All of the above (in More At Home Online is to point out that I don’t get this in Church. Even though I have written things on the Church’s website (which I contructed and maintain), and had a couple meetings with a potential “Web site committee” about what our site should be, I feel almost “shunned”, because I have “the gall” to suggest that the Church could actually see some “Community-building” things happen via online discussions, and via encouraging and enabling members to “blog” and to otherwise express some of their passions and concerns in the online setting. I was especially disturbed that our pastor didn’t seem to be able to see or care that this is indeed my “calling”; to help the Church tell its story via online communications. I have long flet thatit is the Church’s main task to help and enable the Members to discover their calling, and then to act upon it via some Church-encouraged and supported structure (mechanism for fulfilling a “call” via community support). This was not the case here. I was basically shunned. Not even so much as a “referral” to someone in the cogregatino who might could idenbtify with and understand my calling. And so I have another tally to the collection of stories about how clueless the Church can be.

I don’t believe this a thing which should be. We are not meant to be more at home online, but the reality is, the Church has become an anti-dialogical place. One of the other problems we’ve had at our church is that there has been far less of it. What used to be a tradition there has been ousted from the central spot in worship it used to have, and then there have been attempts to “fit it back in” or pay some homage to the idea, almost seeming like an “appeasement”, but the atmosphere is different. All of that may be patently unfair, since I haven’t been back there since Christmas, but neither have folks been beating down my door asking where I’ve been (with only a couple of exceptions). It all goes to allowing and encouraging me to have a place in the “ministry” of the Church, in a place where I obviously fit, as an online ambassador, and not just as a maintenance worker who enters stuff into the calendar and updates the newsletter online. There must be some “export” of the “stuff of community” into the online world. Else, nobody is going to get a “feel” for who we are.