I thought this was a great question from listener Mark, and I’m posting this as bait for my friend, Jeb, who does an excellent job managing his parish’s site:
I loved your show today and I wanted to show you what I am doing to reach out to our small parish. Like many rural churches we have never had a website. I have been bugging them to create one for years and they finally told me to go ahead and show them what I had in mind. I found a company that allows a “free look” period and showed our priest a template I was building. Now he can’t get it fast enough. If you have a few minutes please take a quick look at the site. It is still under construction so parts of it still need reorganized but I would like to have it up in two weeks. I want it to be a strong apologetics site so I will be giving resources for Daily Mass readings, the Catholic Channel and Lighthouse Catholic Media. Father Jay Finelli paid our Capuchin Sisters us a visit recently so he is giving me some materials as well. Could you please take a quick look. I am open to suggestions for content.
www.icslchurch.net
The hosting company is very happy with what I am doing and they have very few Catholic customers so they have asked me to create a few templates for them and reach out to Catholic churches as well. Once I am done with ours I will probably make this a ministry for myself.
Thanks, and I love your show. My wife is a Presbyterian and your show is the one program on the Catholic Channel she really enjoys.
So what should go on a parish’s website? What makes it truly useful and brings people back again and again?
I would recommend the approach that Bob, another listener, is doing with his parish. Bob wrote last week and said:
I just wanted to drop you an e-mail, and let you see what we are doing in our local Parish; because in a way you were the motivation! As a long time listener, I had been pondering how our local community could do something in terms of technology that would make a difference, bring people together.
A friend at church agreed, and fortunately we have a Priest who was very supportive. The feedback from the community has been awesome. It’s a bi-weekly video e-mail, that focuses on our Lenten journeys and things going on. The e-mail links them to a semi-private You Tube video that we created.
We have to laugh, because it’s such a new concept to some; that they don’t really understand how bad it is!! JAnyways, just wanted to show you. Without your continued dialogue about Catholic Media and how we all need to incorporate it into our parishes, I am not sure we would have done this. It’s just been awesome, and just confirmed the Bishop of the diocese has agreed to do a special Holy Week video for us!
Just wanted you to know, that you both make a huge difference!
CLICK HERE for link to the list of video’s. I highly suggest you go to this Tuesdays video – It’s our best to date!!!
I love the fact that a parish is making their own creative videos. What else would you suggest?
I am curious to read people’s experiences with this. I keep wanting to bring up the possibility of starting a parish website with our priest but I don’t have the knowledge to build one (and considering he just recently learned what “wikipedia” is, I’m not sure he sees the need for a parish website). We do live in a more rural area but have a good mix of older and younger parishioners and I think a website could be a good start to helping build our community.