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Beginning of Comm Project

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National Services on an ecumenical level

I was so intrigued with the resources at my disposal on services such as Compuserve and later America Online. Prodigy never offered much in the way of download, but still kept my interest because of its "quick news and scores" that I could log on and check whenever I wanted, along with all the stats of all the players (which I always loved).

When I found Ecunet, I was filled with anticipation about the potential in this movement toward electronic communication. I had acquired a copy of Bizlink, a great relief to my sense of frustration in navigating Ecunet from the "action" prompt. I was very quickly drawn into a national conversation. The experience was quite unique, and very different from the other experience of looking for utilities I could use, or news of interest to me. There was some of that available on Ecunet, but the thrust was definitely on "Virtual Community".

Ecunet provided me with a feeling of "connected-ness", and gave me a very different sense of ecumenicism than I had ever had. I came to feel a real sense of power in the idea of the church really beginning to reach across not only denominational lines, but across lines of geography and time and space. The whole scene of interaction in the theological community moved from a social, expectation-filled , often intimidating experience of "performance" and intellect to one where I could feel at ease in my ability to write my thoughts and ideas, and to receive feedback and questions inviting elaboration of my ideas.

This community, and our little part of it, have come to represent in a very large sense, the center of what I recognize as my "Context" for ministry. My very first public meeting was "A Compuserve for the Church", where I began to explain my desires to see built a communication and resource system for the church, with Compuserve looming large because of its dominance in the world of online services. I had seen the "shopping malls" on Compuserve, and the many forums representing many interests and fields of work.

I had begun to envision a huge publisher's database of books and resources, all online and with electronic features that would allow "shopping" across publishing house catalogs by subject, or by any other field of choice. The advances in electronic publishing forms and multimedia only recently have made this scenario all the more feasible and possible, as has the explosive growth of the internet and the proliferation of electronic documents that populate the net.

The national online services arose out of two diverging trends. The mainframe computer databases used by large companies, the government, education, and the military, and the small, local individually operated Bulletin Board systems (BBS's). Rheingold tells the stories of the beginnings of the BBS movement, which gained a following initially from computer hobbyists, and later, as PCs became common consumer items, became more accessible to larger audiences, and support at many levels of computer usage became common on BBS's.

The skills of accessing databses were brought home to the personal PC, so that soon services such as Compuserve grew by leaps and bounds as they added different features to their already extensive databases, ( till then largely business related information dominated their files). In the past couple of years, many database keepers and database software companies are developing increasingly user-friendly interfaces, as are the online services and the BBS software writers. Now the race is to provide interfaces to the Internet. Multimedia developments extend possibilities for the concept of the interface even further.

Locally run BBS's are also an avenue in which I would like to see church experimentation and utilization. To be able to "log on" and engage in forum or get various kinds of information about the church, or perhaps for potential members to get a "flavor" for the kinds of activites and emphases of the church; these are some of the possibilities. There may also be a way to interface local BBS's as "nodes" for theological education, just as we are doing here. I look forward to hearing of the uses to which Paul and the North Georgia Conference will put their BBS. And perhaps someday soon, to be able to help in designing one, and even setting it up.

What I have described in these preceding pages has been my experience of the world of current developments and the place the church can have in them. It is in the church, where I have sought to find my appropriate expression of ministry according to the gifts I have received, that I look outward at the developments amongst us and see a connection and a place to place my plow; to do my proper part.

My experience at United Theological Seminary has been crucial to this development of my sense of ministry. Indeed, it was where this calling was brought out of me; "called forth" from the "where" I had travelled, and from the "who" I had become because of it. I feel very fortunate that I have been able to be brought to a disciplined focus on this matter in such a program as this. I have found the interaction to be both stimulating and personally stirring. I have found that my initial hopes about the possibilites for community enrichment in Computer mediated Communication have been heightened, and my conviction about my place in all of this strengthened.

JT, I am very grateful for your initiative and leadership in this effort. For all the intangibles and unknowns as we enetered into this, I have been encouraged and certainly gained quality instruction and human interaction. You have been an MVP at United Seminary and for the Christian Community at the crest of the 21st century.

David, I greatly appreciated getting to meet you and talk with you in Dayton, and to hear from you on a larger scale online since then. I have been reading "Theology in A Digital Age" and your "sequel" handout since then, and have enjoyed them and been challenged. I hold your work in these areas over the past 10 plus years to be invaluble to our Christian community.

To all of you, my comrades in technology and ministry, I hold you in high esteem. This little "sample" of community we have here also contains in it a sense of the whole community, and some sense of the vastness of it. My prayers are out for each of you as we continue to explore in our contexts the implications for the church in the information age.

What I've written is my description of a context ----which is the world of possibilities existing for the church. I don't understand what we are talking about "focus-ing" on. I have stated that my specific project will be the New technology Review Newsletter, in both print form and online interactive form. BUt this was not the purpose of the paper describing context. The length of it was due to the nature of what I was to "describe". David and Paul had both affirmed how difficult it was going to be to describe.

The best way I know how to describe what I've said in a short way would be: My context is the ecumenical community, including any in the community who are seeking to find relevant applications to use for ministry in their own context. I have put in an order at a printer for envelopes in which I will send out the letter and mission statement I showed the group last month, and my logo for "New media Communications" has a line which reads "A Human Interface Between the Church and Technology". I guess this would be the best "one-liner" description.

Like I have said before, if I specilaize too much, I lose the audience. No one takes calculus before basic math. People need that initial "introduction". Computers themselves have grown that way. They have moved from being number and word crunchers to full blown multimedia machines, video editors, communicators, and virtual reality. None of these specilaties would have grown up without people first learning how to use the computer for simpler things at first.

If you want a better idea of what I will be offering in the way of the project, take a look at the New Technology Review Online meeting, and all its 11 branches. Here you will be seeing the further fleshing out of my "focus": Being an Interface to the theological community; an information manager of sorts. Kind of like these handbooks "......for Dummies" or ".... for beginners". Thanks for the questions.