I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Baptists in Australia suck when it comes to the Web.Many churches do not have web sites, although we are now 7 years into the new millennium.  Many that do have websites do them badly in terms of content and style.

The news is good though, the web revolution is sweeping through Baptist churches and the quality is getting better with each month.

There are a plethora of web hosting services that offer stylish and practical ready made web templates that can be updated easily.  Gone are the days when we had to rely on a steady supply of geeks in the youth group to make a website for us that we couldn’t possibly update because we had no HTML programming skills.

There are a couple of possible reasons why Baptists have been so loathe taking to the web and getting with the action.  Here’s my unscientific and highly subjective perception:

Age demographic

The age demographic of our church leaderships and pastors means that the significance of the web rates as a low priority.  You can hardly expect people who have grown up without the web to see a great deal of importance in allocating money or time for a good website.

Although generations who came before Gen X are starting to use e-mail and surf the web that does not necessarily translate through to the competence to take on the running of a site.

New generations in our leaderships and pastors ranks means that we are evolving into a more Net-savvy church.  This is happening way too slowly I think.

Minimalist mindset

Close your eyes and imagine the typical architecture of a standard suburban Baptist church.  Go on, close your eyes and imagine ………………………………………………………………………….., OK open your eyes now [how can you read this when they are closed??].  You probably imagined a small minimalist box like structure made out of standard brick.  On one of the walls in standard minimalist Arial font, in small black lettering are the words, “Somewhere Baptist Church’.  You only really notice the lettering if you are walking into the building and are observant.  Locals have driven past the building for years and don’t know what it is.

Inside you may find the odd banner, but the walls are for the most part unadorned and blank.  The carpet is bad.  This is because one of the babies thrown out with the bathwater when the movement was created over 400 years ago was the baby of religious art and symbolism.

We are not a graphic or an artistic church culture, and we are the poorer for it.  We have never bothered too much about how we look to the outside world, and the notion of spending good money on a window to the world has not sat well with us.  I read a great website called ‘Church Marketing Sucks’, which seeks to address the poor way in which we seek to communicate with the world around us.

[check out http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/]

It’s time to move out from underneath our minimalist mindset, become more expansive and creative in how we present ourselves to the outside world.  The world around us do not understand what ‘Baptist’ means.  The word ‘Baptist’ may well be replaced by the words ‘don’t know what that is or who they are’.  Because our forefathers settled on such an esoteric name for our denomination we have a marketing job on our hands to tell the world around us about who we are.

Your average Australian resonates strongly with our notion of the priesthood of all believers, and our consultative approach to church government etc.  Baptist churches are one of Australia’s best kept secrets.  The people keeping the secrets are us!

Money

We’ve never really been a big money church in Australia.  American Baptists are cashed up, or at least a lot of them are.  As such our budgets are stretched and we’ve baulked at the cost of putting up a website.  In the earlier days of the web getting a website up was an expensive proposition [unless a computer geek did it for us].  That is no longer the case.  You can register your own domain name [www.somewherechurch.com.au] for as little as $25 for two years, and get it hosted for $60 a year. Therefore the money excuse does not apply anymore.

In part II I’ll explore the benefits to your church of having a good website and review some of Australia’s best.