First Lutheran Church: From Isolated to Connected

A small rural congregation wanted online worship. We assessed first, then rebuilt the whole website around it, with a weekly process volunteers can sustain. Visit First Lutheran Church ↗

Who they are

First Lutheran Church is a small ELCA congregation in Pine River, Minnesota. Sunday worship is at 9:00 AM, and the church is run by a small staff and a group of volunteers.

Challenge

The church had a working WordPress website but wanted to add online worship: a livestream and an archive of past services, to reach members who could not attend in person and to engage the community beyond Sunday. Before any of that, they needed to know whether the existing site could support it. A review turned up technical warnings and outdated plugins, and the whole thing had to stay simple enough for volunteers to run every week.

Solution

Assess before rebuilding

I started with a diagnosis, not a proposal to rebuild. I reviewed the site, weighed repairing it against migrating or rebuilding, and recommended the least disruptive path first, along with a plain-language list of what access I would need. Once the church saw the options, they chose to go further and replace the site and its look entirely.

A new site that welcomes people

The new site is built around what visitors are looking for rather than how the admin pages are organized. The home page opens with a welcome, the Sunday service time, the address, and a clear way to watch online. It was designed with older congregation members in mind, with large type, generous tap targets, and a short menu.

Content the church can update

Staff, announcements, bulletins and newsletters each have their own simple content type, so the church office adds an item once and it shows up in the right place. The monthly calendar is uploaded as a file by the office, the same way it is produced today.

Worship online

YouTube is the single source of truth for worship: the livestream, the playlist, and the archive all live there. Sunday services are broadcast with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), and WordPress presents them on a Live Broadcasts page rather than storing the video itself. That keeps the weekly work small and means a member can find a past service in one place.

Keeping it sustainable

The weekly process was written down as instructions for the volunteers who run the livestream, so it does not depend on a specialist. I also recommended that the church own its domain, hosting and accounts, use multi-factor authentication, and share credentials safely, so nobody is locked out and nothing depends on me. Plugins and the theme update automatically.

Results

Online participation tripled within 60 days. Volunteers are confident running the livestream, and members can find recordings, announcements and bulletins in one place. The church is now exploring deeper community engagement tools, with a foundation in place for a future member portal and training.