11 Best WordPress Themes For Churches [2023]
In this article, we have compiled the 11 best WordPress themes for churches, religious institutions, and non-profit businesses of 2017. Read below to find out how these themes can optimize the functionality of your online presence.
A WordPress website, with the right theme for churches, can act as both a management system and an outreach program for your organization. Unlike businesses and publications, churches and nonprofit organizations benefit from several specific features more than others. The essential features of a church’s WordPress theme are as follows:
Contents
Donations / E-commerce Support
Your theme should have a point-of-sale (POS) system for e-commerce transactions. Donations are an important part of a nonprofit’s financial sustenance, and the best themes for churches will include a transaction system for such giving.
Subscriber Form / Member Login
A WordPress church theme should include a subscriber form, to use with an online newsletter. Churches are behooved to chronicle their membership and WordPress themes can consist of a system for doing just that.
Sermon Archive / Video Player
One of the most significant benefits of using WordPress church theme with a responsive design is the ample video and audio hosting support, offered with many of the best themes. Your WP website can be the perfect home for an archive of your church’s sermon videos, unique event recordings and more.
Look for a theme that includes a specialized plugin for posting and archiving sermon videos. The best themes will allow users to embed their videos from a third-party site—such as YouTube or Vimeo—or to upload self-hosted videos. For self-hosted sermon videos, look for a theme that includes a proprietary video player.
Events Manager / Calendar
Keep parishioners informed about upcoming church events with an event manager and calendar function. The best church themes for WordPress will include some event management system. This allows WordPress admin to send out event registrations and more to listed members. What’s more, calendar functions can sync to Google Calendar and other calendar applications, to inform church officials of upcoming and newly added events.
11 Best WordPress Themes For Churches
Each of the themes included in our list features most—or all—of the essentials mentioned above. However, each theme is designed with a specific aesthetic. Some themes are bold and in-your-face, whereas others are more subtle. Look for a theme that includes both highly functional features and also imbues the spirit of your church’s congregation.
1. NativeChurch: Multipurpose WordPress Theme
NativeChurch is a premium responsive WordPress theme offered through Themeforest. If you’re looking for a highly functional theme for churches, look no further. NativeChurch includes every essential feature for creating your church’s WordPress site. This beautiful theme comes out of the box ready for content integration. It is quick and easy to set up and launch, with no need for a frontend customizer. NativeChurch is an excellent theme for those who lack experience designing a WordPress website.
Design, Features, And Usability
Built on Bootstrap 3, NativeChurch offers a sturdy, elegant, and clean foundational design. It is a sermon archive, event/calendar management system, church store, and more. NativeChurch comes with many pre-made page templates from which to integrate. And, with a one-click demo import function, users can get their WordPress site off the ground in no time.
The theme provides audio and video support for sermons, as well as multiple formats in which to post. NativeChurch features a full calendar of upcoming and past events, as well as an event countdown timer. No need to spend time with a visual customizer, as NativeChurch includes ten pre-built color schemes from which to choose.
Also, NativeChurch offers modern functionality like a selection of social media widgets and a suite of graphic element shortcodes. For a theme that will get your church’s website up and be running smoothly and quickly, NativeChurch is a great option.
2. Risen: Church WordPress Theme (Responsive)
The Risen theme for WordPress is a bold, modern theme for churches and any other nonprofit organization. Its simple color scheme accentuates and drives home your organization’s message while imbuing a professional and straightforward tone. Risen enables the user to choose from several color schemes and fonts—and supports custom backgrounds. This theme is great for beginners and lets you get your website setup and working—fast.
Design, Features, And Usability
Risen includes all the theme essentials for a church’s WordPress site. It features a sermon archive page with photo and video galleries, a church events page with an optional sidebar calendar, a staff profile and members section, a church news blog, and a built-in sermon podcasting feature. Users can configure each function with a wide range of theme options.
Site visitors can search the Sermon Archives by date, category, speaker, or tag. Site administrators can upload audio to be played through a proprietary audio player and embed videos via YouTube and Vimeo. What’s more, Risen is designed with a widget for accepting church donations—straight from your WordPress site. This theme offers all of the features necessary for your church’s website, and it is designed for seamless viewing on any mobile device.
3. ChurchHope: Responsive WordPress Theme
Growing churches will find value in ChurchHope. ChurchHope is fully responsive for mobile, optimized for SEO, and includes e-commerce functionality. With an exclusively built events system, a one-click install function, and audio/video-supported sermon post archives, ChurchHope offers everything needed for a church to grow and thrive.
Design, Features, And Usability
ChurchHope offers many pre-built page templates, and all included demo content is easily imported with one click of the mouse. Users need not have any coding knowledge as ChurchHope consists of a range of tools for backend administration, design, and site construction. Though it does not offer a frontend visual editor or drag-and-drop page building capabilities, ChurchHope provides ease of use, setup, and functional proficiency.
ChurchHope includes a custom built, events system combining several vital functions. These include tools, such as an event countdown timer, upcoming events widget, calendar page and widget, and an event location widget. For donations and a church store, ChurchHope features an exclusive e-commerce platform—complete with a customizable product grid layout. ChurchHope is the best pure WordPress theme for growing churches of any size.
4. Saved: Church WordPress Theme With Homepage Builder
Saved is an energetic and modern WordPress theme, perfectly designed for mega-churches and bible belters. It features a real-time homepage builder, allowing drag-and-drop homepage design from the frontend of WordPress. It offers a bold layout design and the tools for growing a churches membership base. Saved supports newsletter sign-ups, forms, and making donations online. And, it includes an all-in-one Church Content plugin, which contains tools to publish sermons, manage events, list staff profiles and more.
Design, Features, And Usability
Saved is a mobile-friendly WordPress theme and includes a free menu designed for smartphone and tablet viewing. Users can customize the themes color design, fonts, and content elements, all with a real-time, frontend control tool. Saved features high-quality graphics animated effects, designed to impress visitors.
The Saved theme is designed to support high-resolution graphic content, such as images and video. It is retina-ready and fully responsive optimization standards and supports beautiful, fullscreen homepage video backgrounds. Saved is easy to setup and use—even for beginners. What’s more, it includes premium support.
5. Deeds: Best Nonprofit Church Organization WP Theme
The Deeds WordPress theme is simple yet powerful and offers extensive functionality for churches and religious organizations. Its aesthetic is elegant and calming and features smoothly animated graphic transitions. With all the tools needed to manage events, post sermons, accept donations and more, Deeds is the best honestly portrayed and simple WordPress theme for churches—both large and small.
Design, Features, And Usability
A fully featured Events Manager application allows users to manage past and future events, directly from the WordPress dashboard. This includes four event widgets: Event Carousel, Latest Events, Upcoming Event with Video, and Upcoming Event with Counter. The Sermon Manager plugin facilitates the archive and posting of a churches weekly sermons.
Parishioners can be contacted and made aware of special events, with the built-in Contact Form plugin. Best of all, Deeds includes a tool designed specifically for managing prayer requests, to simplify praying. The deed is an excellent theme for churches that handle a large volume of need.
6. Exodus: A Flexible, Minimal Church WordPress Theme
Exodus harkens to the more dramatic parts of the bible such as The Great Flood. However, the theme includes several less intimidating background images as well. It supports all the most essential church theme functions and offers a customizable, versatile WordPress platform for beginners.
Design, Features, And Usability
The Exodus theme comes with all the essentials. Exodus features a striking aesthetic design, as its flat-colored font sits in contrast to the high-resolution image and video backgrounds, serving to draw-in the viewer. This theme is also highly functional and features an Events Manager and Calendar tool, locations integration with Google Maps, staff profiles, and a listing of ministry services.
Exodus is built with an SEO and mobile-friendly design. It supports e-commerce to sell published sermons in the text, audio, video, and PDF—or even a hat carrying your church’s logo. Products and posts are made searchable by topic, title, series, speaker, tag, and date. For any church with high ambitions of growth, Exodus is an important theme.
7. Adore Church: Responsive WordPress Theme
With stunningly beautiful background graphics and high-resolution parallax images, Adore Church will take your breath away. It is retina-ready and fully responsive, so it looks great on all screen sizes and mobile devices. Adore Church provides all of the essential features of a church, charity or nonprofit organization and is easy-to-use for WordPress beginners.
Design, Features, And Usability
Adore Church is built on Bootstrap 3.2 and supports audio and video sermon posts. It features seven pre-built gallery page types, saving you from the hassle of making it from scratch. On top of that, Adore Church includes Working Contacts From, Isotope Galleries, 150 Line Icons web-fonts and so much more.
The locations page supports Google Maps and users can place their Twitter Feed in the designated areas with the latest widgets. For churches of small or developing size, Adore Church provides an easy-to-use foundation for building, launching, and maintaining a church’s website.
8. Divi
Divi offers a wide range of functionality for a church’s website. This WordPress theme is built for multiple purposes, which provides a wealth of customization options and versatility to users. Divi can be used by anyone, regardless of computer coding skills. Theme design and customization are performed through a frontend drag-and-drop page builder, explicitly designed for the Divi theme.
Design, Features, And Usability
When designing layouts with Divi: elements, widgets, and content blocks are automatically fitted to the optimally symmetrical page location. And, with over 45 custom content elements to choose from, with Divi’s drag-and-drop page builder, users can create anything they can imagine. For those that want to get their WordPress theme up and running as soon as possible, Divi includes over 20 pre-made website page layouts and templates, with which to adorn your church’s WordPress website.
9. Creed: Religious And Clerical WP Theme
Creed inspires deeply religious feelings, through evocative demo images and well-constructed page layouts. Visitors will be struck by the smooth, elegant animated elements and graphics. Creed is a responsive, retina-ready WordPress theme designed for churches, nonprofit organizations, and religious or spiritual organizations.
Design, Features, And Usability
Creed’s aesthetics and design elements are specially crafted to promote a more profound sense of mindfulness and reflection. The theme features a drag-and-drop visual frontend page builder to make theme customization easy for users that lack coding skill. The demo content of Creed can be easily imported with just one click of the mouse.
Also, Creed features pre-made site page templates for sermons, events, location presentation, blogs, and donations to name just a few. What’s more, Creed maintains the best practice of SEO code design, which enables your church’s website to be optimally placed in Google searches. Overall, Creed is the best WordPress theme on our list for Churches that offer resources to the underserved and needy.
10. Grace: Church & Religion WordPress Theme
With high-resolution parallax background images and large, bold font schemes, Grace is a great theme for fundamentalist and evangelical churches. The demo content of Grace targets those in the throws of major decisions or that are seeking spiritual solutions. Grace is a theme that is aimed towards answering the unanswerable questions of the human soul. If your church wants to imbue an air of confidence and haven, Grace is a solid theme choice.
Design, Features, And Usability
Designed for churches, study groups, charities, nonprofit organizations and more, Grace has a decidedly christen-centric aesthetic. Visitors will find the usage to encompass all of the most modern graphics transitions and page elements that capture the eye and mind. What’s more, users can take advantage of smooth element implementation with a wide range of included widgets, shortcodes, and plugins.
Grace features a fully functional Event Calendar to keep congregations up-to-date with the latest and upcoming church events. It also includes the powerful Visual Composer Page Builder plugin, which enables frontend customization of your theme’s page layout, design scheme, and every visually interactive element of your site. Grace is modern, professional, and highly functional for religious organizations of any kind.
11. Benevolence: The Best Church WordPress Theme For Churches
Benevolence is the most straightforward and functionally versatile WordPress theme for churches that is featured on our list. It focuses on charitable giving and e-commerce capabilities while also offering all the essential church theme functions. Provided through WPlook.com, Benevolence is the best WordPress theme for organizations that desire a simple site design process and a wide-ranging website from which to conduct their organization’s ongoings.
Design, Features, And Usability
Benevolence features 11 custom post types, a WooCommerce online store, and supports PayPal and Visa payments. It is designed for high-speed optimization, making it easy to showcase images, videos, and audio. It includes an Advanced Theme Options panel, as well as custom Share buttons.
Users can set recurring events via the Events Manager tool and can sync Google Calendar to your WordPress site. Overall, Benevolence is built for transaction facilitation with an automatic donation collection tool. It is the best theme for churches that pursue charitable and mission-based endeavors.
Final Thoughts
The best WordPress theme for your church’s needs must take into account the needs of its parishioners. In the end, a church’s real value is that which it shows to its community. Look for a theme that makes everyone’s lives easier—not their pockets fatter.
Thanks for reading! We hope this article was found to be helpful in choosing between the best WordPress themes for churches in 2017. Please feel free to leave us comments or questions in the space provided below.
