This video playing in the background showcases people entering one of the campuses while talking casually, a coffee talk set up where a lot of people are smiling and having coffee in a big room, a band on stage, and a talking (most likely preaching) onstage. One of the things that caught my attention the most is the racial and ethnic diversity of the people presented in the video and the 'casual' feel the video showcases. This coupled with the words 'something different' really starts to give an idea of one of the things the Epic Church wants to showcase- diversity and inclusiveness.
In this same homepage there are various links to other parts of the website. Due to the nature of this assignment, I have ignored the navigation bar at the top and let myself be led by the website content itself. Under the initial video, there are two other sections: a section that leads to other parts of the website (information on baptism and recordings of the services) and a section that showcases their locations and links to more information about them. That's it. True to what I mentioned before, there are a lot of visuals and very little text. This showcases a lot of creativity. As someone who has had to create websites before, there is definitely a message they want to transmit and they definitely think the best way to do so is through engaging the audience with creative visuals through videos and even the very aesthetic design of the website.
At the footer of the website, there are links to their own YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even the app store showcasing their very own app. This in a sense shows they are very well connected to the secular world, and aware of what captivates the attention of the present youth, which heavily relies on social media such as Twitter.
Out of the two links under "something different", I decided to follow the "watch now" link. This link leads to the recordings of the services portion of their website. This is peculiar since they link to these twice in the homepage, meaning this is a very important part of their website for them. Once under this page form, one finds the list of the recorded services with a small text description, and a big visual picture containing the title of the recording. A peculiar thing to note about these visuals is that they are designed to seem, in a sense, very colorful, creative, and 'cool'. Some of them even contain pop-culture references, like emojis. Even more on the subject of pop-culture, the titles of some of these recordings are direct references to popular online phenomena such as hashtags, phrases, and even memes. To prove this, some of them are shown below:
One last thing that really caught my attention was under their "Get Involved" section. Under this there are groups for youth and kids, showing the Epic Church is very present in engaging with younger generations. Even more interesting were their 'Life Groups'. These groups meet at a certain time a week, in a certain location, and have a certain number and type of members. These life groups are very interesting due to their nature, which is seen through their titles; there are life groups for everything from volunteering at a certain location to watching and discussing Football together. The life group search engine linked to on the Epic Church website is shown below:
As is visible from these screenshots, there are different types of life groups, dedicated to different things and aspects of life that bring certain people together. These life groups along with the showcased diversity and coffee talk show how important community is to the Epic Church's religious identity.
Overall, by looking at the Epic Church's website layout, and design I obtained an idea of this church that makes it feel like a community that is dedicated to: interpersonal connections, a sense of community, diversity of thought/experience/background, maintaining integrity and relevance within popular culture, keeping up with the youth, and telling their story through the use of media.
I would speculate from what I know and have seen up to now that the religious identity of The Epic Church is one centered on bringing a group of people with a diversity of backgrounds together into a community of common interests.
