How Do I Pick a Church?

How do you go about picking a church? That's a question I'm still working on myself. Sometimes I just drive by a church and mark it down to try. Sometimes I do an Internet search. Sometimes I'll take a suggestion from a friend or acquaintance or go to a church of a friend. But it's the Internet that interests me tonight.

Church internet sites are one of the more interesting things I've dealt with in the last year. I was the webmaster for my last church. We had a website that was kind of thrown together and did little more than stake our claim on the Internet. It wasn't there for much else. When I took it over, I asked the powers that be what they wanted the website to be. To this day I never got a good answer.

A lot of churches have that same problem. The have a website, but they don't know what they want to do with it. Oftentimes that manifests itself in a website that has little more information than their name, address and phone number. Most have some mention of their pastor, and some general information on the church, but nothing that really makes a person to want to try it out.

I've been asking myself why churches like to do things like that. I think it's because churches really don't understand the Internet. Whenever a person logs onto a website, it like meeting a person face to face. The face that is presented makes all the difference in the world. Some websites are professionally done and scream the church paid for it. Some are done by a freelance member of the congregation that know just enough about web programming to get a website out on the web. I try to look past all that to what is actually presented.

What I find is what speaks volumes, or rather what I don't find. Of course I look for the standard stuff: name, time and place. In addition to that, I look for a mission statement and a listing of what they offer. It's not exactly a menu I'm looking for, but there needs to be enough detail to make an intelligent decision.

In the case of singles ministries, I look for something that says, "we have a singles group." When I find a website that has a singles ministry explicitly stated, that's a huge plus. Unfortunately, that's very rarely the case. A lot of times churches merely state that they have offerings for children, adults, seniors, and couples. In that case I look at the ministers to see if there is a contact for a singles minister. Again, most of the time, that's not done, either.

I could continue talking about websites, but there's enough info to fill a book, and that's not why you're here. To tie it all together, when I look for a church, a website that is well put together and has the information I'm looking for usually gets a visit from me. Because there are so few that do, using the web to find a church with a singles group is pretty hard.