Designed as a minimal, easy-to-use service, cofC.group provides churches of Christ that are preaching the truth a simple way to have a website, even if they don't have the technical background to know how to do so. If you come across a church on here that is not preaching the truth, then let me know. You can see a list of churches that use this service as well as what their websites look like here.

WHO AM I?

I am, first and foremost, a Christian, who worships at the church of Christ in Shippensburg, PA. I am a husband and father of 3, whom my wife homeschools. I am a computer programmer, who has been working in web development for over 10 years.

WHY DID I MAKE THIS SERVICE?

As a member of a small church with limited financial resources, I wanted to support other smaller congregations that also lack financial means or technical expertise. Over the past two years, I have been working on a service aimed at helping these churches, and I have many more ideas to implement. Our church was dissatisfied with spending $500 annually on our website, and I was particularly frustrated with the inadequate support my father-in-law received when he had questions about it from our previous provider. Additionally, our church wanted to offer an online correspondence course, which I was unable to create due to the restrictive nature of the provider's application.

HOW MUCH DOES THIS SERVICE COST TO USE?

After reflecting on whether this service should have a cost (considering Luke 10:7 and Luke 14:14), I have chosen to leave the decision entirely to the churches that utilize this service. If your church wishes to provide compensation for my work, that's perfectly acceptable. Conversely, if your church is unable to contribute, that's completely okay too. Ultimately, it is up to each church to decide if and how much they would like to give.

Can the bible courses be use Only and not have to host website here?

Yes, they can! You'll need to register your church in order to assign who will receive email notifications when someone submits courses for your church. You’ll also need to add specific links to these courses to your church's website. These can be found under the "Church Links" tab in the Members Portal once your church is signed up.

THE DOWNSIDES OF THIS SERVICE

There are a few downsides to using this service:

• The most important, I may be slow responding to emails/issues from time to time. This is not my day job and I have 3 kids, so if your church uses this service, please be patient. Give me a week to respond, and if I haven't, please follow up.
• I do not have a team of programmers and analysts. I try my best to catch all of the bugs in this service, but I am limited on how much I can test. Therefore, you may come across issues that you may need to report to me.
• I am not very artistic. The templates that I have chosen are ones that I like. But beauty is subjective, so make sure to look through the templates before you sign up and see if there is one you like. You can view examples of these templates here.
• I can't provide an email address for your domain name. This would be a time-consuming process to administer, and I do not have time for that. It also eats away at the file limit that the hosting provider has.
• I do not provide a lot of extras like other websites/services do. I do not have an attendance tracker, song tracker, schedule maker, etc. There are a few reasons for this. This service was designed to be as simple as possible to use. If I added these, the menus get bigger, which makes this website harder to navigate. Another reason is that our church had these for years, but never used them! There are other tools and websites out there that do this. The final reason is that not only do I have to build these extra tools, I have to fix bugs and maintain them. With the limited time that I have, this would be very hard to do.
• Another potential issue is that if a lot of churches end up signing up for this service, I may end up having to limit the number of saved sermons that a church can have on here, since the hosting provider limits their storage by number of files. Currently, we are nowhere close to that limit, so it should take a long time to get there. 

HOW DO I SIGN UP?

Interested in using this site? Click or press here to go to the signup page. Once you sign up, you will not be able to log in until you are approved. You will receive an email once your church is approved.