Sanctuary Church WordPress Theme

A free, modern WordPress theme that helps churches launch a clean, welcoming website — no developer required.

Sanctuary Church is a free WordPress theme from PrimeBible.com built to help churches create high quality websites with little technical experience and low cost.

The goal is simple: give churches a modern, welcoming website foundation that can be installed in WordPress, edited visually, and launched without needing a developer for every text, image, service time, or ministry update.

Why churches choose Sanctuary: it is free, fully responsive, editable with the standard WordPress block editor, and ships with practical starter pages and built-in Plan Your Visit and newsletter handling — so a small team can get a professional church website online fast.

Table of Contents

• Who This Is For
• What The Theme Includes
• Installation
• First-Time Setup
• Editing Pages
• Menus
• Forms
• Recommended WordPress Setup
• Support the Project
• License
• Developer Notes

Who This Is For

• Churches that need a clean, modern website without starting from scratch.
• Pastors, ministry leaders, volunteers, and admins who want to edit pages visually.
• Church plants or small teams that need a free website theme with practical starter content.
• Developers helping churches launch faster while still keeping the site easy for the church to maintain.

What The Theme Includes

• A church-focused homepage design.
• Starter pages for common church website needs.
• WordPress block editor support for visual editing.
• Customizer settings for service times, contact details, social links, buttons, and footer text.
• Navigation menus for the header and footer.
• Built-in Plan Your Visit and newsletter handling.
• Responsive design for phones, tablets, and desktops.

Installation

1. Download this repository as a ZIP file from GitHub.
2. In WordPress, go to Appearance > Themes.
3. Click Add New.
4. Click Upload Theme.
5. Upload the ZIP file.
6. Click Install Now.
7. Click Activate.

After activation, go to Appearance > Sanctuary Setup for the in-dashboard setup checklist.

First-Time Setup

1. Go to Appearance > Customize > Sanctuary Church Settings.
2. Add your church's service times, address, phone number, and contact email.
3. Set the homepage countdown day and time.
4. Update the header button label and URL.
5. Add your social media links.
6. Update the footer tagline and newsletter text.
7. Optionally add a Contact Form 7 form ID if your church uses Contact Form 7.
8. Publish your changes.

Editing Pages

The theme creates starter pages for:

• Home
• Explore
• Ministries
• Sermons & Media
• Events
• Plan Your Visit

To edit a page:

1. Go to Pages in the WordPress dashboard.
2. Choose the page you want to update.
3. Edit text, images, headings, buttons, and sections with the WordPress block editor.
4. Click Update when finished.

No code is required for normal page updates.

Menus

To update navigation links:

1. Go to Appearance > Menus.
2. Choose the menu you want to edit.
3. Add, remove, or reorder links.
4. Save the menu.

The theme supports a primary menu and footer menus.

Forms

The Plan Your Visit form emails submissions to the contact email set in the Customizer. If no custom contact email is set, it uses the WordPress admin email.

The newsletter form emails the same address with the new subscriber email so the church can add the person to its preferred mailing list.

Recommended WordPress Setup

• WordPress 6.0 or newer.
• PHP 7.4 or newer.
• A secure hosting account with HTTPS enabled.
• Regular WordPress, theme, and plugin updates.
• A backup plugin or hosting backup plan before making major site changes.

Support the Project

If Sanctuary Church helps your ministry, here are a few ways to help others find it:

• Star this repository to boost its visibility.
• Share it with other churches, pastors, and ministry volunteers.
• Open an issue to report a bug or request a feature.
• Submit a pull request to contribute improvements.

Learn more at PrimeBible.com.

License

This theme is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 or later.

Churches may use, modify, and share it under the terms of that license.

Developer Notes

The theme currently loads Tailwind and Lucide from CDNs to keep installation and handoff simple. If a site needs a stricter production asset policy, replace those CDNs with locally built assets before deployment.