The Church of the Saviour has always been a prime candidate for me in my envisioning what Church use of the web and blogosphere could look like. The ongoing need for narratives of their life together, for the sake of the rest of the church, is a major reason for there to be a network of blogs that exist in parallel to the “social/theological” networking that has happened there for the past 58 years since their founding. Even more since 1976, when The Church of the Saviour divided into what was then 6 sister communities , each a church. Now there are more (not sure what the exact number is).
I put off making a post like this because the whole subject seems intimidating, and I’m also a bit peeved at myself for not seeking out a conversation with someone in the church (or “churches”) about this very topic. I did ask a Servant Leadership School person , but on the last day I was there. I should have started in on that idea on Friday night when I first showed up at the Potter’s House. Often I so wish that I had decided to just pack up and move there (to the DC area) in 2003 when I was NOT finding work (other than a few odd jobs and one 6 week contractor job). But I didn’t , and that possibility seems much less an option now that my son Brain is a junior and in a siginificant-other relationship with a girl. But as I am obviously dealing with online communications, the possibilities are certainly there to do SOMETHING of this remotely, with perhaps more frequent visits to DC (certainly more frequent than once a decade).
A good reason for practically anybody to blog is to discover others with whom we can compare notes on our common concerns and interests. The whole need for the kind of campaign Jim Wallis has undertaken over the past two years (really longer, stretching back to “Who Speaks For God?” back in 1996 and “The Soul of Politics” in 1995, and in years leading up to that with Sojourners magazine being a rather steady voice for the “novel idea” of a politic for the church. Church of the Saviour has long been a “model” of church to which Sojourners has pointed , and has also been the location of many a “suggested visit” for people wanting to personally visit Sojourners Ministries. The Web , and the increasing toolset of technologies growing up in the Web-o-sphere is making it harder for churches to ignore the task of utilizing these tools to enhance community by enabling connectivity between members and churches.
The history of the Servant Leadership School has its roots in the School of Christian Living of The Church of the Saviour, which was devised and envisioned and “curriculum-ED” with an idea of a People’s Seminary in mind. That church membership carries with it commitments to immerse one’s self in intense “counter-cultural” ways of being.
I wonder what possibilities there may be for me to be a “Mission Group” (or not “me” , but a PART of a group, locally based, that has a mission of enabling the “telling of that story” and “inviting participation” in creating a portal that houses an online “Servant Leadership School”. I hope to return to DC (with family) next spring break (late March, early April 2006) having already begun the infrastructure on my own hosting system, where I am concurrently “playing” with Community Server (dotNet blogs, forums, and Pic galleries), Typo3 (a CMS running on PHP/MySQL), WordPress blog, and my active Movable Type blog. Dot NetNuke is also something in which I’ve “dabbled”.
As I was deeply researching all these possibilities in 1994-97, I have gained quite a bit of technical expertise since working in Web departments of two denominational agencies. I think I have some momentum here, even to the point of having a dawning realization that there may be something of a very specific CALLING here (that is, helping to BUILD OUT the online structure and capabilities of The Servant Leadership School)