Parkcrest Small Group Locator
Parkcrest Christian Church knows that filling pews is not enough when it comes to sharing the gospel. As a church, they’re more interested in creating active believers who are engaged in their neighborhoods than people who merely consume a weekly sermon.
It’s one of the reason I decided to keep going to Parkcrest after spending six months of church-hopping around Long Beach and Orange County when I haphazardly landed in Southern California six years ago. So when they asked me if I could help them build a microsite to help people connect with a small group, I had no hesitation. Not only have I been a part of a small group for the entire time I’ve been at Parkcrest, but it’s hosted by my Be Thou Awesome business partner, who would be building the site with me.
The site is pretty simple, really, and came together in less than a day of design and coding. It’s not that we didn’t put a lot of forethought into the site, but that the tools we used really streamlined our process. We painted the design on top of Nathan Smith’s awesome 960 Grid System, then developed a working wireframe in WordPress. From there, we discovered SimpleMap, a plugin that allows you to create a database of locations and ties them into an interactive map using the Google Map API. Very slick and straightforward.
I only started going to Brent’s small group after his wife badgered me in person to visit. It took a lot of guts for her to approach me and I’m sure not everyone has that kind of courage. I’m pretty dense socially, so I probably would have benefited a lot from a simple website I could use to find a small group rather than having to approach someone myself. I hope this site does that for someone.
