Three years ago, in July 2011, I started a theme shop. It was an era where many people in smaller niches were yet to be discovered by developers as a force to be reckoned with. The “The Long Tail” principal hadn’t yet sunk in, at least not enough for churches to have viable WordPress theme options available to them.
Churches were being grossly under-served in every WordPress theme marketplace. The most common option for them was to customize their favorite “photography” or “design agency” theme, somehow seeing past page after page of irrelevant stock imagery and the thousands of “shortcodes” they wouldn’t be using. Sprinkle in a few plugins, and say a prayer – maybe, just maybe, this would work.