Tim at LivingOS has built several themes that are geared toward churches who want to use Wordpress.

He also keeps a list of church websites driven by Wordpress.

Hey Robert...
Yours is an awesome example of a clean, functional, and organized Wordpress church site. Nice work and thanks for sharing!

*edit: and I see you're in the metro detroit area...is your team going to make it over to the conference? Would love to meet ya there!

-Rob Feature
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mustardseedmedia.com

Just noticed that we are still listed there as being a wordpress site when I actually migrated the site to Drupal over a year ago...

I love wordpress, and infact am juts migrating my personal blog back from drupal to wordpress as for blogging I found Wordpress much simpler to use and easier to theme etc.
My new Wordpress Blog is currently at http://www.1kemp.co.uk/test and would love any feedback people have to offer... However, I love the power that Drupal gives you when you need a full CMS.

But you can still see the old Wordpress Version of our Church Site by going to: http://www.warwickbaptists.org...

Whilst I managed to get Wordpress to do virtually anything I needed, I felt that I was hacking it quite a lot to make it do things it wasn't designed to do, where as when I moved to Drupal I felt I was using the software properly and whilst I still spent a lot of time tweaking code etc, I felt I was still basically using Drupal the way it was intended...

Andy

Warwick Baptist Church - The Kemps' Blog

I'm thinking about going to the conference, but right now it's up in the air b/c of some college classes I'm taking n' such.

I have forwarded the link on to our local Ministerial Association, so they may decide to gather up a few pastors to go...

Hey, I have seen some church websites on wordpress, right now our church is close to getting a website done through some company, but I want to get more info on wordpress, Can you guys tell me the benefits of having a site through wordpress?

Thanks.

Church Communications Pro - http://www.churchcommunication... has some good articles about using WordPress for a church/ministry here - http://www.churchcommunication...

For what I use it for, it makes handling a website easy w/o knowing a whole lot of how to actually design a site, etc. because of a lot of free themes available.

Also, because WordPress is a type of software, it makes updating content quicker.

But choosing WordPress/Drupal/Joomla/Any other CMS really depends on what you want from a site and how much time you can put into it.

As Robert said,

Each has their place.

If I can speak in generalities here...If you're looking for a blog, Wordpress is tops. If you want a more robust site, I'd consider Joomla or Drupal. Joomla is easier to get going out of the box, Drupal is a more powerful platform.

Here are some (somewhat bias) discussions from the Drupal forums contrasting it with Joomla and Wordpress.

All three platforms are really good. The primary constraint is the developer.

Blessings!

-NP

We've been running First Christian Church of Tallahassee on WordPress for more than a year and a half at http://fcctlh.org. It uses a custom theme, and the contact pages and Google Maps page are outside the WP framework (but match the style of the site).

Your theme looks page-driven rather than blog-driven, Jack. Nice adaptation of WP.

I'm the author of the Wordpress SermonBrowser plugin. I keep a list of churches using the plugin (which are obviously all Wordpress sites).

There's currently 275 churches on the list.

I single handedly designed, developed and coded a site for our church, daycare and rental property the church owns. My head was almost spinning from all the work to do it in HTML.

About a year-ish ago when Pastor said he wanted a redesign I decided to do it in WordPress for 2 reasons. Theming makes it easy to do a makeover without the work of recoding every page and we had set up a team (we call it MinTech - Ministry of Technology) of about 6 people that could help get the work done. 2 were staff at the daycare as well.

I had problems getting the daycare people to tell me news so I could announce it on the site to keep it fresh. When we went to WP and everyone in my team learned how to update picture (using Flickr) we as a group found the themes and cut/pasted the old site's info into the new one updating it as we went.

What a blast having 6 or so people working on this daunting task, especially knowing two major benefits:
1. Updating the look would be easy.
2. The ones involved in various areas could update the content for their stuff.

Anyway, WordPress worked out great for us. Our small church has no general interest (yet, I'm working on it) in online community and such so Drupal was not worth the effort to learn at the time. We may end up there but for now it's WP.

Our sites are:
Covenant Word Church (not thrilled with the theme but others like it.) and
Lighthouse Christian Academy

I've been using wordpress and it's such a blessing working with this application frequent updates a wide variety of templates available.

What else can you ask for! wouldn't you agree ?

by the way I am using the WP-sermon plugin is a must have tool for any church website who does not have a media management system for sermons.

I almost forgot meet my church at Iglesia Getsemani.

sorry for the language is on spanish.

thank you.

Here's our church's site built on WordPress (2.7.1 but will upgrade to 2.8 in the next week or so): www.5milechurch.org.

For what it's worth, here are the plug-ins we're using:
Akismet 2.2.4
cforms 10.5.2
Collapsing Pages 0.4.3
NextGEN Gallery 1.2.1
Register Plus 3.5.1
Role Manager 2.2.3
Simple:Press Forum 4.0.2
Subpage Listing 0.6.1
TinyMCE Advanced 3.2
Verse-O-Matic 3.1.0
WordPress Mobile Edition 3.0.5
WP-Footnotes

Robert, I really like your site. What theme did you use? I am trying to work on my church's site and have never done anything like this before. I am probably going to use WordPress. Do you all think it is the best for beginners? Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks,
Justin

I used the "Revolution Theme" by Brian Gardner.

It's no longer really being supported, but Brian Gardner develops themes on his site - http://www.briangardner.com/th...

You may also want to check out WooThemes, they have a collection of pretty good free WordPress themes too - http://www.woothemes.com/theme...