A couple of years ago, likely in response to a perception of too much political correctness in the observance of holidays with a religious origin, there was a big movement to “put ‘Christ’ back in Christmas.” The notion was that too many people were watering down the origins of the holiday, calling it Xmas or the generic “holiday season,” and generally allowing it to be a progressively more consumption-centric affair.

Well, with the Christmas holiday upon us again, I thought it was fitting to highlight an enthusiastic Christian web start-up in this installment of FreshTech Friday. That’s not to say that I’d place one religion or spiritual point-of-view ahead of another. In fact, I love the fact that other religions and ethnicities have formed equally powerful traditions at this time of year to celebrate.

But, leaving personal beliefs out of it and being objective for a moment, the most recent numbers on record are that Christianity is the world’s biggest religion, period.  And, at last count, over 3 out of 4 people in the U.S. claimed Christianity as their faith. But, even though 78% of Americans consider themselves a Christian, only 40% attend a church every week. Further, the Christian population has been declining, relative to other religions and even that nebulous survey category “unaffiliated,” especially in the traditional church denominations, like Lutheran, Episcopal, and others.

Not surprisingly, one of the biggest areas of decline is youth, especially the young adult Net Generation, which is the biggest generation since the boomers. Why don’t Net Gen-ers join a Christian church? There are many reasons: churches can be hard to locate; there is a lack of information about the potential experience (i.e., what the church service itself will be like); and, once a church is located, you still don’t know who else attending the church is in your age group until you go there – and even when you go, they may have missed the service, study, meeting, etc.

Enter Zetify (at http://www.zetify.com/). Zetify is a Christian ministry aimed at helping people connect and explore their faith, in the words of its founder Jeff Collier, “with parties, apps and love.” The Zetify vision came from Jeff’s personal experience as a young adult – first in New York, then in Silicon Valley – having difficulty finding a local Christian community using the internet.

Being a designer and developer with prior work experience at high traffic sites like ESPN.com, Jeff dug into the problem and quickly formed the opinion that most Christian content online is disorganized and poorly maintained, resulting in a disjointed search experience.

So, like any good entrepreneur, he set out spending much of the past year talking with churches and Christians to better understand the gap. With his technical background and strong design aesthetic giving him a unique advantage, Jeff created Zetify and began building a web service that he believes streamlines the search process for young adults, simplifies the online Christian experience, and he hopes will help churches increase their membership.

Ultimately, the goal is for Zetify.com to serve as the front door to all Christian content online. If you visit the website, you’ll see that it is powered by a series of apps, with each one aimed at organizing a specific piece of information. Zetify’s biggest app in current production is the largest online American church directory with over 200,000 churches in 97 denominations.

Jeff has big plans for Zetify, not from one single app, but the ability to connect content from all the apps in meaningful ways. For example, he eventually expects to be able to aggregate most online Christian content – created by two primary sources, churches and ministries – on a macro and geo-micro scale using Zetify.com’s content, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, and advanced Web crawling. By thoroughly mapping their content, he intends for Zetify to possess the deepest knowledgebase of what’s going on in Christianity, with an unprecedented ability to deliver real time and historical Christian information in an organized and usable fashion.

Big plans indeed! What’s the business model for Zetify? Like mainly entrepreneurs, Jeff’s still figuring that part out. But, I like the core of the idea behind it, because it solves a very real problem for many people – that is, how to connect with a community of belief (in this case, Christianity) that matters to them. And that, my friends, regardless of your belief, is a problem worth solving as we celebrate this time of year. See you in 2010!