MyChurch.org now has over 2000 church communities

Creating a sense of community around a website

The folks at gospel.com wrote a nice piece about community online within evangelism.  They define a community of having these characteristics:

• shared interests
• shared values
• shared problems/enemies
• mutually supportive
• intimacy
• physical face-to-face interaction at specific times

A church community is one of the tightest-knit communities I can think of – embodying all the facets outlined above.  Yet virtual online communities have not penetrated church walls.  I can offer a number of reasons for this, but I think the main handicap is the lack of the right tools.  Without blatantly plugging MyChurch.org and the many tools available for churches to create online community, I will try to explain with an example…

My first church planting experience was with a small (still small) church called Living Stones Christian Church.  This church tried to establish an online community by maintaining a forum as the centerpiece of their webpage.  Without even looking at it, I knew this would die a slow death.  I’ve designed message boards for school alumni and a sports fan community – they cannot sustain themselves unless you have critical mass in the beginning.  Guide.gospel.com (in this same article I linked to) thinks that the critical mass necessary is 2000.  I think its even higher than that.  The Wisdom of Crowds only applies when there really is a crowd…

My cofounders of MyChurch.org debated on whether or not to provide forums within churches.  After looking through the mega-church websites and noticing that they either: 1) had no forums 2) their forums had little-to-no activity or 3) their forums were used as classified ad message boards, the debate was over.  We have the preliminary code built-in to support forums, but we’ve decided against providing them even if users request them.  Nothing disheartens a potentially vibrant web community like a forum where 5% of the users contribute to 95% of the posts. 

When your community on myChurch.org has 2000+ members from your church, lets start talking about forums (and maybe even chatrooms?)

Given the other communication channels we provided like bulletins, internal email, classifieds, blogs, small groups, the MyChurch.org team decided we’re adequately covering a church community’s needs without forums.    

Besides, forums are old technology – they’ve been around for ~15 years (I remember joining a “bulletin board system” in 1994).  Web2.0 for churches is much more interesting and effective…   

What is MyChurch.org?

80% of church visitors came because someone invited them

Kevin Hendricks at CMS discusses an interesting data point from a church survey – 80% of first-time visitors come because they were personally invited.  He offers some good tips and practices in this blog entry, and there is a good discussion with more best practices offered in the comments of this blog.

A good read for all church leaders.

We hope MyChurch.org will be an easy way for folks to invite their colleagues, neighbors, and friends to church.  We take Kevin’s last bullet point on easy invites to heart: Have a page on your web site dedicated to visitors so they can check your church out online and calm any fears before they decide to go. Make sure your congregation knows about this page and encourage them to use it.

Besides designing the church profile pages to show the character and culture of the congregation, we’ve made the pages as viral as possible.  We made a “Invite a friend to church” link on every single person’s profile, and we also built in a “Send to a friend” tool to easily email out the church profile page.  If you or your church isn't on MyChurch.org   yet, please check it out!

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