Thursday, July 14, 2005

The suckiest church website ever

BITB has started a trend of checking out church websites. Peacebang points to a nice one. And everybody and their mother is linking to some guy named Tony who wrote 10 easy ways to keep me from visiting your church because I visited your website which maintains that church websites must have neither photos of the church, photos of the minister, photos by amateur photographers, photos of flowers nor too many photos and must include pictures of at least one "normal person," which I assume means "normal" by media standards so "a young white person in the 95th percentile of attractiveness, Jennifer Aniston will do nicely."

What you write on the site is comparitively unimportant as long as you make it clear that you will feed the guy salvation in easily digestible chunks and help this guy and his pals walk the paved and well-lighted path to Jesus. Letting him figure your church out for himself is WAY unacceptable.

And don't worry about listing too many ministries, cuz, you're supposed show what you value through the pictures you choose. (It's amazing how everything that is wrong with our society manifests itself so neatly in some people.)

It doesn't violate ALL of Tony's rules, but the crappiest church website ever has to be the old site for Community Church Unitarian Universalist in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Available as a mirror site. Imagine. Leaving your old mirror site up for half a decade, much of the information out of date. Tony would die.)

But one night a really depressed grad student surfed by and found a church where things she'd believed for most of her life were actually in the sermons, sermons that were just plopped on the church's main page. (How terribly unfashionable!)

So she went to church.

That was fall. By spring, she'd named herself Chalicechick.

CC

9 comments:

Rev NDM said...

Is there an annual ritual/ceremony to mark this auspicious transformation? :)

Chalicechick said...

I've sometimes privately thought that I should have one. Novels always have the time someone changes their name signify a great change in life's direction and indeed a renewal of self. Though I didn't actually change my name, that effect is noticable.

CC

jfield said...

If you have a "forest name" you can't really make fun of hippies you know.

Chalicechick said...

A "forest name?"

I'm assuming that doesn't mean.

"My name is Chalicechick. People call me Chalicechick."

But I'm not sure what it does mean.

CC

jfield said...

Do you remember Julia "Butterfly" Hill? Butterfly is her forest name. One
of the clearest ways to know exactly how much of a hippie wignut a person
is is if they have a nom de thing (stolen from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
if memory serves.) As in, I'm not Lebowski, I'm the Dude.

But don't worry, I won't tell Jess. :)

TheCSO said...

Eh, I don't think it counts if you don't use your, as jfield says, nom de thing offline. CC doesn't call herself that offline, for which I'm quite thankful. I'm completely agreed that the forest name thing is dumb.*

Also, CC smells nice, which rules out her being a hippie right there.

*Well, ok, unless you pick something like "Superfly" for your forest name..

-theCSO, who doesn't even use that name online except for UU blogs, and who STILL doesn't like "Imagine".

jfield said...

Unless you think Patchouli smells nice.

Of course I'm thinking of that bit in Raising Arizona:

Do you make the balloons into funny shapes?

Not unless you think round's funny.
http://www.moviewavs.com/cgi-bin/mp3s.cgi?Raising_Arizona=round.mp3

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