Living Open Source

From the many e-mails I get about WordPress-Driven Churches, I have noticed that church planters are frequent users of my WordPress themes. Steve Swisher over at Churches Planting Churches has also noted the tool’s usefulness to those seeking to push boundaries of church that bit further. His own church site, Essential Church, shows what can be done with this tool. My series on blogging your church with WordPress is also a good place to start, but I wanted ask why? Why is WordPress so good for this kind of application?

Is it Cost? When you consider how much you pay for a custom solution or for one of those church CMS sites, this is a no-brainer. This seems to be Steve’s point too:

Here’s how I got a great looking website for under $200 total start-up cost and only $50 per year total cost for the life of our church. (Steve Swish)

I’d go further than that. It can be a $0 solution, if you choose to use the hosted version of WordPress at WordPress.com. Many churches do.

Is it because it moves and grows? WordPress is Open Source. It has grown and continues to grow through community effort; more like what church is supposed to be than any church I’ve come across! Because of the huge community base, there are thousands of themes and plugins around to make it do anything. You will also never be locked in to WordPress, since as soon as the next best thing comes out, someone somewhere will have a way of moving your content painlessly. As if you would want to! It encourages community and grows with you.

Perhaps it is because it encourages the sharing of a story? Unfortunately many users of WordPress try and squeeze out the blog in WordPress, by making their home page full of static content. Churches moving from more conventional CMS and custom sites, struggle a lot when they move to WordPress. They think that a static welcome message and a statement of belief is enough to draw people in. Oh dear! So for church planters, the sharing of story is important, because it is a new story and because the people they are trying to reach are interested in joining a community that is living.

The book by Brian Bailey is well worth looking at too.

Are you using WordPress for a church plant in some innovative way to build community?