May 28, 2009

Covenant Stories: The Website

It may seem strange to devote an entire episode of our church’s story to our website. But in our case, this makes sense. Our website has profoundly changed the culture and makeup of our community over the years.

The first time I saw the word Internet was when I read about it in a Doonesbury comic strip in 1994. Whatever this “Inter-net” was, it sounded interesting to me. So I started going to computer stores and asking if anyone knew anything about it. No one had even heard about it. Finally I discovered what may have been the only company in San Antonio offering Internet access at the time. When I got to the office of Internet Direct Inc., I found 4 guys in their 20s playing a video game called Doom. I had to wait for a few moments while they furiously pounded their keyboards and yelled at each other. It wasn’t exactly a sophisticated business enterprise.

Finally one of them spoke to me. When I asked about the Internet they started throwing out words and phrases I had never heard of: Telnet, Finger, Gopher, Pinging, and the newest kid on the block - the World Wide Web. They were all excited about a new company called Netscape that had designed a new program for viewing “home pages” on the World Wide Web. I got home and connected to their servers with my modem, hearing the classic hissing and beeping connection noises that would become so familiar to me in the years to come.

Two hours later Jeanene had to calm me down because I was a babbling fool. I couldn’t believe what was I was seeing. I found universities online and hundreds of places where I could view and download all sorts of information. FOR FREE! There seemed to be no end to it. I spend hours that first week surfing around and finding things. The web was more innocent in those days. No one thought about making money. Websites were online because people wanted to share information and be a part of what seemed like a growing, virtual community. Catalogs and search engines were still in their infancy. The best way to find your way around was to surf. When you visited someone’s home page, you checked out their links. If you found something you liked, you posted it in your list of links on your home page.

The home pages were cute in those days. All the backgrounds were gray and all the hyperlinks were blue. If you were really fancy you used colored graphic dots as bullet points.

After a week or so, I had an interesting thought. What if I put together one of these home pages for our church? Just for fun. Just to see if anyone out there wanted to exchange emails, chat, or trade links to new theological sites that were popping up every day. I went back to Internet Direct and talked with one of the guys about it. He was delighted.

“Who knows?” I said. “Maybe someday lots of churches will have home pages. This Internet thing seems like it could get pretty big.”

“Hey Bill, this guy wants to make a home page for his CHURCH? Isn’t that cool?”

Bill turned from his monitor and looked at us. “A church with a home page? That’s totally awesome, dude. Go for it.”

The first guy said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll give you server space for free. We’ll even comp your internet access, because this is really interesting.” He yelled back at Bill.

“We can comp his server space and access, right? Cause he’s doing it for his church?”

“Sure,” said Bill. “Comp him.”

So I was comped. Free internet access and free server space for our home page. I didn’t argue with them. It would be a few years before any church would even consider having money it its budget for a website. I went home and spent a few days creating a simple home page in html. (Html was much simpler in the early days). Our first web address was http://www.txdirect.net/users/covenant. I put a banner at the top of our page with our church’s name on it and a cross. Below I told about the church, listed my email address, and provided a list of my growing collection of theological links.

I told our elders about the home page, but none of them had heard of the Internet. But they were fine me playing around with it. It was Gordon’s geeky little hobby, and it wasn’t hurting anything. Why not?

When I registered our home page at Yahoo and some other places, I found that there were very few churches in the world online. The only two I could find in Texas were ours and Lorena Methodist Church near Waco. Emails started arriving, as many as 6 or 10 a day. Some people wanted to say hello. Some were curious about our church. Others were angry and wanted to vent that anger at a tangible representative of Christianity. I got some rather intense emails. My list of Christian links became rather popular as well, and I got email thanking me for compiling it. Then San Antonio Express News came out to my house and took pictures of me in front of my computer with our home page in the background. They ran a story on the front page of the Metro section about the church with the Internet site.

People started showing up. Claud found us online and drove all the way across San Antonio to attend. He’s still a member. One night I was having an email conversation with a woman named Amy. We realized that not only were we in the same town, we lived just one street away from each other. She and her husband came the next Sunday. A man from England showed up one Sunday. He had seen our home page and was in San Antonio for a convention and wanted to say hello. I took him out for Mexican food, and we still email each other occasionally.

Slowly, over-the-years, our website has become our best way to connect with people outside of our church. Most of the people who visit these days find us on the web. I think close to half the current membership found us directly or indirectly on the Internet.

This is important: We never used the internet as a publicity tool. We never planned to have a page so that people would come to our church. I created our website because I wanted our church to be a part of an online conversation. I’ve always felt good about the fact that our internet presence, whether it be blogs or the website, has always been offered in an authentic way. I think that makes all the difference. Somehow people can tell when you are authentically participating and when you are using the internet as a marketing tool.

Few things have changed our church culture as much as our website. And the website has allowed us to build friendships with people from all over the world.

All that from a home page. Who would have thought?

Which brings me to a final thought: I’ve noticed that many times, what we thought was going to be important turns out to matter very little. And small things we didn’t think much about can turn out to be very important. In church, it’s always a good practice to be nurturing small and powerless things, with no regard to the bottom line.

Because you never know.

Gordon Atkinson