This (hat tip to Matt Carlisle) from United Methodist Reporter on Blogging and the United Methodist Church:

United Methodist blogs give laity greater voice
The beauty of the Web, he said, is that it allows people to find each other. Readers often comment that they\’re happy to connect with someone who believes the same thing they do.

Matt adds this on his blog post:

mattcarlisle.com
faith groups developing websites need to now consider not only how will my website share who you are, and what you believe?, but how will you allow site visitors to contribute to the conversation?.

This is the built-in component to the blogging tools that make the blog a natural enhancer of dialogue and the connector of ideas and shared spirtiual copncerns. The “comment”, the “trackback” and tools like Technorati have enabled people to create a massive personal database of aggregated, related content and conversation. In some ways, this is far beyond what the church is enabling. This is the danger posed by the separate, individualistic slant to nearly all churches in this culture. The personal and the dialogical has been supplanted by presentation and “push” approaches, rather than relationships and dialogue. This reality is what , in many ways, gives me a deeper affinity to people I meet and read online than I have with nearly every “church” I have encountered. The Church of the Saviour in Washington DC is the community (now a “tradition” all its own, with a “community of communities” present among several separate church entities that usually subtitle thmeselves as “a community in the Church of the Saviour tradition”). This relational, deep commitment to being on a journey together that is both Inward and Outward, is something that can be “resourced” by the blog and by developing Web 2.0 tools. There is a blog of daily reflections that was begun in April of this year that is collected and maintained by Church of the Saviour staf , inwardoutward, and it looks as though several folks across the country have found each other in the comments. I recently noticed a person who is now in Nashville making comments, and I intend to try and look them up here locally and share some stories about my journey with Church of the Saviour these past 30 years.

I like seeing articles like this. Perhaps we should start seeing more of this, and delve into the “tools” side of things with an eye to the THEOLOGICAL implications for how to enable and enhance and extend CHURCH.