A few of you have probably already seen this but for those that haven’t the United Methodist Church has revamped their entire website to look a bit more “social.”

But don’t worry if that scares you, they still have their normal site here.

They apparently really like Google’s Friend Connect and are leveraging it very heavily, which I find fascinating because the heavy use of a very specific service can actually hamper adoption, use, engagement, and can ultimately close doors.

I’m not sure that’s what they were hoping to do.

But otherwise, I’m liking the site, for the most part.

It’s a bit slow on load in some circumstances and their coding base needs some work, and they definitely need to work on their permalink structure because web addresses like these are super-ugly:

http://www.10thousanddoors.org/site/c.ruI4KbMRIvF/b.4877557/k.BF1F/Home.htm

But you should seriously take a look. It’s definitely a few takeaways here that I really like.

In addition, RWW caught up with Miiacom‘s Bayard Saunders, one of the developers of the site:

“The big idea,” he said, “was to serve the content of the home page like a giant tag cloud based on feeds from news sources, blogs (including Twitter), keyword searches, site paths and referring pages.

So by design, the site is constantly refreshed and always highlighting the most relevant content based on the most current topics relevant to seekers.

It is ground-breaking, certainly for an official religious denomination’s website,” he said. “And it’s been quite an interesting experience, designing a web presence for ‘the God account.’”

I’m marinating on the last line here with the ‘God Account’ card, but that’s a post for another day.

I’d like to imagine that more denomination-centric websites will start incorporating more social aspects and features, but one of my biggest concerns is that the attachment is with an organization and not people and Jesus Christ.