“Our website is fine. We just updated it 7 years ago.”
Have you heard this in your ministry or congregation? Have you said it? Too often and for many ministries, your website is the last thing to get attention. Updates become after thoughts on Saturday evening, a dreaded chore. The reality is that your website is your church’s new front door.
And would we just leave an empty space where our front door should be, or leave it hanging off its hinges? 85% of guests will visit your website before they come to the church for the first time. Let’s read that again: 85% of guests will visit the website before they come to the church for the first time. That’s a lot of people.
If you have a bad website without necessary information like your worship times or location, outdated or hard-to-find information, or comic sans font, what does that say?
If you have no website, what does that say?
It speaks volumes.
The real cost of neglecting your church’s website is that you miss an amazing opportunity to reach out and minister to people. A website isn’t just a website. It’s a tool for communication. It’s a tool for evangelism. It’s a tool to connect people. It’s a tool to tell a story and invite people into that story. But only if you use it. Before we look at the amount of money or time that is invested, we must know the cost to our ministries if we don’t communicate.
Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Let us see the value of our communication ministry with clear eyes, and the real cost to our ministries if we choose to leave our front doors untended.
