Hello to folks in the group. I've been lurking around for a while, but have to participate now.
My church is embarking on a project to transition its website from handrolled static html to drupal. Although I have some geeky inclinations, my interest in this project is really to investigate the kinds of social forces that prevent churches as a group from adopting open-source technologies in general, and drupal / CivicCRM specifically. I'm acting as the project coordinator, and will post relevant materials as I write them.
If you want to have a look at the "before" version of our website, it's at:
My theory is that churches make changes as a result of inspirational stories of faith, and because of their typical demographic / power mix, often require a fair bit of explanation, storytelling, and education in order to grasp the community-building power that drupal offers. Sometimes there is a person within a local congregation that has both the requisite technical knowledge and the organizational power to make things happen. But so far, this has been rare. My goal is to try to develop better success stories that congregations can understand, and from which they can derive inspiration for change.
Exciting!
Comments
Trouble with the web in general
I haven't had any problems getting my church to adopt Drupal or any Open Source solution in particular. The resistance I've experienced has been more involved with convincing them that the web is something other than what they think.
That is, for a long time the web was just a place for potential visitors to see what our church was about. Of course, this is completely false. The majority of visitors to site are and have always been our members trying to see if we had information on addresses, staff, lessons, schedules, etc. Of course, the importance of representing ourselves properly to a potential visitor is very important even if they are a small minority, but I, initially, had a very difficult time convincing the leadership that what we really need was more detailed information.
Resolution for this came when our church leadership went to a church in the Columbus area (http://www.xenos.org/) that has a very informative web site. They suddenly began to see the value of the web site as a communications and collaboration tool, rather than just a way of introducing people to our church.
Thus, my recommendation in trying to help your church staff overcome obstacles is to look toward examples of churches that are already doing something like what you want to do. Use that as a platform to discuss vision and where you want to go in the future.