Episcopalians, Catholics, Baptists, and Mormons: In the eyes of God and on the Internet, they're all one big happy family. As part of an online movement to further a sense of community among churches, the nonprofit group Houses of Worship this week introduced its plan to create a directory with a bare-bones Web site for every Christian church in America.
"It's not fancy, but a lot of churches don't need anything fancy," says Michael Maus, spokesman for the project's backers, American Bible Society, a bible sales company. "The main purpose is to have churches talk to each other, to get their messages out to the community."
Originally envisioned by the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation - and similar to recent and controversial efforts to build a free cut-'n'-paste Web site for every school and district in the US - hows.net provides a listing for each of 300,000 churches in North America.
Except for very skeletal information, the sites are currently empty, leaving it to individual churches to fill in the blanks with pastor's announcements, service schedules, and youth bulletin boards. A "needs and offers" area lets churches offer each other help. If a church already has a homepage, it can simply be linked to from hows.net.
Houses of Worship isn't the only group of netizens to feel that the hand of God is guiding their HTML. ChurchUSA.com, for example, offers a directory of the Web sites of several thousand US churches. Founder James Koehn will build a free page for any church that desires one. "Any Internet concept that brings Christians together for fellowship is a good thing," explains Koehn. "As far as what can be done through automated Web-site generation, there are countless organizations that provide that service for free."
Maus estimates that between 10,000 and 50,000 churches currently have Web sites; so far, only 500 churches have been added to the hows.net database. The grand dream of Houses of Worship is to get every Christian church in the world into its database. But even Maus admits, "You have to crawl before you walk."
