A decade ago I was writing about how there needed to be “A Compuserve For The Church”, since I felt that the Church could avail itself of some of the technologies being used to conect people remotely. The Web came along and made all of that a lot more possible. I was reading an article in the latest WIRED issue today, which was describing the economic situation of MIT today, in stark contrast to the “camping out at their door” that was happening before the big Tech bust. I have often thought that the Church needs a Web RandD group, to explore possible shapes of online Church and doing Church business, both professionally and via the laity.

A decade ago I was writing about how there needed to be “A Compuserve For The Church”, since I felt that the Church could avail itself of some of the technologies being used to conect people remotely. The Web came along and made all of that a lot more possible. I was reading an article in the latest WIRED issue today, which was describing the economic situation of MIT today, in stark contrast to the “camping out at their door” that was happening before the big Tech bust. I have often thought that the Church needs a Web R&D group, to explore possible shapes of online Church and doing Church business, both professionally and via the laity.

Cluetrain philosophies figure prominently here, as it seems to me to be absolutely crucial to the future of the Church that it find ways to help the Church have a voice on the Web, and therefore into the lives of many more who are not being reached by increasingly obsolete models of relating, programming, and encouraging people to gather.

As economic slumps continue, the Church is pulled into inaction because, after all, we need operating budgets too. There was an article in one of the “with it” Business mags (Fast Comapny , I believe) that pointed out how some of today’s biggest success stories (like Compaq) made their start in economic downturns, because they saw the need to innovate or slip into oblivion, rather than claw and “survive” and die with all the rest. The Church needs to be like that. IN a time when dollars are tight, why not strategize toward efficiencies which can be realized via improved communications? Why not benefit from the much more highly effective storytelling environments and interest-group aggregation powers that can be realized via Online Community features, and that can also link Church schedules to archived comments from past participants, and testimony from participants in recent events as to how they were touched. The Web can blow away the impact of Newsletters or Cork Bulletin Boards, or any other media for that matter.

So now is the time for “R&D” and not “R&R”….a time for understanding the cultural forces being enacted in online communication and seekin to understand it and appropriate it in the cause of getting out the stories of who we are. The CBF needs it, big time, right now. They are in a time of extending of many tentacles to build networks (mostly of the non-technological kind, but the technological kind is a big boost for speed and the breadth of the other), and Web technologies along with sociological studies aimed at how best to appropriate these technologies can be valuable knowledge, even more so when efficiencies are needed.