Next Page

Previous Page

New Media Communications Home Page

Beginning of Comm Project

Index for Communication Project

An Emerging Communiations Center Model (6/4/94)

This Christian Ministries Center opportunity came knocking on my door in the past month. It all actually began for me two years ago when I attended CAMCON (Computers and Ministry Conference) in Dayton. There I met a guy named Larry Bourgeois who was, as it turned out, also from Cincinnati. Since then, we have kept in touch, mainly because we both have an interest in what the other is up to in our separate but related vocational sense of calling.

Larry had run a coffeehouse/bookstore on the West Coast, and was a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. He has specialized interests and knowledge in both books and coffee. He had come to an interest in computing much for the same reason as librarians and other "gatherers of books": to help "catalog, categorize, and locate particular books.

Let's for a moment go all blurry and transition back to where I was when I cam to CAMCON:

I had been thinking about the shape of online services for the church. I too had always been interested in resources and books for theological challenge and edification. I had also become intrigued about the new communication technologies that were being developed, largely via the computer platform.

I had been visualizing some online service menu structures that would allow more ease in searching for resources. I dubbed the idea "A Compuserve for the Church", after seeing the early version of their Windows information manager interface.
I imagined an opening screen like the following:

1. Denominatons
2. Subjects
3. Organizations
4. Movements and Scholars
5. Help and About

Following a particualr choice such as denomination (#1), a second layer of the menu structure would be accessed. Here, we would be presented with something like:

1. United Methodist Church
2. American Baptist Church, USA
3. Presbyterian Church, USA
4. Episcopal Church
5. United Church of Christ
6. 6. Etc. (and the list goes on, probably alphabetically or by keyword)
   

In our example, let us choose #1 once again, and be presented with a list once again (and these lists could well be a Windows type interface with checkboxes, icons, or the like). Choosing item 1 will then present us with :

1. Seminaries
2. Cokesbury Bookstore
3. U.M. Communications
4. The Circuit Rider
5. Forums
   
   Choosing #1 would get us a list of the seminaries, and so on. Within each of these choices, there are links to the same resources that could be gotten to through a different path, such as, "Online education" as a choice under the menu for "United Theological Seminary", which is a choice under "Seminaries" in the menu above. The "Online Education" choice would then contain choices which are maintained by other groups involved in Online education at the seminary level. United's menu could be accessed via another menu found by following a different route from say, The National Council of Churches chosen as the initial route via the "Organizations" choice at the initial screen.
   
   

When I first envisioned this scenario in my head, I was thinking of this in the context of a particular online system, such as one based on the "Compuserve model". Now, this "ecumenical" system could actually span multiple systems, and link to an unlimited amount of resources and sites via the Internet. There exists today a "net-wide" menuing system called "Gopher" (because of its origination at the University of Minnesota).

Gopher systems are linked to each other through the basic interconnecting protocol known as "Telnetting". The base Internet commands for moving form one Internet site to another involves typing "telnet uc.eng.edu", or some such command that tells the Internet computer to connect to uc.eng.edu, which is University of Cincinnati English dept. address (I think). Gopher is itself an interface which hides these commands from the user, so that they need only make a number choice, and the proper information is brought to the screen (or, I should say, they are taken to the proper place where the information resides). Across the lightning fast communication lines connecting the Internet computers, this process takes no longer than calling up a particular file on your own computer (provided there is no problem).

The "infrastructure" for the kind of cross-linking of theological education and resources I was thinking about two years ago has unfolded before my eyes since then. In December of 1992 I picked up a book called "The Whole Internet: User's Guide and Catalog". It was then the definitive and authoritative book on the Internet. It was also indicative of the fact that the Internet was not yet a user friendly place. The Unix system on which the lion's share of the Internet ran upon was a difficult highway to navigate.

A proliferation of books and "How to Connect" have flooded the computer book bookshelves and made the cover of all the computer magazines. It still remains a maze to most people, and access is in still somewhat muddied waters. America Online has begun to offer some of the most user friendly tools to date to their subscribers.