On Thursday I launched FrChrisWalsh.com. Fr. Chris Walsh is a longtime friend of mine, and one of the most future-oriented, hopeful, effective priests I’ve met. To my knowledge, his personal website is one of the first of its kind in the country. Not many non-celebrity priests have any real web presence.

They should. I see a few opportunities for priests created web portals:

1. Direct Contact — A vestige of the bureaucracy that so much of the Church adopted over the years, and which the egalitarian web disdains, is artificially limiting access. Derek Sivers talks about this. Picking up the phone, as it were, is a simple and often revolutionary thing. No voicemail system, no “press 5 for…” commands, no red tape. Just a human connection. This is what direct email and Twitter access does.

2. Priests as Dynamic Personalities — Any church or school worth its salt has at least a shabby website at this point. Practically zero priests or religious have any web presence. This is due partly to the fact that many are old, and more or less hostile toward new media that they’ve chosen not to engage, and partly due to a lack of digital guides to youthful priests who might be curious, but lack technical expertise to extend their existing ministry work into the digital space through a personal site. The market hasn’t caught up to a place where there will be demand, in other words.

Pastors, priests, and religious are dynamic personalities. The right (or wrong) CEO can make or break a business. So it is in the church. Great priests should have sticky web portals to connect their faithful with them regardless of their given ministry. A great pastor who leaves your church for his next assignment after a few years shouldn’t disappear as a part of your life or as a spiritual influence.

3. Approach to Priesthood/Pastorship — One of the things we’re featuring on FrChrisWalsh.com is an “Approach to Pastorship” page, where Fr. Walsh will be posting a write-up essentially explaining what led him toward the priesthood as a vocation, and the strategies around which he leads his parish and school communities. This includes: extent to which he focuses on building/improving physical infrastructure, pedagogically unique decisions, approach to homilies, approach to evangelization/conversions, demeanor in the confessional, etc.

This is something inspired by Brad Feld‘s Foundry Group “thematic approach to investing” page. Being candid about a leadership/life approach can lead toward follows, and toward new priests and a more passionate faithful as people learn specifically how to buy in to your leadership approach.

4. Daily Video Reflections — Given the shortage in priests, and the massive demands on their time, blogging is a luxury for which there’s rarely the time. But for those with iPhones/Androids, self-recording a short 1-2 minute daily video reflection can be a simple, easy way to blog while sharing a bit about what life is like day-to-day for a priest. Record the video, upload it from your phone directly to your YouTube account, which can be set to auto-post it to your Twitter and Facebook pages. Done. You’re building connections through sharing, showing people what the priesthood is like in a practical way. It’s an evangelization tool that takes fewer than 5 minutes per day.

5. Homily Audio — A new thing Fr. Chris Walsh will be trying is recording his homilies on his iPhone during Sunday Mass and posting them to his personal SoundCloud account. His parish already ustreams video of the full Mass, but we think there’s a potentially even larger audience for audio of just his homilies. At minimum, a web audio archive of his homilies over time can become a nice way to demonstrate his approach to preaching as he continues in his career across different pastoral assignments.

The magic of Fr. Walsh’s site, though, is in its structure. While there are a few pages that present content (like the About page) the site’s core areas are all structured so that everything that will drive visitorship — video reflections, audio homilies, ustream broadcasts, and of course Twitter and Facebook updates — can be done through his iPhone, in a mobile way.

It’s my hope that more priests take a page out of Fr. Chris Walsh’s book, and realize they have a personal brand (whether they’re nurturing it digitally or not), and that brand, that reputation, can evangelize both existing and new audiences for the faith.