"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.

So many churches have great graphics, a cool look and feel, and wonderful toys but I have no idea who the people that are behind the site are. Many churches have the obligatory "pastor's page" which does its best to make their pastor sound cooler than First Church's pastor but other than that, the sites have no personality at all. My own church, Lakeview suffers from that as well. Outside of hiding NHL legends Wayne Gretzky and Grant Fuhr in a couple of images, our site could be the corporate template for General Electric. The site is attractive but lacks a personality. Lakeview's graphic artist was asking about when are we going to start the annual redesign of the site. My response was that we are going to give some life to the design and content that we have.

One thing that got missed along the rush to the IPO and the revolutionary practice of selling Isotoner gloves online is that we forgot why we came to the party in the first place. We came to tell stories, learn from others, and share our experiences. We came online to meet people. Not in chat rooms or on singles sites but while surfing the net, finding our hobbies and people who share them along the way. Information was cool and is useful but information alone didn't make people tell everyone they knew all about the Internet. Connecting to people online, even if wasn't in the flesh is what made it so cool.

The sites I have come to love and rely on during my journey are those sites that are published by real people with real lives and experiences. I read Next-Wave not because of its interface or look, but because of the community of authors that I know of and interacted with. I check out ginkworld (http://www.ginkworld.net) twice a week to see what John O'Keefe is up to. Connecting with John Wallis on a couple of discussion groups (and meeting him at Soularize) causes me to shamelessly promote his new magazine "seven" (http://www.sevenmagazine.org) . People that I have referred to Andrew Jones' weblog are bookmarking the site and going back everyday. The opportunity to connect with other people is what is driving the web.

I also saw it first hand this year when talking out loud one day on my own weblog about relaunching jordoncooper.com and splitting off the postmodern ministry content to a another domain. Many of the sites 20,000 monthly visitors can't seem to get their head around how a site that has so much about postmodern thought and the church can also have links to the Calgary Flames and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. It seems to confuse a lot of the Southern Baptists that complain when they write me (no offence to those it hasn't confused, but Southern Baptists always identify themselves as Southern Baptists). I had a domain already picked out when I started to get e-mail back saying, "wait a minute, it is knowing about you that gives the site some character and credibility. Postmodern ministry sites are everywhere". People went on to say that without the personal stuff, the site just became a collection of links posted by someone they don't know. My stories about my life gave it some context and something to judge it by for good or bad.

It is that context so many church sites are missing. For good and often bad, the personal stuff on jordoncooper.com lets people know if I am a loser or not and if they really want to trust the sites I am linking to or that have linked to me. The problem is that most church sites are without that context. Most people who are looking for a church online want to connect with people that they are comfortable with. They don't care about the church logo or stance on an increasing number of doctrinal positions, they care about the people they will meet as they walk down the street and into the church. What do most sites talk about? Exciting and thrilling things like governance structures, doctrinal positions, historical facts about organs, and all the things that so many people don't care about unless they are already part of your church. I am not saying that there isn't a place for those things (preferably 8 or so layers down in your site) but to offer those over content that people would actually care about makes no sense at all.

The best way to enter that dialogue is not web content about someone but content that is by someone. For the last five years publishing on the Internet took some skill and effort, not to mention a copy of Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver or any one of the competing products. Today, free services like Blogger and Moveable Type lower the bar even further and allow anyone that has a Internet connection to post effortlessly to the web. This has prompted thousands of people who used to just surf the net to now interact and build their own corner of it. They do that by telling great stories and tales from wherever they are.

And great tales they have told. From the details of clueless executives, moronic co-workers, to commentary on news and current events these stories are told by thousands of people daily in the "blogs" (short for weblog). Blogger has made it incredibly easy for anyone to be published online and some of those blogs are seeing traffic numbers that rival all but a handful of the most popular sites online. You want updates on a conference or event; chances are someone is blogging about it as it happens. The attraction isn't the design of the site but the real people who share their stories and thoughts with the masses.

Eventually conversations started between websites where one blog picks up on what another is saying and passes along the story and it keeps on building and going back and forth until the conversation is over or until something new captures the attention. It is the voice of individuals and conversation. Even online people want to hear that sound. It is the sound that we don't hear enough of.

I think the larger the church and the more they have invested online, the less they understand this. The problem is that since we all steal our ideas from those large churches instead of thinking by ourselves, we give up our voice so we can more like people who don't get it. We follow the model of disseminating information to the masses. The problem is that people don't care what the institutional church says. At one time people at least pretended to care what the church, ministerial fellowship or their own denomination said about church and life. A word from the pulpit on a lot of issues carried some weight. As we live in an age where those influences matter little, the voices that do matter are our peers. As a Free Methodist, I was amused a couple of years ago to hear of our denomination's bishops speaking out against the movies Disney was producing. It made no difference at all to me as I went to Disneyland a couple years later only to meet several Southern Baptists who apparently weren't that bothered by their own denominations condemnation of the Magic Kingdom either. Postmoderns may not value those kinds of hierarchical relationships anymore but we do value peer based ones. I may not be interested in what Microsoft Corporation has to say on their homepage but I do care what my friends who work there say on their pages. The idea of a prophetic voice calling out in the wilderness is changing to a solitary voice with a readership in the tens of thousands. Participating in online conversations and online peer to peer relationships will be a leadership art that all churches will have to master in the 21-C.

I don't have all the answers but hear are some of the things that we have been tossing around to help us get back our voice;

1. Stop talking like you are a Fortune 500 company. Noted usability guru Jakob Nielson complained of the horribly lifeless writing on the net in a recent C|Net interview. Fortune 500 companies don't tell great stories-neither do churches. Individuals tell great stories. When a friend of mine shares about his life, he does not send me a press release or pen an article about it, he uses his own words, his own nuances. Churches tend to communicate stiffly, unimaginatively, and based around the facts. Which would I rather listen to. There is a reason why the Letters to the Editor and the Editorial page are the most read of major newspapers. That is where people share what they are thinking and feeling, not a formulaic press statement.

2. Find some places on our web where real people can share their stories on a continual basis. Using tools like Blogger, you can embed the code into your page and have someone add the conversation remotely without risking the rest of your site. It is remarkably easy to set-up and use a service like Blogger and really hard to mess it up once you got it going. It allows multiple people to share their voice and it is very simple to operate and maintain.. At Lakeview we are looking at a small group leader sharing their experiences, some of the staff and lay leadership reflecting on what they are learning, some devotional thoughts update a couple of times a week, and some ministry leaders talking about the ups and downs of leading their ministries. I would love to have a single parent share their journey for a year or even one of our seniors. I have no idea what they will write and outside of some ideas that people have written to write better blogs, who really cares. As long as it is real. There is a temptation to have a purpose defined before you start but as my life goes, so does my blog. If I am trying to make a goal for my blog, I am making it into a script, not a mirror of my thoughts and wanderings.

3. Create a place where people can connect online outside your page. While Lakeview Churches site draws thousands of people every month, there is this incredible global conversation taking place online between individuals and their sites. They aren't going to interact with what a church site has to say they want to interact with other individuals. The nature of our site makes it hard to carry on conversations online but that doesn't stop those that attend the church from having them. Lots of people around Lakeview enjoy those conversations. We started to get into this discussion but helping some of the staff set-up blogs of their own. Blogspot hosts them for free (or without ads for $12 a year) and they are free to talk about whatever they want to talk about. Our media creator at Lakeview Church is also a rabid Edmonton Oilers fan, devoted Photoshop user and one of the few people who actually watched the television show The Tick while it was on. His blog reflects not only his spiritual journey but also a journey through the NHL trading deadline, waiting for Photoshop 7, and comic book lore. It isn't about Jeb pretending to be something he isn't. People see that from miles away. It is about Jeb living his life. The same principle is what led my wife to go online with her blog. One of my favourite sites on the net for a long time was the homepage of recently waived major league baseball pitcher C.J. Nitkowski. C.J. was a below average reliever for the Detroit Tigers last year before being demoted to the minors and then sent to the Mets. He stunk last year and his webpage reflected his struggles. He went too far many felt in his criticism of team management but there something very real to his site. First of all it was done by him and contained his thoughts as he felt them. If it wasn't for that site, I never would have heard of C.J. Nitkowski but here I am this spring training hoping for him and checking the boxscores and the Sporting News to see if he would make the opening day line-up (he didn't). CJ Baseball.com is not a site about a superstar pitcher, it is about a average middle reliever. He is telling his stories. That is what gives it its appeal. Fox Sports or TSN can tell me all sorts of things about sports but it is someone else's life they are reporting. They are not part of the game and aren't part of the conversation.

A couple of years ago when Ford originally got the idea to get their employees on the Internet, the world was shocked over the price tag, but forgot the benefit. As Christopher Locke pointed out in Gonzo Marketing Winning Through Worst Practice, having 370,000 people who could talk about Ford products on the net, solve problems, and learn from the people they connected to online could be a powerful change agent as well as a sales agent. Chances are there isn't 370,000 people that attend your church but having a place where people can talk and share can't be that bad for the kingdom (although that could depend on the people).

Whenever I am foolish or brave enough to suggest these ideas to church leaders, they always seem to respond the same way and they always want to bring up objections about control. "Will people think they are speaking for our church?" "What if they say something that reflects bad on the ministry?" I always reply that these conversations are going on offline and probably even online as well so why not be a part of them. Condemning, ignoring, or even threatening Google won't stop it. A discussion I have had often deals with the control of information in the church. I have always had the opinion that it gets out anyways and this way people have the right facts. Others feel that truth needs to be facilitated and people need to come to a consensus together. The second point of view leads to endless meetings; discussions and people go away and make up their own mind anyway. Fear over the opinions of those talking doesn't stop the fact that people are talking. The best thing we can do is join the conversation.

MY FAVORITE BLOGS ONLINE:

1. Tallskinnykiwi (http://tallskinnykiwi.blogspot.com) - home of Andrew Jones
2. deepdirt (http://deepdirt.blogspot.com) - blog of Karen Ward
3. Urban Onramps (http://urbanonramps.blogspot.com)
4. Doc Searls (http://doc.weblogs.com) - one of the Cluetrain co-authors, blog deals with the technology, OSX, Linux technologies
5. Scripting News (http://www.scripting.com)
6. EVHEAD (http://www.evhead.com) - Evan Williams weblog - CEO of Pyra Labs and co-creator of Blogger.