The Ten-Second Test
Designing Communications for the People We Hope Will Receive Them
I want you to try an experiment with me. Pick a congregation—not your own—and imagine you’re new in town, or grieving, or curious, or all three. It’s Saturday evening, and something in you has decided that tomorrow morning you’re going to go to church. You pull out your phone and search for a congregation nearby. You find their website.
Now: How long does it take you to find out what time worship starts?
I have done this experiment more times than I can count, sometimes as a visitor, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a guest preacher. And not as an experiment — I did it literally trying to find out where I was supposed to be and when. And I can tell you that the answer is rarely “ten seconds.” More often, the answer is buried three clicks deep (or more!), or in a PDF newsletter from last spring, or beneath a rotating banner about a rummage sale that happened in 2023. Sometimes the worship time on the homepage and the worship time on the “About Us” page disagree with each other, and you’re left to guess which one survived the last board meeting. Sometimes there’s a beautiful mission statement, a photograph of stained glass, a warm paragraph about how “all are welcome”—and no service time at all.
All are welcome. We just won’t tell you when.
I don’t share this to mock anyone. Most congregational websites are labours of love, maintained by a volunteer who inherited the login credentials from someone who moved away, working in a platform chosen a decade ago. I share it because this small, frustratingly common experience reveals something important about how we think about communication—and because fixing it requires a shift that is as theological as it is technical.
Communication is designed for someone
In previous articles I’ve been arguing that communication is a two-way street: that messages aren’t complete when they’re sent, only when they’re received. We’ve talked about the legal dimension of this (consent and anti-spam legislation take the receiver seriously as a moral agent) and the theological dimension (reception is itself a spiritual practice). Today I want to push on the sender’s side of the street, because if reception matters, then design for reception matters.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about most congregational communication, on websites and well beyond them: it is usually designed for the people who already know. The homepage assumes you know what “the narthex” is. The announcement assumes you know what M&P stands for. The sign on the lawn assumes you know that “10:30” means worship and not, say, a yard sale. We write for ourselves, in our own dialect, organized according to our own internal logic — committee by committee, ministry by ministry—and then we are puzzled that newcomers find us hard to approach.
The discipline that names this problem is called user experience design (UX design), if you want the jargon, though the whole point of this post is that jargon is the enemy. UX design begins with a deceptively simple question: what is the person on the other end actually trying to do? Not what do we want to tell them. Not what do we think they should value. What are they trying to do, right now, on their phone, on a Wednesday morning?
For a congregational website, the answers are remarkably consistent. People want to know when worship happens, where you are, whether there’s parking, what to do with their kids, whether the building is accessible, and—often unspoken but always present—whether they will be safe and wanted there. That’s the list. Everything else on the website serves people who have already decided to engage. The visitor’s questions should come first because the visitor has the least context and the lowest tolerance for friction. Your members will dig for the choir schedule. The grieving stranger will not dig for anything. If the answer isn’t obvious, they close the tab, and you never know they were there.
Hospitality begins before the threshold
We tend to think of hospitality as something that happens at the door: the greeter, the handshake, the name tag, the coffee afterward. But for most people who will ever consider walking through your doors, the first encounter with your congregation happens on a screen, days before Sunday. Your website is your narthex now. Your Instagram is your lawn sign. The question “can a stranger find our worship time in ten seconds?” is not a technical question. It’s the digital version of “is our front door visible from the street, and is it unlocked?”
And here the incarnation has something to teach us. The central claim of Christian faith is that God did not wait for humanity to figure out the directions. God came to where people actually were—into a particular language, a particular place, a particular body—and communicated in terms that fishers and tax collectors and Samaritan women at wells could receive. The Word became flesh, which is to say: the message was redesigned for the receiver. If that is the pattern at the heart of our faith, then designing our communications around the actual needs of actual people isn’t a concession to consumer culture. It’s discipleship. It’s taking seriously that the people we hope to reach are not obligated to learn our language before we’ll speak to them in theirs.
The inverse is also worth naming honestly, because there is often lament alongside hope. When we organize our communications around our own internal structures—when the homepage reflects the org chart rather than the visitor’s questions—we are communicating something, whether we intend to or not. We are saying: this community exists for the people already inside it. No mission statement, however lovely, can out-shout that message. Mainline congregations spend a great deal of energy lamenting decline, wondering aloud why people don’t come. Some of the reasons are large and structural and genuinely beyond our control. But some of them are this small: we have made the most basic act of approach unnecessarily hard, and then interpreted the resulting silence as indifference.
What this looks like in practice
So what does it mean to design communications for user experience? A few principles, translatable well beyond websites—to bulletins, emails, signage, and sermons too.
Start with the receiver’s question, not your answer. Before publishing anything, ask: who is this for, and what are they trying to do? A newsletter for members and a homepage for seekers are different documents with different logics. Trouble starts when one artifact is asked to do both jobs.
Put the most-needed information where the least-committed person will find it. Worship times, address, parking, accessibility: on the homepage, near the top, in plain text. Not in a PDF. Not behind a click. The rule of thumb from UX research is that people decide within seconds whether a page will help them. Design for the person giving you ten seconds, and you’ll also serve the person giving you ten minutes.
Write in the language of the street, not the sanctuary. “Worship is Sundays at 10:30 am” beats “Divine Liturgy at half-ten in the nave.” There is a place for the rich vocabulary of our tradition—I’m a theologian; I love that vocabulary—but the front door is not that place. Insider language at the threshold functions as a lock, even when we mean it as poetry.
Keep it current, or take it down. An outdated website actively misinforms. The visitor who shows up at 10:00 for a service that moved to 10:30 two years ago has received a message: this community doesn’t notice the experience of newcomers. Better a sparse, accurate page than an elaborate, stale one.
Test with a stranger. This is the single most powerful tool available, and it’s free. Ask someone with no connection to your congregation—a neighbour, a colleague, your kid’s friend’s parent—to find your worship time, your address, and your accessibility information using only their phone. Watch them do it. Don’t help. Where they hesitate, you have work to do.
None of this requires a budget line or a consultant. It requires a shift in posture: from broadcasting what we want to say to designing for what others need to receive. That shift is humbling in the way all genuine hospitality is humbling—it asks us to decenter ourselves, to imagine the stranger’s experience as carefully as we curate our own.
The good news, in every sense, is that this is deeply learnable. Congregations that make this shift discover it changes more than their websites. Once you’ve practiced asking “what does the receiver actually need?” about a homepage, you start asking it about the bulletin, the annual meeting, the welcome at the door, the sermon. You start communicating like people who actually expect strangers to show up—and who intend, when they do, to be findable.
Ten seconds. That’s the test. Go run it on your own congregation’s site, and tell me what you find.
There is an assumption within the United Church that we are all good communicators. The truth is harsh. We are not. As you say, we communicate in our own churchy language and churchy place. We communicate to ourselves in our unrecognized and unacknowledged echo chamber. That was not true a generation or more ago.
The United Church has always been focused on communication. Our original imprint was Ryerson Press. We had the United Church Publishing House. The Methodist church publishing house at 299 Queen St. West, later bought by Moses Znaimer, became our national office and eventually the main studio of CITYTV. We had a Division of Communication and Berkely Studio, who did remarkable things in various media for decades. There is probably a PhD in church history in all of that.
In the 1990's the Division of Communication, created "Pen, Paper Parlour and Pew". Don Genge was the author. The simple, user-friendly binder which was a "how to" manual on church bulletins, bulletin boards, graphic design and the early use of computers and copiers.
The internet was a toddler then. The United Church was there through an ecumenical, international network partnership called Ecunet. It even-pre-dated the internet by several years. Dr. David Lougheed of VST was an earliest driver behind Ecunet and it's United Church iteration, UCHUG or United CHurch Users Group. There is another untold story there.
The United Church shut down DivCom in 2000, mostly for economic reasons. Berkely Studio was absorbed, restructured and eventually disappeared. We are left with United Church Resource Distribution, or UCRD. It fulfills orders through Shopify.
Our communication skills need a serious reboot. I have seen many position descriptions for ministers in the last few years which say "Skills in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Office required." But where do we learn those skills and concepts as you outline that are specific to the church? I see and hear nothing but crickets. But then I am a luddite. I still use WordPerfect.
“Divine Liturgy at half-ten in the nave.” 😂