The church on the Web

Christian Century, August 11, 1999 by Michael L. Keene

SUNDAY SCHOOL teachers say that the toughest question kids ask is, "But what's a virgin?" While my class of 13-year-olds hasn't asked me that, they certainly can stump me with other questions. After the bishop accepted my wife as a candidate for seminary, I mentioned to the class that she had to send him a status-report letter four times a year--during Ember Days. I should have been prepared for "But what are Ember Days?" Where can you go for quick answers to such questions? To the Internet, of course. In my office or at home, the answer is only a click away (for example, at Canon Beverley Wheeler's "Question Box" <http://www.wwdc.com/ stpauls/stpqanda.htm> or at Simon Kershaw's "Keeping the Feast" <http://www. oremus.org/liturgy/etc/ktf/year.html# s9>).

The World Wide Web is playing an important and rapidly growing role in helping laypeople think about their faith. For starters, it helps us look up all kinds of church history and other theologically oriented reference information. But the Web also helps build the community of God both by increasing the flow of information from denominational organizations to churchpeople and by helping like-minded believers rind and connect with each other. And the Web provides additional opportunities for people to engage in private, or not-so-private, prayer. Finally, and perhaps uniquely, the Web can bring a refreshing wind of serendipity into our faith lives, making more concrete the line that "the spirit blows where it wills." Access to the World Wide Web gives us access to a richer church life.

My Education for Ministry class at the cathedral has "the quest for the historic Jesus" as one of its topics. As usual, in the hours before the class meets I'm looking for additional ways to illuminate and update the subject matter. Typing "quest for historic Jesus" into my favorite search engines produced a mishmash of odd sites, and a quick look at the first rive or ten of them (this takes only five minutes with a fast connection) suggests I'm not getting the kind of thing I want. Having just finished rereading The God We Never Knew, I take a chance and type in the author's name, "Marcus Borg." The second site that comes up on AltaVista is Cam Linton's "A Portrait of Jesus" <http://www. united.edu/portrait/index.html>, which contains an amazingly detailed summary of Borg's work, complete with an audio of Borg and links to his speaking schedule for the year, to a list of his publications, to the Jesus seminar and to Westar Institute. It takes only a couple of minutes to browse the site's main pages and select a few to print out for my class. The printer puts the Web address on each copy so that students can go straight to the source I used.

That scenario shows just one of the many ways that the Web helps me rind additional information on church-related topics. When I'm puzzling over a particular Bible passage, such as the one I always remember (incorrectly) as "the spirit blows where it will," I like to read other people's interpretations. Of course, the first problem is that I don't remember exactly where that phrase occurs. Not having my pocket concordance with me at the office, I go to the "Bible Gateway" , which has a very forgiving search engine--if I give it an approximate phrase, the computer will do the rest. (The Bible Gateway also offers seven different versions of the Bible in ten different languages.) I choose to search the RSV for "spirit blows," and the site gives me back information more accurate than my search phrase had been. The source is John 3:8: "The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit." If I feed "John 3:8" back into the search engine, it will offer me the whole chapter so I can see the context (or the same text in any of the other six versions).

Once I have the right chapter and verse, I can start looking for sermons and commentaries on that text. I can check Richard Fairchild's enormous "Sermons & Sermon-Lectionary Resources" site <http://www.rockies.net/ ~spirit/sermon.html#text> or John Kapteyn's "Sermon Central" <http://www.sermoncentral.com/>, but there are so many sermon sites, nearly all of which will let me search for sermons by a particular chapter and verse or a particular key phrase, that I may decide simply to type "John 3:8" into the AltaVista search engine, which itself yields me over 1,800 "hits."

Or maybe it's music I want. My home church's choir normally focuses on music by 18th- and 19th-century European composers, so when they launched into the spiritual "Steal Away" a few weeks ago, I was really struck by it. But on Monday I couldn't remember the words. A quick visit to Frank Petersohn's "Hymns, Gospel Songs, & Spirituals" site <http://ingeb.org/spiritua.html> takes me fight to the words, and the site will play me the melody (both versions) as well.

Why is my favorite hymn often called "The breastplate of St. Patrick"? I can find the answer at Diarmuid O'Laoghaire's "Introduction to Celtic Spirituality" <http://indigo.ie/~lifecork/html/celtspir.htm>, which I found by putting "breastplate of St. Patrick" into the AltaVista search engine. This search took longer than usual, not because I did not find an answer in under five minutes, but because the search led me to so many good Celtic spirituality sites, most of which I could not resist skimming.