I see numerous articles on Church and the Web speaking of the Web as this vast, powerful evangelism tool. I agree with one significant condition: That the strength of the Web and its potential for thw Church lies first and foremost in its “formation” potential , and through that, becomes an effective tool for evangelism (because for me, the most persuasive and powerful approach to evangelism is not some kind of “smooth message” — which is a marketing approach — but a story telling, “human voice-centered” (ala Cluetrain) communication of what kind of difference can be made by living in community and becoming responsible stewards for the spiritual care of each other….which involves not only dialogue around issues of inward journey — the contemplative stuff, but also exploring together the “outward journey”, which is the “mission” aspect; the “ministries” to which we are called.

As many of you may know who have read this blog since its beginnings almost 2 years ago, much of this is straight out of the concept of Church lived out in the community of The Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. There, in the midst of a deperately needy and tumultous neighborhood of Adams Morgan in D.C., this band of followers founded by Gordon and Mary Cosby in 1947, have had such significant impact on not only the neighborhood, but on the vision of numerous other churches in this country who have heard about their community and often send teams of stategists to observe and hopefully absorb some of the envisioning that is happening in the COS community.

What I derive from this phenomenon of Church of the Saviour is that their story gets out, and often depends totally on the traditional media of print and word of mouth, powerful , of course, in their own right. But I can’t help but feel that the potential for aggregating a powerful “suite” of communication tools is reaching an apex in this day of the dawn of the blog. By combining blogs, dynamic data driven Web sites, web forums, digital photography and rapid maturation of multimedia that is accessible to increasing numbers of folks, the story telling power of the Web has siginificantly matured.