Church Web Schemas

I 've been thinking for quite some time about who has ever considered seriously the prospect of hosting Church webs that design Webs with ministry in mind?  I have thought about for quite a while a data schema that would provide a multi-church web that would also do "matching" of similar interests/ministries in much the same way as Amazon does their "People who bought this book also bought these books",  but matching them with Ministry emphases,  comparison of rankings of selected "theological issues" and existence of certain kinds of ministries.   An ecumenical organization with ties to the Internet and Web programming would be the most well-suited to such an endeavor,  and really would be the only legitimate host of such a schema.   The denominations (like the Southern Baptists) who already have a "pay for features" hosting system are limited by their own narrow focus.  

I think of Churches who are socially and politically involved whose ministries intersect with interests and concerns of even "secular humanists" (I say that with a great deal of sarcasm because I do not believe those who are labeled as such are such evil people -- many of them are sincerely passionate about helping real people and real socail problems...and much of the reason many of them are "unattached" to the Church is becasue of the widespread absence of Churches in combatting many social problems today).   The attempt to "normalize" data that describe ministries and relate them to categories that are best theologically derived is an important task of the Church and theological institutions,  and this task is valuable to "enlisting" people to be colaborators with Churches who are doing this work.  Of course,  there are also scores of theolgical categories and issues that are not so "worldly" but nevertheless worthy subjects of exploration,  and there is really no reason for Churches not to cross denominational lines to find "common ground" and introduce their members to one another.

Of course,  this would help denominations intheir desire to promote growth within their own group becuase it would allow members of their own churches to find other members in other churches with similar interests.This data could also be joined to Weblog community servers,  and utilize RSS subscribing between weblogs of members,  denominational headquarters,  ecumenical groups,  and weblogs focused on specialized ministries of all types  (like me and my Web Development for Churches interests)

An article elsewhere from someone else thinking the same way,  at least it appears to: Inside Saddleback: Church web Development 

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:37:35 PM.