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A Brazilian Church’s Resurrect-powered Website and Interview with Daniel Gardner

Presentation of Igreja Batista Parque Industrial's Resurrect-powered website

Presentation of Igreja Batista Parque Industrial’s new website

In our first Showcase post, we take a look at how a church in Brazil is using our Resurrect WordPress theme for their new church website.

Daniel Gardner built Igreja Batista no Parque Industrial‘s website and was kind enough to let us interview him. He is part of Ministre, an organization with the goal of helping churches in Brazil build websites and distribute sermons. They contributed the Portuguese translation included with Resurrect and the Church Theme Content plugin that other churches are now benefiting from.

A Look at the Website

See a shot of the homepage below and visit the website for a complete tour. You can see that Daniel has done an excellent job with branding. Resurrect lets you upload a logo and change the background. The impact of these changes can be dramatic.

IBPI Website Screenshot

Interview with Daniel Gardner

Please tell us a little about yourself and the church you built a website for with Resurrect.

An hour away from São Paulo’s international airport, there’s this busy city called São José dos Campos. If you’re coming down for the World Cup, you must stop by and say hello. I’m community manager at a publishing ministry where my friend Felipe is a webmaster. Over 20yrs ago, Igreja Batista no Parque Industrial was planted here in town and they recently got in touch with us because they were in need of a new website. They have a ton of recorded messages and folks inside & outside of the church are always asking for copies of the sermons. So they had the content and the audience – they just needed a platform to connect the two.

Why was our Resurrect WordPress theme chosen for Igreja Batista Parque Industrial’s new website?

We reviewed dozens of themes and then chose Resurrect primarily because of its clean interface and the way it features sermons. Plus, Brazil is being taken by storm by mobile connections, which means we needed a theme that was responsive as well. Add on to that churchthemes.com’s awesome support, and that sealed the deal.

What has it been like using the Resurrect theme? Any favorite features?

Something we kept hearing over and over again was, “You’ve got to allow the sermons to be easily found & downloaded.” As is the case in most churches, Igreja Batista Parque Industrial is made up of tech-savvy folks as well as older members who just want a no-nonsense way to download sermons. Resurrect has pleased both groups by being feature-rich but still clean-cut in it’s design.

What do you hope visitors to Igreja Batista Parque Industrial’s new website will benefit from?

First off, visitors will be able to get the information they need — quickly. That’s so important. The Resurrect theme is uncluttered and very user-friendly. But secondly, we’re really thankful this new website will allow visitors to get a genuine feeling of what the church services are like. The website mirrors the congregation. It’s a perfect fit.

This one time, I was traveling to visit a church in another city and couldn’t find their full address on their website. It was like being stranded in the Sahara Desert with only a partial address to a public swimming pool. Quite grievous. I ended up having to dive deep into a Google search to find a secluded reference to their address on some other random page. We’re thankful that visitors to Igreja Batista do Parque Industrial’s website won’t have to suffer through that. Ever.

Would you recommend churchthemes.com to other churches and why?

Yes! churchthemes.com follows the principle of “Do one thing well” and it shows. The themes are crafted according to church needs and if you get into any hiccups, the support via e-mail is so fast you’ll wonder if it was lazer-guided. Imagine a mix between Mister Roger’s clarity and the speed of Iron Man. That’s the support at churchthemes.com.

Tell us about what you’re doing with Ministre.

There’s an internet boom taking off in Brazil. For example, Brazil has the second-largest presence on both Facebook and Twitter*. So there’s a real opportunity for churches to reach more people with the Gospel via the internet. That’s the good news. The bad news is that so many churches have terrible websites. You know the kind: they look like they blew out of a western and into your browser. Hidden away on some blog space, sporting a “news” page that was last updated in 300 B. C. and staggering with Flash or convulsing with too much text.

Using our experience with websites and community building, Felipe and I founded Ministre (that’s Portuguese for the verb minister) to help churches have a vision for the internet and give them the right tools to share truth online. And partnering with churchthemes.com is a big step in making that happen. We’re excited about what’s in store!

* Statistics from Forbes.com

Wrapping It Up

We thank Daniel for agreeing to this interview and Igreja Batista Parque Industrial for choosing our Resurrect WordPress theme for their church’s new website. You can follow Daniel Gardner on Twitter and on his blog, LifeSchooled.

Would you like to see more posts like this showcasing church websites using our WordPress themes?