Telling the Story of a Church on the web

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United Methodist Communications has as its Mission Statement: "We help the Church tell her story".  That works as an excellent theology/rationale for Church Webs.   The Web must tell a story.  This is the best kind of "brochure".  It has VOICE.  It tells the stories which embody the connections between what draws us together and what God calls us to do.  The Church is God's corporate structure for us,  to support the work.  Our work is preparation (waiting, discerning) and responding by doing a divine act of collaboration,  throwing our tools in the hat and taking on roles as ministers to a particular mission. 

We can now "illustrate" the process by relating the stories of our process of waiting,  and how waiting happens to us and what we think about and how the waiting turns into discovery of our gifts,  and how our community helps us to bring those gifts to the conscious and work with it and begin to focus it as a tool for a particular mission. Online community has been the underlying structure and power of the growth  of the Internet to the point where the mass collaboration on Networking it brought to be suddenly awoke the powers behind the commerce engine.  ONline communities drove the impetus toward further standardization, so that more groups in more diverse areas could "talk to one another" and share information,  which often was research which required collaboration and fine tuning.  TCP/IP and finally HTTP emerged as an widely extensible solution to the problem of connecting a wide variety of computers speaking/sending slightly different languages.  TCP/IP also addressed the problem of "finding a way" for the messages to get to some other place,  and to get there intact.  The desire to collaborate,  and the "exchanges" neccesary to do this in an educational/scientific research environment,  was the force that instigated the creation of the network protocols of the Internet. 

The Church is a collaboration laboratory.  There is the work of God in our midst,  which seeks an avenue to us and through us and among us.  God flows in and out and among us,  and in that context,  gifts emerge,  calls come,  and people mobilize out of a sense of purpose and interdependence.  There is a drive to remain constantly connected to the dialogue and the sense of the spirit's activity.  It moves among people in face-to-face gatherings,  and it remains with them as the community on mission takes on a sense of "being in the air" as the people move out to their "other lives" which now seem to become subservient to the larger extended family to which they connect through mission. 

Lauren is one member who finds, receives,  and sends out to Church members a steady stream of "issues links" and articles and bits of news about Church members.  Often when I see any of the messages,  I think of the Weblog format and how I really want to set up a "community blog"  where things can be posted,  news offered,  comments made,  and make it "subscribable" (so in this case it would be news aggregators on Web browsers and Portable PCs and Net Connected phones with Palm-powered OS's).....

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© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:38:15 PM.