I’m a Pastor With No Coding Background — Here’s How I Built My Church’s New Website in One Saturday

Pastor Mike (not his real name) leads a 220-person church outside Austin. For two years he’d been trying to get a new website built. Two years.

The first quote came in at $14,000. The second was $9,500 plus a $300/month maintenance contract. The third dev shop ghosted him entirely. Meanwhile, the church was still running on a 2014 Squarespace site that didn’t work on phones, didn’t have a sermon archive, and listed a service time that hadn’t been right since the pandemic.

Then on a random Wednesday in October he texted me: “Is this Claude Code thing real?”

I told him to clear his Saturday.

Saturday morning, 8:47 a.m.

Mike showed up at the office with a laptop, a printout of every page he wanted, and an extremely large coffee. He’d never used a terminal. He’d never written HTML. He had opinions about fonts and that was about it.

By 9:15 we had Claude Code installed. By 9:32 we’d run our first prompt. By 9:48 we had a working homepage with the church’s actual name, address, and service times rendered in a typeface he liked.

This is where his face changed. Up to that point, I think part of him was waiting for the catch — the moment where the AI demo collapses into “just kidding, you still need a developer.” That moment never came.

What we built (and what it cost)

By 4:30 p.m. that afternoon, the site had:

• A homepage with service times, address, and a map
• An “About” page with the staff and elder bios
• A sermon archive page that pulls in audio from their existing host
• A “What to expect when you visit” page (his favorite, by far)
• A simple contact form that emails the office
• An events page that’s easy for Mike’s assistant to update
• A “Give” button that links straight to their existing donation processor

Total cost so far: $0. Hosting on Vercel: free. Domain (he already owned it): $0 incremental. Claude Code Pro subscription: $20.

I’ve had four people text me this week asking who built our new site. I keep telling them — I did. With my pastor brain. On a Saturday.

The part nobody believes

What surprises everyone (including me, every single time I do this) isn’t that Claude can write code. We’ve known that for a year. What surprises everyone is how much of the “hard part” of building a website turned out to never be the code. It was the deciding what you wanted, the writing the words, the picking the photos, the having an opinion.

And it turns out pastors are excellent at having an opinion.

Mike already knew exactly what he wanted to say to a visitor. He’d been saying it from the pulpit for ten years. All Claude did was take that and turn it into a website. The bottleneck was never engineering. It was access.

What Mike learned that you should learn too

If you take one thing from Mike’s Saturday, take this: the gap between “person with an idea” and “person who shipped a thing” just got a lot smaller. Not zero. Smaller.

You still need:

• Three hours of focused time
• A clear idea of what you actually want
• The willingness to be a beginner for an afternoon
• A laptop and an internet connection

That’s the entire list. There’s no fourth bullet about “learn JavaScript first” or “take a six-month bootcamp.”

Where Mike is now

The new church site has been live for three weeks. Mike already started a second project — a small app that helps the elders track which families he’s visited and when. He built the first version in about an hour. He’s adding the next feature this Saturday.

I asked him last week what he’d say to other pastors thinking about this. He thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Tell them they don’t need permission. They just need a Saturday.”

Amen, Pastor.