordPress blog similar to Radical Civility. With a WordPress blog it is possible to have one person with permissions to administer the blog — that is, universally edit everything in it, modify defaults, etc. — but give others permission to upload entries and so make it a group blog. For example, the pastor could upload his sermons as entries.  Other members could provide updates regarding various church activities.

My impression is that blogs often attract more traffic than static web sites, so I think it makes sense to make the blog the church’s “public face” insofar as possible. That’s not the usual practice at the moment for church sites, but I suspect it will become so as the dynamic becomes more apparent. Certainly plenty of ministers already have blogs as adjuncts to their church web sites; I’m just proposing to reverse the emphasis. That’s not a decision that needs to be made formally. We can just create both the web site and blog and see what develops.

The church’s monthly newsletter, The Northwind, is another resource that really needs to be made available online. Doing so would give visitors a very good idea of what the congregation is like, what it does, etc.

The website falls under the jurisdiction of the Evangelism Committee, so I’ve arranged to address them at their the next meeting. Two points need emphasis: 1) how to use the site as a tool for outreach; and 2) the need to develop a cohort of church members with the basic knowledge needed to operate the site. Although one person needs to be responsible for administering it as “webmaster,” it will make it much easier to add and modify content if more than one individual has the ability to do so.

A member of the committee mentioned that she liked the design of another church here in town. I took a look and found that its site is powered by E-Zekiel, which says that it is “committed to providing Christian organizations easy-to-use, powerful, cost-effective, Internet-based communication tools and services. For large and small churches to faith-based non-profits, E-zekiel provides simple solutions to often complex technology.” As E-Zekiel portrays itself, it looks like a good platform for allowing multiple users to add/revise content while maintaining a consistent look, and it has other features that may be useful, too. So it might be just the thing.