Calvary Christian Church website: how we built a multilingual church site

Calvary Christian Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts has been on Boston's North Shore since 1947. On a Sunday it gathers in Lynnfield, in Salem, in Spanish, and online, and its people speak English, Spanish and Portuguese. When they asked me to build their new website, the real question wasn't what it should look like. It was how one multilingual church website could welcome every one of those people without feeling like three sites taped together.

Here is how we built calvarychristian.church, what I'd point out if you were sitting next to me scrolling through it, and what any church can take from it.

Who Calvary is, and what the site had to do

Calvary is an Assemblies of God church with a big heart for its neighbors. Sunday alone looks like this: services in Lynnfield at 8:30, 10:30 and 12:30, a Salem campus at 11:00, Calvary en Español at 3:00, and an online service at 5:00. During the week there are kids clubs, youth nights, young adult Bible studies, senior gatherings, Celebrate Recovery, missions teams and a theater ministry.

That is a lot of church. The website had three jobs:

1. Help a first time guest find their service and feel welcome, in their own language.
2. Help members find what's happening this week without calling the office.
3. Let the staff keep it current themselves, without a web person in the middle.

A church website in three languages

In the header, next to the Give button, there's a small switch: EN · ES · PT. Tap ES and the site becomes "Bienvenido a casa." Tap PT and it's "Bem-vindo ao lar." The menu, the headlines and the welcome copy all change with it, so a family who speaks Portuguese at home reads the same warm welcome as everyone else.

We didn't bolt on a translate widget. Those tools are fine in a pinch, but they guess, and a guest can tell. Each language on Calvary's site is its own real version of the page, stored in their content system, so the church can have a native speaker review a phrase and fix it in a minute.

If your church has more than one language on Sunday, this is the thing I'd push you on first. Your website is usually the first time someone hears your church speak. It should speak their language.

The design: their people, their colors

Every photo on the home page is Calvary's own people. Friends hugging in the sanctuary, a dad and his son, conversation in the lobby. There isn't a stock photo of a stranger on a mountaintop anywhere on the site.

The look is warm and simple: bright orange on clean white, a bold modern font for headlines, and a handwritten accent font for small touches. A rotating "Get connected" stamp sits on the hero photo and gives the page a little life without getting in the way. We carried the same orange into new email signatures for all 24 staff members, so an email from the church looks like the website does.

The flow: first time guests first

I build every church home page in the same order, because it's the order a guest thinks in. I wrote about it in church website layout, and Calvary is a good example of it working at a larger church.

Right under "A safe place to explore your faith" are two buttons: Plan your visit and Watch online. Next to them, one tap opens campus and service times. Below that are three cards for the three reasons most people show up: I'm New, Watch a Message, and Give.

Then the page slows down for members. This week's message, a short welcome and the church's story, ministries for every age from Calvary Kids to Community Groups, a Connect Card, and the next few events. The footer repeats the service times and the address with a link straight into Google Maps.

The Plan your visit page answers the nervous questions before anyone has to ask them. What to wear (whatever you're comfortable in), how long the service runs (about 75 minutes), where the kids go (check in, birth to 5th grade, with a background checked team), and which campus meets when.

The integrations: one site, everything connected

This is where a church Calvary's size either gets a site that runs itself or a site that goes stale in three months. Here's what's plugged in:

Planning Center. Events come straight from their Church Center calendar, so the staff update them in one place. Guests can filter by ministry (including Hispanic Ministry and each campus), switch between list, week and month views, add any event to their own calendar, or subscribe to the whole thing. Registrations, the Connect Card, prayer requests and "Share your story" all run through Church Center forms. I explain the difference between embedding and truly syncing in syncing Planning Center with your church website.

Sermons. New messages sync in from YouTube on their own, organized into series with the speaker and date. The sermon page also points to the Spanish YouTube channel, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, so people can listen however they like.

Watch online. The Watch online button goes to their live Church Online Platform service, so nobody has to hunt for this week's stream.

Email and search. A "Stay in the loop" signup feeds their Constant Contact list. Behind the scenes, the site tells Google exactly what Calvary is (a church, its address, phone and social profiles) using structured data, which helps them show up well when someone searches for them.

Their content system. The whole site runs on Sanity, a content editor the staff log into like any other app. Service times, events, staff and every language version are theirs to change.

How it scores

Our free website health check gives calvarychristian.church a 93 out of 100. You can run the same check on your own church site and get a score and a short report in a few minutes.

What your church can take from Calvary

You don't need five services and three languages to learn from this build.

Speak your guests' language, literally if you need to. Show your real people. Put the first time guest first on the home page. And connect the site to the tools you already use, so it stays current without anyone babysitting it.

Calvary trusted me with their front door, and it has been a joy to build. If you'd like a site like it for your church, book a time to talk with me or read about our custom church websites.