Font Rants on Many Subjects

Missing the next revolution.

That the church is too occupied by gays and women priests. It's time to let go of the 28 prayer book and look to the future. I'm not trying to belittle what I'm sure are well thought out and principled stands. We had a process for debating these matters; we held a vote; and we made a decision now lets get going.

I'm just trying to say that while you're busy re-fighting these issues; the whole world of communications is reinventing itself. The church needs to stop worrying so much about the issues that divide us; and start focusing on this other revolution. Every diocese and parish held forum after forum in the last 20 years on human sexuality; women in the priesthood and other of these issues of conscience. Yet it seems that we have only poured a miniscule fraction of the energy into solving the problems of using the Internet to enhance our ministry. The church missed out on TV, radio and the so called broadcast revolution; while extreme voices like Pat Robertson became the movers of national debate on religion. The church missed out on direct mail; while others built massive fund raising operations. Now we are losing out on the Internet. We've spent 30 years trying to revisit women priests and the 79 prayer book. 30 years is long enough for reflection. Christ spent 30 years wandering around and then 3 years doing real ministry; so we're due to start. We may not agree on exactly what the Episcopal church should stand for; but I think there is enough common ground that our message would be radically different from these other voices. The fact is Robertson and others wern't successful because of their message; they were successful because they mastered a medium for their message.

The church needs to get its act together and come up with a real strategy to leverage this Internet stuff into a real digital ministry. That ministry should include:


Evangelism/Outreach
--An online add campaign connecting people to local churches. If the on line dating sites can figure out where I'm dialed in from and point me to real singles in my hometown; why don't we do the same and start directing people to real churches in their area.
Community
--We need to train priests and lay ministers to get involved in existing on-line communities. We need to be participating in the millions of narrowly focused communities out there. We need to raise up virtual churches inside those communities.
Education
--The Internet is a great tool for teaching. We need a national and diocesan level strategy for using it.