I started this blog back in mid 2002 with an idea— and that’s where Theoblogical was born. It is the idea that there is a role for blogging (and by association, Web technologies in general) in the method and shape taken by knowledge and interpersonal communication in the theological world, and online community is emerging from the geeky subculture Where Wizards Stay Up Late (the book written in 1996 chronciling the roots and invention of what is now known as the Internet — or if you’re George W. Bush, “the uhhh ….Internets”)…..online community, in other words, is coming out into the open as various “social networks” spring up, powered by a multitude of various network technologies. The 2004 election cycle and the Dean campaign brought even more of this to light (and Joe Trippi’s book , The Revolution Will Not Be Televised was a good narrative of this “revolution”.

I “made my mark” , so to speak, as Theoblogical, becuase I was focused on the role of Online Communication in the ministry of the church. It seems that this is my NICHE. I’m not an exemplary programmmer, but one who has always been comfortable with gadgetry (I was playing with the earliest audio cassettes, the first on the seminary dorm hallway to have a VCR —circa 1979—– which I luged back and forth with me to Cincinnati from Louisville, KY on my weekend stints as Youth Minister at Ninth Street Baptist Church. Ten years later, after doing some full time Youth Ministry, and some Audio-Video Sales and INstallation, I returned to Seminary at United Theological Seminary in Dayton OH to enter the MARC program (Masters of Arts in Religious Communication) in 1990. My advisor was Ken Bedell, and he was a Computer Communications specialist, and my intial intro to him was his presentation to the United Seminary chapel on one of my pre-enrollment visits, where he had a dial up connection to Ecunet, and projected the video up onto a screen above the choir loft, and entered in prayer requests from the chapel participants regarding the earthquakethat had just taken place the night before in the Bay Area (this was October 1989) .

I later particpated in a Doctor of Ministry program group that did the majority of its work online (about 3 or 4 Face to face, yearly meetings between 1994 and 1997). When I moved to Nashville from Cincinnati in 1997 to take a job at the United Methodist Publishing House (where I worked until 2002), I laid aside my thesis which was studying Online Community and its implications for the church. I have often desired to take up those studies again in a very disciplined way. I have always kept an ear to the ground and on the bookshelves and various Internet articles for what people are saying about the use of Computer Communications for the church. I began a church website where I was, in the pre-blog days (at least pre-my-awareness of Blogs), where I included disucssion forums and used some database driven functianlity to allow for keeping the site up to date with an online Web-based back end. The forums became the point of some controversy when I asked a few questions about a very questionable , “command-decision” by the pastor to suspend post-sermon discussion as a part of the worship service that had been a long-standing tradition for several years— and this was done on the Sunday following September 11, 2001. There were numerous conversations in little clumps of people all over the building for a long time after the service. I had been trying , prior to that event, without success, to set up follow-up meeting with the pastor, who was still new (only about 5 months), to continue my laying out for her the sense of call that I felt to enable some “technological extensions” to the church community to allow members to know more about the people in the church, to tell the story of the church to the “Internet audience”, and to provide ways for people from the outside to find people concerned about various points of need in the world and to find that these are being discussed and acted upon by Christians in this particular church community.

Since then, various “Church Web” outfits have grown up as the Web gets bigger, and becomes more a part of the “business world” and project management. As organizations and business discover the advantages of having an online community, the church has “caught on”, and yet rarely move beyond “shovelware” from various brochures.

More on this to come.