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WordPress is rapidly becoming the defacto CMS for church websites, with it’s quick install & massive collection of plugins, you can quickly turn a WordPress blog into almost anything you need for your church. Still, you are going to need a look for your new church website – here are some themes that lend themselves to church websites.

BONUS THEME – Moses Theme by Church Themer

Moses Theme from Church Themer is a beautiful minimal theme that comes out of the box with custom post types for sermons, MP3 audio, social networking and more. It’s a great theme that will fit many churches & includes a very nice home page FEATURED content slider.

» Grab Moses Theme here

Minimal – Elegant Themes

Minimal is an elegantly designed theme with a large central feature slider & 3 front sections for key ministry focus areas. ElegantThemes all come with a great control panel for managing your entire site from the admin panel – super easy.

» Grab Minimal here

Aperturious – UpThemes

Aperturious is designed as a photo featuring blog, however it lends itself nicely to a ministry focused website. While it doesn’t have a central home page – you can easily make one, and the blog part of this is exceptional for church sites focusing on community ministry. Great for showing the visual side of your church.

» Grab Aperturious here

Caulk – Brian McCulloh

Caulk is a modern theme designed with a magazine focus. This allows it to fit into a church setting very well. With a large feature slider on the home page plus extra feature item areas, you can quickly feature large events, and highlight smaller activities all from your home page. Elegantly designed, well put together this theme could serve your church very well.

» Grab Caulk from ThemeForest here

MixxMag – Rocket Themes

MixxMag – a very vibrant and fun magazine style wordpress theme. This theme would work really well for an emerging church with a slightly younger age. Great featured slider, key focus panels and heaps of links to deep content – this is a great theme for getting your message out there.

» Grab MixxMag from RocketThemes

Moxy – Rocket Themes

Moxy is another Rocket Themes, theme. Suffering a split personality, Moxy is on one hand elegant, fresh and clean, on the other vibrant, colourful and energetic. The top section of the theme contains a novel content slider, the bottom a lovely soft content rich area. This is a favourite theme of mine.

» Grab Moxy from RocketThemes

Afterburner – FREE from RocketThemes

Afterburner is a stripped back, magazine style theme focused on speed. There is little to sing and dance about this theme, visually. However when it comes to simply letting your church content speak – it’s perfect. With a large feature area, simple layout and great navigation – this theme allows you to quickly build your site and style it to match.

» Grab Afterburner (FREE) from RocketThemes

Outreach – Studiopress

Outreach is a theme built on the Genesis Theme Framework. While this means the theme isn’t the cheapest, it’s one of the few actually built specifically for churches. This theme is beautiful and ideally suited to church wordpress installations. With it’s large visual feature slider (fader) and central ministry blocks, Outreach has all and more of the features your church needs in a website.

» Grab Outreach & the Genesis Framework here at StudioPress

Church – Studiopress

Church – of course I couldn’t have a collection of WordPress themes for churches without a theme called “Church” – although I’m debating having this in here. Pretty simplistic & dated looking now, Church is a theme that has a simple featured area but leaves the rest of the site looking very ‘blog’ – still I’m sure it’ll find some uses out there

» Grab Church from Studiopress

Smarter – Cozmos Labs

Smarter really is a smart theme. Ideally suited to a church, the featured message box allows you to highlight a bible verse or mission statement or …. right above the featured event slider. This theme is very elegant, easy to read and lends itself to showcasing sermon messages.

» Grab Smarter from Cozmos Labs

Overeasy – Woothemes

Overeasy is very similar to Smarter on the home page, however the sub pages of each differ a lot. Overeasy contains a mix of page layouts allowing you flexibility in layouts for blog pages vs content pages. WooThemes all come with a fantastic control panel, all the assets & great support – just what you need to make setting up your church website a breeze.

» Grab Overeasy from WooThemes

Make your own?

If you are wanting to make your own WordPress theme for your church? Go for it, just don’t waste heaps of time recoding the same old stuff over and over – I’d highly recommend the use of a “framework” to take much of the grunt lifting out of your development process. Themeshaper have a great article on how to use a framework to craft your own WordPress theme