st kea is a church in cornwall, uk that has the most brilliant web site. i wasn’t convinced it was real so rang the church number and it does exist….. the web site is designed in flash – about a mb but is worth the wait to load. vicar adrian hallett persuaded marksteen adamson of uk giant interbrand to work with the church on a campaign to help the church be relevant to the community. from the web site you can download the manifesto. it has a cheeky irreverant tone to it combined with great instincts about mission, the gospel and the community. there’s even a line of products such as holy smoke candles and god bless tissues!
adrian says this in his summary in the manifesto:
The Gospel is literally “good news”, but to the vast majority of people in our generation, the church is viewed as boring, hypocritical and irrelevant. As far as the un-churched are concerned, the church is answering questions they are not asking and we are providing solutions to problems they don’t face. In other words, we are scratching where they don’t itch! We are seen as irrelevant to the people we most need to reach. Yet the gospel is God’s solution to mankind’s deepest needs. God and his eternal Word are relevant to the needs of every relationship, every culture and every period of history – including the present. Somewhere between God’s ultimate solution and the world’s need, the message of hope is becoming garbled. The problem is not the message; it’s in the medium. The problem is not in the vision; it’s in the vehicle.
you have way too much time on your hands 🙂
I could do with a box of those tissues right now, I’ve got an awful cold!
cheers for the link…
I like the “The problem is not the message; it’s in the medium. The problem is not in the vision; it’s in the vehicle.”
what is interesting about this link and kind of neat is that i found it via an article in a design magazine (creative review) not via a church route…. as for having too much time on my hands – i wish! cheers….
jonny – do you really think the problem is just medium – is it just about all churches getting flash websites – i reckon the message needs some work as well – not in a downwatering, but in a reclaiming of all of the bibical narrative and seeing fresh nuances through our postmodern lens.
steve of course i don’t but what the issue raises for me is how surprising it is to see something churchy that i like! authenticity and reality is where it is at with church rather than slick web sites but the medium is massively important as well – at least it is to me… i received this healthily sceptical e-mail from a friend about st kea which maybe you’d identify with?… :-
to be honest, i’m skeptical, cos i know this is the sort of stuff that ad agency’s do just to get into glossy magazines – i’ve seen this ‘rebranding god’ stuff loads of times. funnily enough, we did a liturgy once that used some of these kind of phrases, “for god’s sake”, “what the hell?” etc. etc. the whole website is about branding, like it’s an ad for the designers. the manifesto is the same old twaddle that all churches say. at the end of it, it’s just a parish church with housegroups. radical – not.
Well it made me laugh, if nothing else:)
To be honest, overall, I think the problem is not in the medium used to convey the message, but in the absence of the strength of the message by those who convey it. The truth of the gospel is relevant without cheesy websites like St. Kea trying to wrap it up in consumer culture:)
Lucy
Hmmmm… Lovely as it looks, I could come up with more than a few criticisms of this site (and that’s coming from a dedicated Flash disciple), but the number one question is: what happened? You’ve got a site that looks this good, but the only content on there is dated 2002?
I have a fair amount of contact with Church websites, and the best way to administer a kiss of death is to create something that you can’t update: it’s like going out now and walking past a Church noticeboard with a list of Christmas services from last year pinned to it.