Prayer for a Church Website

April 6, 2015 by Kevin D. Hendricks

The following is a prayer for a church website, inspired by an actual church website that in the spring of 2015 still announced an event happening in 2011 on its homepage. Lord, have mercy. We won’t be linking to the actual site in order to save embarrassment and cuz it’s mean. But laughing anonymously is OK, right? Join us in prayer…

Dear Lord,

For church websites announcing events from four years ago, we pray.

We thank you for the miracle of automatic domain renewal, without which this would probably be a porn site.

We thank you for the lack of animated gifs, flash intros and auto-play videos. We thank you for churches that at least have websites, and pray that outdated is at least better than nothing.

We pray for all who hold logins to the church websites of the world.

We pray for an end to volunteer abandonment that leaves church websites orphaned here and around the world. We ask for mercy on the absent volunteer.

We ask you to strengthen the beleaguered church staff. Give them patience for outdated web pages and technical difficulties.

Give this church volunteers who do not waver and a budget that can afford WordPress.com.

Give them the wisdom to stay off Facebook, lest they fall into the same sin again.

Bring renewal to the outdated renewal conference announcement on the homepage.

Bring visitors to this site and give them eyes to overlook an announcement for events that happened four years ago.

Pour your grace on the other questionable web practices, like that cross icon and the unnecessary exclamation marks. Oy vey.

Pour your wrath on overdone content management systems that should never be used for simple church websites.

Bless all whose websites are closely linked with ours, and grant that we may load pages quickly and link to one another as we would have them link unto us.

Bless our search engine optimization that it may guide your lost sheep to welcoming church websites across the chaos that is the World Wide Web.

We commend to your mercy all 404 errors, that your will for them may be fulfilled; and we pray that we may share with all your webmasters in the eternal Internet Archive.

We seek forgiveness for enjoying the communication gaffes of other churches a little too much. Please don’t let anyone know about that one time I posted a personal comment to my church’s Twitter feed or the time I sent a risque text to my pastor by accident and totally saved it by pretending to be holier than I am or the many times I used Comic Sans and thought it was hip and personable.

Amen.

Jen Beever
April 7, 2015

Hi Kevin, I believe this is a common problem. Everyone has the best of intentions, and legacy sites often need programmers to make changes. Volunteers set up the site but for some reason drift away – maybe they just get busy with other things. Pastors and ministers are focused on their good works and tending to their members and church attendees, and don’t have the bandwidth for technology (and perhaps shouldn’t be bothered with it).

With so many people using mobile devices and searching online, having a website that is responsive to all devices and easy to use is important. I encourage church boards and leaders to learn a little about the current technologies and going prices. A good web developer can produce a nice WordPress site for a relatively low cost. I referred a web developer to my church when I saw how outdated the website was. I also stepped up and provided content updates, organized the ministers and practitioners to write for the blog, and worked to properly connect the site to social media. Any church facing this situation can contact me – I am happy to review sites, provide suggestions and answer questions.

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