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Beginning of Comm Project

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Information and Resources

I have always been "into" resources. When I was in Youth Ministry, I collected them. I still have a vast library of them. I also visited book stores and looked for the latest resources. I also did a lot of reading from the beginnings of my Christian journey. When video technology reached the consumer, I was enthusiastically incorporating it into my ministry.

At a time when most of the seminary students at Southern had just basic Black and white TV's in their room if any TV at all, I had a color set, and before I was out of Seminary, A VCR (this was 1980). I hauled the TV and VCR with me every weekend to Cincinnati from Louisville, utilizing popular movies and TV shows as springboards for discussion.

My passion for utilizing technology led me to eventually leave the vocation of church staff ministry and seek a place in communications ministries. I ended up selling and installing video and audio electronics until I came to United in January 1990 to pursue the Masters of Arts in Religious Communications. Some of those specifics I related in the Personal Perspective. It was in the process of pursuing this degree that I began to see the developing possibilities between the coming of age of the personal computer, and the task of effectively communicating within the church and to the outside world.

My first excitements were in visualizing the way churches could utilize the phone connections to find, exchange, and offer resources for ministry. I took with me to CAMCON (Computers and Ministry Conference, Dayton 1992) a diagram showing a menu structure that I thought would make for easier navigation of an online system designed especially for the church.

I acquired Bizlink software at that conference, and logged onto Ecunet. I had previously tried to use Ecunet, but without Bizlink, I was "naked" before the Unix commands. I didn't know what to do. With Bizlink, I was able to begin to look around, and see what people were talking about. What I saw in this world didn't seem to focus much on any other reasons for using a system like Ecunet other than talking to one another. I certainly valued this piece of it very highly, but I thought there could be more.

I had come into the world of personal computing via the Amiga computer. This was because of my interest in Video. My father-in-law had bought an Amiga for its editing and titling capabilities. When I arrived at United in 1990, one of my "student" jobs was to get the audio/video studio back into some organized, working state. The studio had two Amiga computers for help with video editing, but they had been virtually abandoned over the past two years.

For computers, two years is like a lifetime of developments. (Kind of like the human years/dog years kind of thing).

The Amiga was much more like a Mac than a PC. Graphically superior to PCs at that time, and with a much more friendly user interface, I perceived the PC world for quite a while as the world where guys with pocket protectors and thick glasses were the main users. When MIcrosoft Windows came into the picture, I began to see a shift.

All of a sudden, there were more people buying these machines which had been on the market for 7 or 8 years. Prices plummetted, and now people were buying PCs for their kids (yeah, right!), when before the only computer for a kid was the Apple (schools were dominated by Apples in the early to mid 80s). People held back, mostly I think, because there was this perception that IBM was so huge that any other kind of computer would be squeezed out.

It seems that when the user interface for the PC was made more "graphical" and "intuitive", the confidence in the possibilites soared, and more buyers created competition among the now many players in the PC-compatible market, and more buyers created more factories, and competition brought lower prices.