Mars Hill WebsiteSo we’re working on a redesign of our church website using WordPress as the foundation of the site. Should be kinda cool—it’ll be a blogging-based church website.

But in working on the redesign, I spent some time looking at some “great” church websites. And after looking at a bunch of these “great” church websites, I realized that they all started looking same—cool flash headers, lots of pictures, lots of videos, lots of images of people with their hands raised and looking generally spiritual or happy, most of them white, upper middle-class.

That’s all ok, but to be honest, it got a little annoying after a while. In contrast is the website of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Rob Bell is the pastor. The homepage is essentially a randomized black and white picture. Only one of the pictures (that I’ve come across) shows a white American mother and child. The rest of the images are of African children in a small, run-down schoolhouse, or women working in a sweatshop, or African and white children playing together—kinda like they’re saying, “We don’t exist for ourselves. We exist for them.”

I like that.