Does your church need a website?

Does your church need a parish website? Would you like it to be free or very, very cheap to operate? Would you like your web-site to be so easy to maintain that even you can do it? Well, you can have all this ... but you have to act fast! I will be "Cooking up a Parish Website" or two at the Diocesan Training Day on March 28 at St. Stephen's in Wilkes-Barre (Find the description here.) and I am looking for two churches in our diocese that need a web site. I am looking for a church without a web-site or with one that is very old and either out of date or one where it is a pain-in-the-neck to maintain. I prefer a smaller church, although I know some larger churches may fit the bill, so it's first-come, first-serve.

For this to work, you need to have for me the following ingredients: a church with a regular schedule--a nice image of that church would be nice; people who come to that church and do things--photographic proof is needed! You need a description of your church and, better yet, a mission statement You need to have someone with a computer who can go on line with enough skill to send an e-mail. If you know someone whose skills are advanced enough to retrieve and print directions from Yahoo or send/recieve jokes and photographs to friends, family or grandchildren. You need to have enough going on in your church to create announcements in a bulletin or say during announcement time and a desire to share your congregation's story with the community.

If we decide to work together, I will send you a list of things that I need for you to e-mail me with deadlines. I will do some of the work in advance of Diocesan Training Day and the rest before our "live studio audience" on Training Day. From this work, I will create handouts so that everyone who comes to the workshop will know how to create their blog-style web-page for their church. Together we will create for your parish an attractive, easy-to-use website that is inexpensive (or free!) and can be maintained by anyone with average computer skills. We will show you how to maintain it. The selected congregations will use either Blogspot, WordPress or (if there is time and enough interest) one other easy-to-use web site creator for churches.

Ideally, your web-site should have it's own web-address, so if you have one, I will need it and some technical stuff we can talk about. But if you do not already have a web-address or cannot afford the $75 to get one for the first three years then the Evangelism Committee will get it for you.

If you are interested, please e-mail me at [email protected] by Wednesday, March 11 at 5 pm EDT. Remember, first-come, first-served, so act now!

Blessings,
Andrew
The Rev. Canon Andrew T. Gerns
Trinity Episcopal Church, 234 Spring Garden Street Easton, PA 18042
610-253-0792 ext. 202 fax: 610-253-4808 cell: 610-392-4112
www.trinityeaston.org
http://www.diobeth.org/ministries/Evangelism/evangelism.html
http://trineast.blogspot.com