If you’ve been paying attention, you probably know that churchthemes.com has released an absolutely incredible WordPress theme, Resurrect, designed specifically for churches. We’ve given you an overview before, but right now, I’d like to give you a review from the inside of this WordPress church website theme.
If you’ve been paying stalker-level amounts of attention to my posts over the past month, you’d know that I recently undertook a new project at church: redesigning our website. Given this task, I immediately wanted to switch over to a WordPress site from our current Joomla-based site. My lead pastor and I went back and forth over this, but the battle was won as soon as he saw Resurrect.
With that bit of introduction, let me give you the top three features of Resurrect that make say, “Every WordPress church ought to buy this theme for their website.”
1. Church-Specific Structure
It’s hard to describe how sweet it is to have a theme that is specifically designed for the needs of a church. Resurrect, powered by the Church Theme Content, boosts WordPress, adding Sermons, Events, Locations, and People to go right alongside Posts and Pages. To explain further, using the theme and plugin, you can add a sermon/sermon series, calendar event, church/campus location, or even a staff member with the same ease and skill that you are used to adding blog posts. Honestly, how much easier could it be?
2. Page Templates & Custom Sidebars
Now, to add those sermons, events, and whatnot, you have to have a page set up to display them—I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, of course—which you establish by selecting it’s template: sermon, events, etc. So, your pages are not only automatically set up to display all the varying bits of info you post, but Resurrect also allows you to assign widgets to the sidebars according to the pages’ template. That means that I can create custom sidebar menus and add page-specific widgets to truly customize each page. Thus, my events page has a specific sidebar menu that matches the needs of that page. My sermons page has not only its own sidebar menu but widgets (theme-specific widgets) that display my church’s sermons by speaker, topic, sermon series, and even book of the Bible. Super awesome, yes?
3. Looks & Layout
I have always loved WordPress, but I had to admit that my leader pastor, in our discussion over WordPress vs. Joomla, had one great point about WordPress sites—they don’t look like websites. They look like blogs. Resurrect, thankfully and wonderfully, does not. It looks like a website. Sure, if you know WordPress, you’ll be able to see some telltale signs, but to the average user, it looks like a slick website that probably cost us quite a bit of money. (It didn’t.)
Feel free to check out my church’s site, if you’d like. Of course, we’re still working out the kinks, still moving stuff here and there, still finding typos and other small mistakes, but the theme looks amazing!
I’ll close this review like this: I love Resurrect and wish that a similar theme was set up for bloggers/authors like myself. If you’re looking to build a WordPress site for your church, I’d freely recommend that you buy Resurrect from churchthemes.com.
Would you consider buying Resurrect for your site?
If you have a theme that you like, please share.
Mason Phillips says
We use Resurrect for our church website and so far it has been a very good experience. The sermons section is great for anyone who wants to post their media. While it doesn’t have everything I want, the developers are active and I believe that some of these features (like video podcasting and event RSS) will become available.
Phil Schneider says
I couldn’t agree more, Mason. Thanks for the comment!
Steven Gliebe says
Thank you for using Resurrect and sharing your experience. These are some things we have in our list of features to consider. We consider all suggestions and will be adding features in highest demand first. Something we plan to do is setup an ideas board for people to suggest and vote on features.
Phil Schneider says
Hey, Steven! Love the idea of being able to suggest and vote on ideas. Sounds awesome!
Matt Smith says
I love this theme. Truly one of the best WordPress themes out there.
Phil Schneider says
It certainly is, Doctor.
(How often do you get called that?)
Matt Smith says
Not as often as you’d think now I’ve hung up the bowl tie for good.
Phil Schneider says
I see. Well, I’d never let it go. Every time I’d bump into you, I’d be, “Why, hello, Doctor!”
I’m a child like that.
Eric Dye says
It’s true.
Jason says
This template has worked well for my church, but I’m having some trouble with one of the pages. When you click on our “Events” page, it lists all our blog posts. In the edit mode of the Events page, however, it lists all the events that we’ve entered. Can anybody help?
Phil Schneider says
Hey, Jason. I’ve got an idea of what the problem might be. Can you send us a link to your site?
Patrick Chapman says
Hi, I’m not very smart when it comes to this but I’m having a hard time editing the static home page on wordpress such as changing the pics and videos and everything. How do I do it?
Phil Schneider says
If you go into the support section of the site (once you’ve logged into your churchthemes.com account), you should be able to find a guide called Homepage. It’s pretty detailed.
But as a brief answer to your question, you edit the homepage by adding “widgets” to the pre-determined ares of the page. You can find the Widgets menu on the WP Dashboard under “Appearance.”
I hope that helps!
Dani B says
I’m trying to purchase this site but i keep getting a message Missing stripe. Please help. I’m excited about the template and eager to get this posted. Thanks
Phil Schneider says
That’s weird, Dani. If you got to their contact page and submit a question, they answer (usually) within 24 hours. Personally, I’ll look into their new theme Maranatha (CMag review forthcoming). I really liked Resurrect, but I LOVE Maranatha.