Jordan,  come and visit me, man!   We got a lot in common. 

Blogging: Advice for Church Websites.

Jordon Cooper writes:

“Several months ago I wrote an article in Next-Wave that talked about evangelism and communicating to an increasingly net-literate lifestyle. Since then I downloaded a plethora of e-mail soliciting my opinion on their local church website. Many of those local church sites got posted on jordoncooper.com. Recently I took time to review the list and two things caught my attention. Almost all of them are very well designed but I never found myself being drawn back to check them out very often.

As I was thinking about this I started to go through my bookmarks and took another look at the sites that I go back to all the time. I started to look for the characteristics that kept drawing me back. As I was formulating what was surely going to be a best selling epic book, I picked up the now legendary book, The Cluetrain Manifesto. I got no further than the first paragraph of the introduction to see that my best-selling book had already been written (doh) and I had my answer for what drew me back to the web. The authors pose this question,

“What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies it pipes and wires? What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling takes? Five thousand years ago, the marketplace was the hub of civilization, a place to which traders returned from remote lands with exotic spices, silks, monkeys, parrots, jewels-and fabulous stories.”

It hit me and thousands of other people that the reason we came online is that there was a conversation of millions of voices happening, and we were missing out. In reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, it came clear what so many churches were missing as we moved online, a voice. [read more from next-wave magazine]

link from [Ian’s Messy Desk]