Will a Newly Transformed Website Transform our Church?

                                                                       

                            Will a Newly Transformed Website Transform our Church?
    We are very excited to bring our website (hebronpresbyterian.com) up to date.  It will have all the bells and whistles that you would expect and we can hope that it will be an effective evangelism tool.  It is true that people looking for a church do not use the Yellow Pages (remember them?) but they do a ‘Google search’.  And how we present ourselves on the Web influences their decision of whether to attend or not.
    Some would say that the Web is the wave of the future.  We had better catch it or we will be left behind.  But will it really transform our church?  And the bigger question, “What will they find once they come here”?  I read an article in Christianity Today(CT) and they said something that makes Hebron look really good: “The most important and biblical pieces of technology in a church today may not be the projector and the amplifier, but the crockpot and warming plate.  Potluck suppers are a test of the redistribution of the community wealth that heaven and earth will offer.” 
    Yes, it will be possible with our new website to stay at home and watch past services that have been uploaded and made available at the push of a button.  Ahhhh…now we can stay at home with our family, dressed in our pajamas and worship without all the bother.  Really?  Okay, so on occasion this could be a good thing when we’re on vacation or unable to get out due to sickness or weather but as the CT article goes on to say, “The Christian story is God made flesh..”  In other words, if God went to all the trouble of becoming man, surely this implies that real human relationships are important.
    “Do we want to do to our church services what video did to movie theaters?  Or what Facebook has done to friends having dinner together?”  Many churches enable you to give online, check announcements online and even encourage ‘tweeting’ reactions to the service while still in the service.  It’s not uncommon to see church attenders fumbling with their phones throughout worship because we fear missing out on one hour of being offline.
    “The church’s true calling in a technological society is to do the slow, difficult work of embodying God’s love, one embodied soul at a time.”  Technology changes but the human need for satisfying relationships has not.  The church has the unique ability to not only offer real fellowship but true relationships bonded by The True Message of Jesus Christ.  If technology can help us advance this cause then Hallelujah!  But if it gets in the way, how will we recover what we have lost? 
    The new website will be up and running very soon.  Pictures, sermons, events, links and more will be made available.  We pray that it will simply be a tool aptly used so that people might come to Hebron, enjoy our potluck lunches and dinners, hear the Word of God taught and enter into meaningful relationships.

“Jesus rose from the dead and you….you can’t even get out of bed”
                                Keith Green