The Internet is a double-edged sword for churches. It has certainly opened new communication channels, providing easy access to worship schedules, activities and sermons as well as the ability to spread the Word far beyond an individual congregation’s four walls. But online connections in church facilities also carry risks, from user exposure to inappropriate content to sabotage by outsiders. As a result, churches must protect their staff and members from temptation as well as legal liability.

We confronted this dilemma at Fellowship Bible Church in Nashville, Tenn., a progressive non-denominational Bible church that held its first worship service in a local high school just 10 years ago and moved into a permanent home on a 75-acre campus in 2003. Today we have about 4,000 members, one Saturday and three Sunday morning services, 350 volunteers working in our children’s ministries and in other capacities on any given weekend, and innovative programming ranging from our annual Express Festival of the Arts weekend to marital self-help classes based on Emerson Eggerichs’ book “Love & Respect.”

We also have about 85 computer workstations, 100 users and an Internet café in a junior and senior high school hangout – known as “The Spot” – that opened in an old farm house on our property in 2006. The Spot is a vital part of our student ministry, as seventh through 12th graders can watch TV, play XBox games, do homework and even nap on overstuffed couches. They can also surf the Web on the two PCs in the room or on their own laptops using a WiFi connection. That open environment was the catalyst for adopting Internet filtering.

Combating e-Temptation

For us, going wireless at The Spot and elsewhere on campus was a wakeup call about the need to place controls on Internet usage on church property. Even before, we knew that the Internet posed challenges to the spiritual health of our staff members and congregants. Through the church grapevine, we had heard of cases where staff had lost jobs because of inadvisable Web surfing, children had gained access to disturbing online material by sneaking into unlocked offices, and one church’s servers and workstations had even been confiscated by law enforcement officials for investigation into questionable online activities.

Now we had the added concern that students in The Spot or wireless users in any of our six buildings could freely access undesirable Web content. In addition, anyone sitting in our parking lot might use our wireless network to send a spam e-mail that would get us blacklisted and unable to send regular email messages to our congregants – or, worse, to reach objectionable Web sites that would open the church to lawsuits if the activity was ever traced back to our network.

The one who sounded the alarm was Elliott Wood, a senior network engineer with our technology partner Solerant. He not only pointed out that Internet abuse could affect the church adversely but also expressed our responsibility to help church members and personnel resist the lure of the Web’s more unsavory elements. In essence, his message was that of the 23rd Psalm: “Lead us not into temptation.”

“Keeping a clean Internet connection helps keep temptation at bay,” Wood said. “An addict will find a way to reach Web sites that will feed his addiction, but if you have someone who’s just depressed or having problems, Web content controls can keep him from just making a bad decision one day. Controls also help people from making unplanned mistakes, like clicking on something like PersonalAds.com that pops up on otherwise acceptable Web sites.

“Opportunities abound for people to stumble. It’s a church’s duty to prevent that from happening as much as possible, and that includes moral policing on the Internet with some kind of content control program,” Wood added. “For any organization that’s interested in the spiritual well-being of their users as well as protecting against liability exposure, it’s helpful to at least put some obstacles in the way of temptation.”

Perimeter Defense

To that end, we turned to an Internet-filtering product that was designed specifically for organizations with 10 to 200 users and little or no in-house IT expertise. We chose it for several reasons. First, it filters every computer on the network without requiring software installation or configuration of settings on each machine. It is simply installed between our Internet router and computer network, so it stops unwanted Internet traffic before it gets to any PC or Mac in our system. That includes laptop computers that students might bring into The Spot. Regardless of where users are on the church’s property, we’re covered. Second, the database of blacklisted Web sites is automatically updated on a daily basis to keep up with changing online content. This eliminates the need for manual database downloads by a church staff member or outside technical consultant, saving considerable time. It also ensures that we always have the most current filtering capabilities so that new Web sites that should be blocked don’t slip through the cracks.

Third, we have complete control over what we do or don’t block. We can specify which Web site categories we want to ban, block additional sites by URL or keyword, and create white lists that permit access to specific sites that would otherwise be off-limits. We can also block or allow individual IM, chat room, newsgroup and peer-to-peer file sharing programs, and we can establish different policies for different groups of users.

Control It Your Way

With the software decision made, we proceeded to customize the product’s settings using the easy Web access management console to fit both the church’s mission and our staff needs. This setup process involved simply checking menu choices and typing in a handful of URLs to create exceptions. No technical expertise was required.

As our default setting for all users, we elected to block Web sites in 20 categories ranging from adult, alcohol, dating/personals, drugs and gambling to hate sites, lingerie, pornography, profanity, sex, swimsuits, tobacco, violence and weapons. We allowed Web sites in 15 other filterable categories, including auction, e-commerce, entertainment, jokes, news, sports and stocks.

In addition, by placing checkmarks in the appropriate spots on the software’s default setup menus, we blocked all instant messaging programs except for MSN Instant Messenger (which we use internally) as well as the Gnutella, EDonkey, FastTrack and BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing programs. These settings would help guard the church against problems such as user downloading of copyrighted, infected or objectionable material while also helping conserve bandwidth for church business – a key fringe benefit.

Next, we turned to creating special settings to accommodate the varying needs of individual church departments. This was a simple matter of clicking “Create New Policy” on the setup screen and going through the same point-and-click setup menus as before to tailor the settings to each user group.

For our graphic arts/communication staff, for example, we blocked only eight site categories instead of our standard 20 and created a custom list of eight allowable sites such as GettyImages and iStockPhoto to provide access to image portals that would otherwise be blocked for inappropriate content. For our student ministry pastors, we created exceptions to enable them to reach sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube required for their work. For our congregational care ministry, we unblocked specific sites such as RestoringSexualPurity needed as references for counseling purposes.

Settings can be modified at any time simply by going back into the same menus and checking or unchecking the various options. I typically adjust the filter configurations every month or two in response to changing conditions such as staff requests for access to additional Web sites. Recently, for instance, we amended our settings to unblock YouTube because of a need to provide user access to material such as mission trip footage, short training videos and content used in our student ministry.

I can also adjust the settings on the fly from the office or even from home to accommodate a user who needs immediate access to a given online resource.

Beyond Safety

First and foremost, our Web content management strategy protects the church and its congregants from exposure to online material that would be spiritually detrimental. It not only prevents accidental encounters with unwholesome content but also thwarts unhealthy online behavior by users struggling with impure urges, whether their personal tastes run to gambling, cybersex, prostitutes or other illicit activities.

Individuals who try to access blocked content while on campus receive a popup message explaining that their request violates the church’s Internet usage policy. In this way, we help avert the temptation of the moment and hopefully help users resist negative impulses even when they are not on church property. This approach also minimizes the risk of litigation related to Internet use.

Our content control system also provides insight into the kinds of forbidden sites that users try to access. Several times a month, we check the software’s usage logs to determine what kinds of policy violations have been attempted. The logs list the blocked Web sites requested by users and the number of access attempts for each. Over the long term, this may help us further refine our system settings to improve our defenses against inadvisable Internet use.

Beyond these critical protection measures, there are additional benefits to Internet filtering that we did not anticipate when we decided to impose Web controls. Arguably the most important is that we are able to reduce the amount of network bandwidth consumed by Internet activities unrelated to church business.

Fellowship Bible Church runs almost entirely on Fellowship One’s Web-based church management software, relying on that system for everything from contribution accounting and check scanning to class check-in and event management. The more we grow, the more bandwidth we need for our daily operations. Any extraneous Internet traffic simply wastes T1 and cable bandwidth from our two Internet service providers and puts us that much closer to having to invest precious resources in upgrading our broadband connections. With EtherShield, unnecessary Internet usage is limited.

In addition, Internet filtering helps increase church staff productivity by curbing the amount of time that can be spent on personal Internet activities. If you can’t play online games or search dating sites looking for Miss or Mr. Right, for example, you are going to get more work done. In a very real sense, then, Internet filtering is an extension of our ministry.

Any church is made up of people with their human weaknesses. Our mission at Fellowship Bible Church is to help our staff and body mature in the faith and give their lives away to live the meaningful life that God wants us to experience. The modern world is filled with challenges and distractions that complicate that mission, including technology challenges like the Internet. With the growing centrality of the Web to our everyday lives, churches need to face this particular challenge head-on.

J. Mac Brown is Operations/IT Manager for Fellowship Bible Church (www.fellowshipnashville.org).