Appealing to the Masses, Affecting and Reaching "real" Christians

This is just something I've noticed from a lot of Christian forums, and that is that a lot of them are too "churchy" and don't really appeal to the people who actually might be attracted to a Christian community. If you've never thought about it before, the church has it's own culture and set of "rules" on how Christians should act, and a lot of these rules have nothing to do with the Bible or living a Spirit-filled life. In fact, I would say that sometimes they squelch living the Spirit-filled life, because this Christian culture we've developed is a whole lot more concerned with how things appear than how they really are.

I went to seminary, and my master's is in Intercultural Studies. We talked about how culture itself isn't sinful, and there are many ways to worship God and come together as a church. Every culture has sinful elements, yes, but a lot of missionaries mistakenly believe that because a culture doesn't act like Western culture, then the Christians of that culture must be "reculturized" to the Christian culture. The problem with this is Western cultures have just as many sin problems as any other culture. We tend to be greedy, overly concerned about appearance, materialistic, and not very sensitive of the people around us.

How does that affect forum design? Quite a bit. I have visited Christian forums and websites somewhat regularly, but I am often turned off by this "switch" into Christian culture than most of them have, and force their members to have. Many people project themselves completely differently at church and around all Christians than who they really are, or who they act like at work or elsewhere. If you don't always talk about godly, "Christianized" things, then you must not be a "good" Christian. Many of them force discussions that are dull and that members are not really interested in.

For example, at one site I visited some time ago, they only allowed "churchy" discussions. Then, I went to the admin and some of the members' blogs, and they had a whole other set of interests, and wrote like they were completely different people. The discussions on that forum were forced and fake, and probably don't appeal to most of the people who checked the site out. BTW, I went back later, and there was a somewhat angry note that members had to introduce themselves before they could see the rest of the forums, because people joined and just left. This got a post count, yes, but it still didn't make the rest of the site any more appealing, and I bet people still left after they made their obligatory posts.

Here's an example of a post I read one time when the discussion was on struggling with sin in your life. It was actually a rather down-to-earth and honest discussion up until this point. This uses language which I call "Christianese", and aside from being really exegetically off-base, it's something that probably causes a lot of people to avoid Christian websites and forums:

I agree with alot of what you said. Though I do believe Christian based sites should have some regulations(at least sites that are ment for fellowship), these regulations should only be based on scripture. There are many rules Christians put upon themselves which they shouldn't. Also as Christians our faith should be a part of our everyday life and personality, not a mask we put on to parade around infront of others. There is no point in joing a forum and pretend to be someone else.

And I'm not even sure if I understood what that ment

I have seen a ton of forums and websites that are like this. On my website I try not to do that as much as possible because then its pretty much lying about how you really act.

One of the reasons why people don't want to go to church is because they think that every Christian acts the same way and they always have to do certain things. I hate when I hear that from people when I ask them to come to church. But when I do I just ask what they don't like about what some Christians do and I would have to agree with somethings like, "I don't like how they think they are always right about religion." Some people are like that.

I wasn't even talking about the site rules, because every forum has to have rules. It's more the entire format and style, and the unstated rules of the site. Sometimes breaking the unstated rules, or mores, are stronger in causing Christians to look down on others than even breaking a clearly stated one. More than that, it seems like a lot of Christian forums are really formal, or...to put it plainly....really cheesy. For example, not talking about any sort of media or hobby that isn't directly tied to church. That's not even how the admins live, so why do they expect to attract others with it?

There's a site I've been invited to in the past because of the ministry I lead, and they basically wanted me to declare my site as part of their network. It's honestly the most hideously designed site I've ever seen, with bad layout, graphics, poor planning, and really just looked tacky. I politely declined, and the owner got kinda mad, claiming that I was going to miss out on being a part of his "successful" ministry, and that I just didn't want to "submit to authority". Aside from the fact that he's no church, and therefore he was not in the position to claim authority over other people's ministries, I thought that Christians should be better representatives on the net, and that includes being excellent with design and approach. I know twelve-year-olds that can design websites and graphics better than that, and I know that the younger generations especially are not going to be impressed with stuff just slapped together.

Just because you claim you are great, doesn't mean you actually are or have really invested the time to make something that is worthwhile or appealing. It also doesn't mean that just because you want to lead something like a ministry or a website that God meant for you to do it. There's a lot of humility required in being a good administrator; the ability to listen to people and think about them before your own reputation or wants.

Yes all of this is true. Most people go to websites and some times all they see is how it looks and then they never go back to it. Most websites take a while to open but when they do they last.

One of the best things to do is to think about your members. If you don't do that then you won't know what they would like to see on the website.