Christian websites

I spent a great deal of time finding and navigating helpful Christian websites. All of the websites were given to me as helpful catechetical resources and great websites to give to young adults. The sites claimed to bring ministry and pop culture together. While the list of sites is very long I will use christianitytoday.com and crosswalk.com as examples but many of the websites follow suit. The sites are so overcrowded with material, advertisements, and even pop-ups one could almost claim whoever created them used the same designers from the websites we don’t want our young visiting (not that I would know anything about those websites). For these two sites navigating to a desired destination was impossibly frustrating. While I could read and see quite obviously that the site was Christian based I found very little useful.

In sections 4 and 6 of Passing on the Faith Christianity is looked at more closely as well as some evaluations of the current research done on young adults. One major theme is not to underestimate the young of our world in any way especially not in prayer. Along with the respect of our young everyone for all religions is responsible for the forming of young identities, either positively or negatively. One major way of forming identities during all stages of life is through experiences.

While websites are a cultural way of reaching our young the authors found in Passing on the Faith would disagree with mode and content of much of these websites. Providing websites so poorly designed gives the impression we don’t care or that we underestimate the reader. While having pop-up ads with positive messages may be a nice they are still pop-up ads and they are still the worst way of advertizing. The web can be a wonderful world of knowledge and yes fun, but in order for a faith based website to work advertising and profit must take a back seat. A good religious identity should be based on community and respect, not on consumerism. No wonder our youth are frustrated with religions, if they are seeing these frustrating websites as their religious identity.