So here are five more rather cool looking churches telling their story with WordPress.

Mosaic Baptist Church

Walton Parish Church

Newhills Parish Church

Calvary Chapel Miami Beac

Westland Baptist Church

If you are looking for a WordPress theme for your church, make sure you check out my themes on the themeloom. You can also find out more about using WordPress to run your church web site on the WordPress-Driven Church page.

Christ Lutheran Church

Lakeside Church

LakeView Church, Indianapolis

Grace Outreach Center

First Baptist Church of Augusta

The first one of course is running one of the livingos themes.

You can view more in the WordPress-driven church directory.

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?

For now here are five, no actually six, churches I’ve noticed from the directory.

Freshchurch, Brisbane

Westbrooke Church, KS

Clearforkalliance Church, Ohio

Cottingham Road Baptist Church, Hull

Cutler Ridge United Methodist Church, Florida

Decorah Covenant Church, Iowa

I’m very pleased to add Hull to my map of WordPress-driven churches (their e-mail arrived while I was typing this post!).

In case you were wondering, some of the themes being used here that are available to download:

• Mimbo – a nice magazine style theme
• UPSILON – my own most popular theme, seen here with some nice colour adjustments.
• Cutline – a beautifully elegant and clean theme that has been around for a while.
• Ocean Mist – a really chilled out kind of theme that is being used by a number of churches, especially those on the ready hosted flavour of WP at WordPress.com

In case you still think that you need some geek, or a big budget to set this up, the Cutline theme and Ocean Mist themes are both already installed for you at Wordpress.com where you can have your church on-line within the next 10 seconds with no exchange of currency…so what are you waiting for?

Fellowship Community Church

Mosaic Baptist Church

Trinity Baptist Church, USA

Don’t forget, to send me your links to add to the list too.

A number of my own WordPress themes were designed for churches in mind, and I was surprised to discover someone had reckoned my Delta theme “the only decent-looking church theme”. I’m sure there are plenty of other great themes out there. So here is my version of the ten best that I have noticed being used.

And, oh dear, I could only find 6, that I could say were in some way “best”.

They are in no particular order and I hope you won’t mind me at including at least one mine!

1. Delta

I’m not sure it is the “the only decent-looking church theme”, but it is the one I put together for out church web site. You can see it in action here.
Theme Homepage

2. Ad Clerum

Ad Clerum is a distinctive theme and has been put to good use by Antelope Valley Church.

Theme Homepage

3. Mandigo

Mandigo is a fairly standard and popular WordPress theme. It has some big name users like Sony and Björk. Lindale First Baptist has put it to use for their web site, though the customised version is not quite to my taste.
Theme Homepage

4. Andreas09

Another popular WordPress theme. This one is here, because it is running on WordPress.com, which is where smaller churches with less technical skill can be on-line in five minutes for free. Immanuel Baptist seem to do OK with this. But…

Symmetrical 3-column designs are fundamentally flawed as a concept. One of the reason why Drupal hasn’t hit WordPress levels yet is the dominance of the 3 column centred theme – which just doesn’t work.
Theme Homepage

5. Ocean Mist

A much better theme, but also available on WordPress.com is Ocean Mist. Serpentine Rd Family Church are using this one.

Theme Homepage

6. Upsilon

OK, so I’ve included two of my themes, but while Delta gets the accolades, Upsilon has been the most popular of my themes; and not just for church applications. The main reason is that it includes SmoothGallery for a cool rotating header. See it action on Perimeter Pointe church’s site.
Theme Homepage

Help me out here!

There must be more than this. What do you think? Which ones have I missed? What is the best WordPress church theme? They must be free to be in with a shout and they must be being used by a church!

You can add your own church to the growing list of WordPress-driven churches or start blogging your church with WordPress using one my WordPress church themes.

Check out the WordPress-driven Church directory for many more great examples.

So how will you blog your church this Christmas? Hang angels from your Blog Title? Give away virtual gifts and snowballs on Facebook (its true, you can)? But, seriously share the story.

If I release this plugin, you could put SmoothGallery on any theme and use it to cycle through links in your blogroll. But there are a couple of issues to resolve:

• SmoothGallery 2.0 seems to have problems in Internet Explorer. The current plugin installed here is using an older version of SmoothGallery.
• SmoothGallery uses MooTools which thows up conflicts when using other plugins like lightbox that uses other JavaScript libraries. [UPDATE: use LyteBox instead with SmoothGallery!]
• Looking at using phpThumb to resize any image you associate with a link and cache images.
• Well, it all takes time…

Anyway hope you enjoy going ooh and ah as you see all those great WordPress driven church web sites.