The Downey Seventh-day Adventist Church is honored to receive the e-church award for July 2004. Here is my comments for your website.

As a computer scientist by profession, having a church website was not an option. We had to have one. We rolled out our first site in 1997, well ahead of most churches. Back then we built each page by hand using notepad. Thankfully we have better tools now. Through the years the site has gone through several redesigns, the goal is each time we do a little better and make the site a little easier to use. The last revision was in May 2004.

We have lofty goals for our website. We’d like to be able to reach our current members, as well as reach non-churched people. This can be difficult and our website has room to grow in this area. But we are making progress in reaching those goals, our members do visit the site and we continue to reach new people. We have had several people join our church as a direct result of visiting our website. We hope and pray that continues. There are four areas of our website that consistently generate positive feed back; the RealAudio sermons, the Kids Zone, the church newsletter page (The Latest Word) and the Help for Church Webmasters newsletter. Interestingly enough, 2 of those areas are specifically geared for out-reach (sermons and Kids Zone) and the other two are specifically geared for in-reach (the two newsletters). Certainly there is some overlap, but the comments that we receive regarding these sections of the website help us realize that we making progress. Some of our in-reach is actually outside of our local church, but it’s still within the body of Christian believers, so we call that in-reach. The Help for Church Webmasters is an example of that type of in-reach. We have many different subscribers to the newsletter from various different faiths. Many more just come and check out the page once in a while. We feel it is important to minister to believers and non-believers and that is what we try to do with our site.

The “webteam” consists mostly of myself. I have several people who help on an as needed basis. And I solicit ideas and feed back from other friends and various church members. I get a lot of support from the pastor and church members. They realize the importance of having a good site and the new area of evangelism that is open to us because of this site. They also give me great freedom to do what needs to be done because they see the benefits and the results.

I would encourage all churches to have a good website. Start small and grow it slowly. You don’t have to spend big bucks, you don’t have to have a huge web team, you don’t even have to be a big church. What you do need to have is the desire to hear Jesus say, “Well done thou good and faithful servant.”

God Bless,
Bill Aumack