Quill pen and documentConsider this a cautionary tale.

On the surface, one of the simplest improvements to your church’s website is adding its institutional policies and procedures. It’s equally true that there are few time investments in your site more worthwhile. Why?

  • Adherence to policies is easier to achieve when policies are readily available.
  • On the Web, not only are they available, they become searchable.
  • The webmasters don’t have to worry about content. Policies and procedures are already written.
  • The audience is obvious. It’s church leaders.
  • Ergo, it should be clear where in your site it resides, not only for those building the site, but also for those using it.
  • In this era, church members often expect to find policies on the website.

A Culture Shift?
And yet, from an informal sample, many churches still don’t do this. My theory is that while it’s easy to include policies on a site from a technological standpoint, it represents a major cultural shift.

Bylaws, policies and procedures by their very nature represent tradition. After forms of worship, they seem to be the aspect of church life most bound by the we’ve-always-done-it-this-way mindset.

As soon as I got on the Board of my church (in the late 1990s), I started pushing for bylaws and policies to be added to our site. People were happy to oblige, especially when I was the secretary of the Board, but then we ran into upkeep. The bylaws changed, but I wasn’t on the Board, and no one thought to send them to our webmasters.

My next tactic was to request that inclusion on the website be required in the bylaws themselves. Once again all agreed this was a good thing. Thus five years ago Section 8.1.3 was updated to read: “A current and complete copy of all policies and procedures adopted by the Board shall be available from the Church office and on the Church website for reference by the general membership.” In earlier versions, as you might guess, they were only required to be in the church office, and you can imagine how few people had access to that.

At first, even with it mandated in the bylaws themselves, the webmasters still didn’t get the updated bylaws, let alone policies, without rattling cages. It was then I realized that cultural change was the issue.

Thus patience and persistence became key. At times I think these are the most important requirements for webmastery in a church. It’s not how much PHP or JavaScript or CSS that you know. It’s knowing what’s most needed and shepherding transition.

Now I’m happy to report that our culture has changed. After our most recent congregational meeting, I was not only sent a copy of the bylaws to post within 24 hours, but a few weeks later when I still hadn’t gotten to it, a Board member (Mr. Web Diva, as it happens) sent me a reminder.

And so it goes now with all of our policies. Even our most tech-resistant church leaders count on the web as a repository for policies.

If your church has not yet made this transition, I would encourage you to don the web shepherd’s mantle and ease them in this direction. The ROI is enormous.

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