A couple of weeks ago I read a post in my RSS reader (can’t remember the blog, you’re welcome to comment) where someone had asked if churches should have “members-only” web sites beyond church directories. He argued that churches were public entities doing public things, and thus everything should be publicly available.
I agree that church directories should be restricted, but I think there are also other things which should be password protected.
Just as there is information which is quite beneficial to the visitor, there’s information which gets in the way of telling the world what you are about. When searching for a church, I never felt the need to know who the officers of the church are, other than the pastor and the organist. On the other hand, a church’s organizational structure and leadership is quite important to members.
Some churches operate discussion forums in the members-only section. Depending on what is being discussed, password protection may indeed be necessary. People are going to disagree about how to do things. Comments made in the course of a discussion can be searched and taken completely out of context. People can change their minds. There is no forgiveness from Google or web.archive.org.
For the most part church internal business should remain internal, but if you’re working on changing your constitution and by-laws on a massive scale, these days it’s courteous to let visitors know.
If your church has a system which creates a user login for each family, it may be quite cool to tie it to a database that shows the family’s tithes for the current and previous years for tax purposes. We had fun on tax day trying to find that special piece of paper.
One thing to keep in mind: a members-only site by design benefits few people compared to everyone who could possibly hit your public web site. An entity whose mission is to proclaim should put most of its resources in the part which does the public proclamation.
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Good idea, but most churches can barely afford a basic page, much less the support for designing and maintaining anything remotely complex.
Right. Online donation receipts and directories would be costlier in time and money, but members-only pages for a church’s organizational structure and discussion forums can be had for free.
But where can you find a person who can set this up and maintain it consistently for free? Volunteers with knowledge are great, but either most churches don’t have them, or they do it for a while and are lax on the upkeep.
I would think that a church’s site should basically be proclaiming the word with their explanation of the doctrine (or a link to the Confessions), informing about worship times and bible classes, address and contact info, and give an overall impression what is at that church and the activities. Other than that, I don’t think much more is necessary. Some at our church have requested an online directory, but then we would have to have logins and there’s still a possibility of abuse and address data leaked, so imho, it’s a bad idea. Plus others are absolutely paranoid on their phone #s getting out even to other church members.
I believe I am the blogger who wrote the post you are commenting on here. Let me say that I wasn’t really advancing an argument so much as asking a question. However, in the case of our church, what is being password protected is basically the announcements — the same announcements that anyone can walk through the doors and read in the bulletin. I understand that there may be reasons for restricting access to that sort of information. In a day when strangers and former friends or members are walking in on Sunday morning and killing pastors in and parishioners in worship — not only in Pakistan, but right here in middle America — it may be time to restrict access to information about what may be happening at church on Tuesday nights!
But I also know that among those in my congregation who are advancing innovations in worship there is a strange and misplaced paranoia. They seem to think that if people in the District office or the Synod office knew what they were doing in the contemporary service, there would be some attempt made to shut it down. (Ridiculous — they would probably get some award!) In my mind, the new password protection may be connected to this ridiculous paranoia.
Eric, thanks for stopping by.
The “paranoia” you mention is interesting — maybe they have an underlying notion that they are doing something they shouldn’t be doing?
Heidi:
We seem to agree, members-only content should be a lower priority than public content. I think it’s funny that we have products like CTS MemberConnect whose focus is on ministry management, but I haven’t found much guidance or help regarding public web sites. Thrivent made an attempt with lutheransonline.com, but the sites I’ve seen over there are positively ugly. This is coming from an engineer, so you know it’s bad.
Maybe Lutherans should just stick with me. It’s nice to feel needed.
Cost shouldn’t be an issue. Just set up an account on Blogspot or any such place that will allow for private postings that can only be read by certain people. It’s crude, but it’s free. And then don’t make a big deal about it on the church website. Heck, don’t say anything about it at all. If it’s information that is available only for members, guests don’t even need to know it exists. Give the log-in information to all of your members who want it. Have someone responsible for accepting new accounts into the site, making sure that everyone is properly identified and is actually a member of the congregation, and let it go from there.
LOL! Yes, if an engineer says something is ugly, it is HIDEOUS! I know way too many engineers… sigh, most especially my dad… But even if you are an engineer, I can agree with you occasionally. This is one of them
Our site isn’t particularly attractive, but its main problem is that any info going into it now comes from the office. I can adjust things on there, but we officially have a member who does it inexpensively. Cost isn’t much of an issue for us, content and making it interesting is. Our guy isn’t much of a designer, but if I tell him what I want, he could do it. So could I, of course, but time is the biggest issue. In fact it is so low priority for me that I have been meaning to go surfing for ideas and have yet to get to it after 6 months. No one has really complained, but hopefully by our next conference we will have a sign-up form in place. I know people go to our website for the info and then have to call me, sometimes long-distance. Currently the method is to scan the form to PDF and they can print it, fill it out and mail it with their check. It shouldn’t be that hard to have an entry form that then generates the info into text and emails me. It just isn’t D’s forte, so I need to find the code or program that does that and tell him to implement it. Again, we’re stalled with me. I’m a bad secretary.