Christian Standard’s New Website Aims to Serve the Whole Restoration Movement
The new Christian Standard website is designed to make the breadth of the Restoration Movement more visible, searchable, and connected. This article explains how the project developed, how AI tools are expanding access to Christian Standard’s archives and ministry resources, and how churches and partners can help support the work.
- The new website positions Christian Standard as both a content creator and content curator for the Restoration Movement.
- AI tools are helping make articles, ministries, churches, events, podcasts, studies, and archives more searchable and accessible.
- The long-term vision includes searchable archives back to 1866 and broader support for ministries across the movement.
By Jerry Harris
I write this on April 3rd, four days before the launch of the new Christian Standard website, wondering what the implications will be as all the painstaking pieces begin to come together, creating a platform for all of the expressions of our movement. By the time you read this, those implications will have had some time to be measured and its impact will have begun to be felt. As a preacher, I tend to think in terms of story: how something came to be the way it is. So, I think it might be good to let you in on that story and how I perceive God working in it for his kingdom.
Where It Started
It’s hard to put my finger on the place to begin because there have been a number of beginnings. I have written previously about how The Solomon Foundation became aware of Christian Standard’s impending consignment to history in 2016 and the news of that coming to the TSF board from Doug Crozier, a board that I happened to be a part of. I could begin with an article I wrote years before, “Rediscovering the Sacred Stones,” that fostered a Restoration Movement appetite in me that eventually created a pathway to my becoming Christian Standard’s publisher. I could even go further back to sitting in Homiletics class when Don DeWelt brought in the first edition of One Body to share with our class. But I think it would be best to start the story closer to today.
In August of 2025, I scheduled a meeting with Tom Thatcher through our editor, Shawn McMullen. Tom served as professor and Provost at Cincinnati Christian University and currently serves as co-founder and Chief Analyst with The Elemental Group, a consulting and grant-writing firm. I was looking for funding for CSM and Tom had been one of the few successful grant writers to receive Lilly Foundation grants for ministries of The Restoration Movement (over $55 million in total grants). As I shared our need with Tom, I could feel his passion for our movement. It transformed the conversation from money to a greater vision, sparking ideas in me that weren’t there before. The big takeaway from that initial meeting was this: Virtually every ministry in our movement is in competition for market share: churches with other churches for members, missions with other missions for financial support, financial institutions for investments—all of them. Christian Standard isn’t in competition with anyone and virtually “one of one.” My thought was, “if we didn’t have to compete, then maybe we could become a catalyst to promote all the ministries of our movement.” But how?
A Providential Connection
In November of this year, I was asked to participate on a panel discussing “The Reversal of 1906” at The Nehemiah Conference with Orpheus Hayward, Rick Atchley, and Leonard Allen. The topic of our discussion was reunification among the streams of our movement. It was received extremely well. At that same conference, I attended a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in ministry led by Wes Woodell. After the workshop, I spoke to Wes and learned that he was already working with Renew, one of our strategic partners, on their various projects. Our conversation continued at ICOM a week later, and I invited Wes to do a deep dive on our website.
What Wes came back with was simply astonishing! First, Christian Standard had more content than he had ever seen, but it wasn’t searchable using key words, topics, or indexing. He told me that even with the 1.2 million that presently interact with us in a year, we were only reaching 1-5 percent of our potential audience! Later that week he informed me that our website, christianstandard.com, is a tier 1 Google website, considered reliable and authoritative enough to appear on the first page of any related search result. Very few sites are Tier 1 and Wes had never worked with one before. Apparently, it comes from our history (160 years of publication), the amount of content we’ve produced, and the fact that Standard Publishing (as Standex International) was a publicly-traded company on the NYSE. I had no idea that our website was Tier 1, or even what it meant. But it led me to think of how we might leverage our Tier 1 status to help all the ministries of our movement.
In January, we began the process of a top to bottom change in our website to allow people to see the whole of our movement on a single platform. The platform evolved from an editors’ meeting the previous month where we realized that our independence had left us without a clear view of our movement as a whole. Since all the ministries of our movement are forward facing and public on the internet, we were able to harvest all we needed from the content they had already created. This enabled us to see ourselves not just as a content creator, but as a content curator. It would also answer a different question from the traditional, “What is the Restoration Movement?” which we have answered many times, to “Who is the Restoration Movement?”
How AI Is Helping
The use of AI tools made possible what had previously been thought impossible. Our content from 2005 to the present became fully searchable. (Just enter your name into the site-wide search bar and if you were published in Christian Standard during that time frame, it will list you.) But what about all the ministries? The top line of the site divides the various ministries in Restoration Movement churches by category, subdivides them by Independent Christian Churches and A Capella Churches of Christ, and then provides a listing of those we know. In the interest of fairness, the listings appear alphabetically and the content boxes are of the same size. AI generates descriptions from what has already been produced and also provides links to the web, social media, emails, and staff. It even connects to related Christian Standard articles.
The Directory connects to 11,800 churches in our movement and can be searched by name or region. Church leaders can claim their church and add any pertinent information they wish.
Everything on the site is free, with the exception of the print magazine. The site includes recent jobs postings, an events calendar, 1717 Studies (a six-year study with questions through the entire Bible), news, and an opportunity to sign up for our free twice-a-week newsletter. Over 50 of our podcasts are there, as are conferences, cohorts, missions, higher education, church planting, publishing, finance, church design, and consulting. There are archived issues that go back to 1966 that you can read and free resources you can take advantage of.
More To Come
Incredibly, in the coming months, we will be working on making Christian Standard searchable back to 1866! Until recently, we could only view these files digitally, but with AI, we can also search-engine optimize it all the way back to the beginning! Think of it … all those voices, over 100 million words, silent for decades, get their voices back again! We will also produce an AI chatbot that will answer your questions from Christian Standard’s collected content.
There’s still plenty we wish to do, and for that we could use your help. We are asking our largest churches to help us with a substantial yearly gift for the next five years. Some have already committed. You could remember us in your annual mission budget. A number of churches are doing that now through $1,000, $500, $250, or even $100 annual gifts. We are presently working on advertising packages for our website and we still have room for more strategic partners. We want to let the world see this movement as a whole and when they do, it’s impressive!
The Cane Ridge Revival gave birth to our movement in August of 1801. At that time, only about 15 percent of Americans attended church. After Cane Ridge, that number swelled to 50 percent! That’s a revival we could use today! In 1801, every church in America had a denominational name and hierarchy. Cane Ridge was the root of the tree of non-denominationalism.
Four years ago, Ryan Burge observed that non-denominational churches had become the largest subset of non-Catholic churches in America at 13 percent. Southern Baptists were second. This year, non-denominational churches represent 30 percent—that’s 13 percent to 30 percent in only four years! There are 128 million church goers in America, which means 41 million of them are independent. I wonder how many of them are looking for a movement they can connect with, learn from, and flourish with? If we can leverage the power that comes from our unity, what can we achieve for the kingdom of God? We can do that while maintaining our autonomy and independence. Our goal at Christian Standard is to capture all of that calling and passion that put you in ministry in the first place and bind it with the calling and passion of everyone else to show the world what God can do with a Savior, a Bible, the gospel, and the voices outside of a blue ash log cabin in the wilderness of Bourbon County, Kentucky!
Author: Jerry Harris
Jerry Harris is publisher of Christian Standard and former teaching pastor at The Crossing, a large, multisite church located in three states across the Midwest.
