Your New website

Some of you, as you happen across this website, might wonder why no one from your church has contacted Luthernet about building a new website for your congregation or school. You might wonder why Luthernet hasn't contacted your pastor. Well, the fact is that folks who work at churches are very busy, and even though Luthernet has made an attempt to contact churches and schools, we've avoided continuous "spamming" with email or walking in on people not expecting us. Therefore, we've mostly sent mail and attempted to contact the congregations most in need. This article will provide details about what we saw with the old websites and how we chose to contact each congregation. If you attend one of these churches, feel free to contact us for the church or your pastor (as a concerned church or church council member). Perhaps district or synod administrators will also be interested in the progress of member church websites.

 Most of the contacts were initiated after Pastor Peter Kelm sent out a newsletter to LCMS SWD member churches. One church contacted us immediately (Trinity Lutheran Oshkosh), but the rest waited for us to contact them. Since we had a well-respected pastor mentioning the need for Luthernet's or similar services, we figured these mailings would provide some added exposure at just the right time. In order to find churches in need of our web design services, we simply used the LCMS find a church tool for the South Wisconsin District. There were a few other churches along the way, too, but it was mostly LCMS SWD to start. If your church is not listed, it's not always a sign of website competence: some sites were too large for us to bother offering an update, some sites did not exist at all (and had small membership numbers), and some sites were just plain ugly (but were modern/mobile-friendly).  

After six months of sending contacts to many LCMS member churches, there are some common themes. We mostly found that very few churches respond to either email or mail, even if the content is obviously from a fellow Lutheran with advice: I often complimented a website that looked good, gave one piece of advice, warned about security risks, or just identified a broken link from the LCMS search page. I'd just read that people who want to succeed need to think about how many people they help rather than how much money they can make, and that's how I saw many of the contact, but it can get frustrating when the people you have offered to help never see or ignore even simple gestures that are only meant to provide free guidance. I also started to wonder how many legitimate contacts are not seen each month by pastors who get all kinds of junk mail. How many new members are missed because LCMS and most member churches publicly post email addresses for Canadian pharmacies and Nigerian inheritance lawyers to find? Mostly I feel sad that my good intentions are seen as business as usual instead of as actual good intentions, but there is so little I can do to change that. Of course, if you attend one of these churches and stumble across this article, there is something you can do to change it.