351. New Website

We have a brand-new website, and it will go live on 12/31. The new website is not a design refresh of our current website. It is rebuilt from scratch in a different website platform called “Nucleus” that specializes in church website. It offers neat features that allow us to use the website not just as storage of information but a hub for all “next steps”.

Pastor Chai, who started the house church movement, has taught lead pastors that their main roles are Ministry of Word, Prayer, and Leadership. And he emphasized that the major component of leadership is administration, which is managing and controlling “how” things are done in church. He used “traffic control” as the analogy and warned us that if the leader is not actively engaged in logistics of ministry, it creates frustration due to inefficiency, which can create unnecessary tension and conflict among members while doing ministry.

Through his talk, I felt challenged to view myself as a “Chief Administrator”. So, decisions related to ministry flow, sign-up process, setting communication methods, what apps or platform to use for ministry are something I have taken on as my responsibility. So, even when tasks that are related to other teams, I took them as my responsibility if they had to do with “how” team leaders and teams interact and communicate with each other.

So, given the importance of a website in directing VIPs and members’ next steps for their faith and ministry, I took it as my job to recreate the website to use as the central hub for next steps. The media team will continue to contribute to the design decisions and handle content updates. But streamlining and controlling ministry processes on the website is something I will continue to do as it relates to traffic-control.

One important new feature to note on our new website is a “launcher”. This is the blue button that will always be floating in the bottom-right corner of our website. This will help our congregation to make their next steps easier and quicker.

Also, we now have a separate blog platform that will host news, testimonies, and pastor blog to differentiate static contents from contents that get regular updates. But it will still be accessed through our main website.

We are paying a bit more for the new website platform. But as the website is the first encounter with our church for our vips and a hub for all our next steps, consider it an investment in fulfilling our mission, not an expenditure.