I help make games at 
I've seen the future of church websites and it's...
Located in Kansas City, Jacob's Well is a small church that was started seven years ago. The Jacob's Well website is the best example I have seen of what a Web 2.0 church site would look like [via Creative Church].
The site is incredibly clean, uses very soft, friendly colors, and features high-quality, original photographs throughout. In fact, you can count the number of actual graphics on one hand.
The community piece is where things get really interesting. When you create an account and join the online community, you can add your bio, blog feed, and your Flickr photo stream to your account. The site then creates simple community pages that group all of this member content together.
So, you can go to a single page and see a Flickr stream of photos from everyone in the church. Then you can check out the latest blog posts, whether from people on staff or people who attend. There's even a bio page where you can get to know the people in the community.
Wow! I've never seen a church attempt something like this. What's exciting is that it's equally valuable to the curious as well as the committed. If you're just exploring the church, what better way to get a feel for the community than to step into the middle of it? And if you're already a committed member, you can easily get a window into the life of those around you.
If all of this wasn't enough, the site's even built using the 37signals web framework Ruby on Rails.
Does it scale? Would something like this work in a larger community or is it most effective in small church? I don't know, but I know they've created something very special here - the first online community that is truly an extension of the best community there is, the local church.
I was excited to see the site but... is it down or does the site just not support Mac?
I tried opening in both Safari and Firefox and both of them failed to open, trying to download "jacobswellchurch.org" as if it were a file.
Posted by: Jesse J. Anderson | November 22, 2005 at 04:17 PM
That's very strange - I'm getting that on a few pages in both IE and Firefox. That hasn't been an issue before, so hopefully it's temporary problem that will be fixed shortly.
Try going to this link directly:
http://jacobswellchurch.org/story
Posted by: Brian | November 22, 2005 at 04:24 PM
ahh that works, thanks.
wonder what the problem is...
Posted by: Jesse J. Anderson | November 22, 2005 at 04:28 PM
Very cool. I really like the community, weblogs and people sections as well as the bios.
I think it could scale in some format and actually may be more needed in a larger church rather than a smaller one.
Posted by: Jeff Dowdle | November 22, 2005 at 08:19 PM
(I'm the guy who put together the Jacob's Well site...)
I'm afraid we're still struggling with some server glitches that cause the site to go down occasionally; sorry about that Jesse.
As for scaling, that was actually part of the reason we built the site in the first place. The church grew to the point of having more than one service, and it started to create some disconnect -- there hundreds of people whose faces I might never see, because they went to the other service. Part of the goal of the site was to bridge that gap. Larger scale, it also allows people to feel "in" the community even if they move away, which IMHO is a wonderful side effect.
Posted by: Scott Raymond | November 23, 2005 at 12:40 PM
Scott, that's an impressive job ... and if I had lots of money I would hire you :-)
Your website might be the first church website I've come across that allows people to subscribe with iCal.
Two suggestions:
1) provide an RSS feed for your news page
2) provide a site map
Posted by: Barry Bowen | November 23, 2005 at 04:52 PM
Scott beautiful job - many congratulations. I've shown the rest of the team here and it's just got us dreaming :-)
Posted by: uk church websites | November 25, 2005 at 10:36 AM