I can hardly begin the blogging of 2003. It seems so intimidating. There were scary times when I went through a second prostate biopsy in 18 months (in March , after the one in September 2001), disapppointments , like not landing a job I thought I might be getting, and then continued to draw blanks in the search for work. I worked frantically at various “possibilities” for projects that seemed to promise some ongoing work.

Then, the Old Saint George development began as decade-long discussions about “Great Good Place” and “Online Community” began to be talked about in terms of specific projects, and actual web development started.

There was now an organizational umbrella for me, and a leadership driven by my friend Larry, who tells people to whom he introduces to me how I was raving about the Web before either he or anybody else was paying it much mind. From the beginning, we both had a tug and a sense of call about something that was “emergent” in the communication technologies, and this was a key component in communication that required due attention by the Church.

I was to be , and remain, a dabbler and experimenter in specific applications for Online Community. Larry and I met at an event that represented for me a first step in this journey toward a new expression of the Blessed Community. This was Ecunet, who held their first official gathering (first at least to my knowledge) in the fall of 1992, in Dayton. Someone told me , upon my introduction, that there was another person from Cincinnati present, and I found Larry that way. I had just finished my MA in Religious Communication the previous year, and had come away with a vision for online communications for the Church. My model at that time was Compuserve, which was the largest online service at the time. I began a discussion on Ecunet called “A Compuserve for the Church”.

After a couple of stints as a help desk worker, and a computer consulting company who provided talent to Procter and Gamble, I took a job in Nashville as a Web developer in a denominational publishing company. Although I felt I had been hired largely on my vision for what religious publishing could do online, I rarely felt that my passions for building online community were given much thought. BY 2000, I was already wondering what might be next for me, because I was losing hope that there would be an avenue in this position that would utilize my passions for the things of Online Conversation and “telling our stories” online.

I began talking to Larry more frequently, who had become involved at Old Saint George in 1993, had an office there, envisioned the Coffeehouse and Bookstore that could be esatblished, along with various other uses of the facilities there which had been the parish of Saint George Catholic Church. What began as a “Christian Ministry Center” begun as a largely denomonationally-based Campus Ministry collaboration, evoplved into “Old Saint George, A Great Good Place for Community and Spiritual Renewal”. The Pilgrim Place Coffeehouse and Pilgrim Place Bookstore have since been upand running, as well as a Cyberlab and wonderful facilities for group activities, events large and small, and office space.