The Chapel Network News is an online publication which will offer individual Christians and local churches and Christian organizations a platform from which to communicate with one another, in a manner which is as cost effective as possible.
The objective is to insure that no genuine needs needlessly go unmet in the Body of Christ. This, I believe, is part of what it means to serve Christ.
Some churches have deacons who serve this function to some extent, but they are often hindered from doing so in a maximally effective way by the fact that they don't have access to a large enough pool of people who are both able and willing to meet the needs of their brothers and sisters in Christ.
For those readers who serve as deacons or elders at your churches, please know that I'm not trying to compete with you or to impugn your motives. I hope that you will come to think of this online publication as a resource and a tool which will enable you to more effectively perform the duties of your job within the local church.
Likewise, I hope that you will help to publicize the existence of the Chapel Network News, using whatever resources are available to you. If you will choose to do so, I believe that all will benefit. After all, the better the circulation of the Chapel Network News is, the more people will see the free ads you place in the publication. Likewise, the more often you read the Chapel Network News, the more aware you will be of resources which might pertain to the needs in your own congregations.
A substantial amount of the contents of the Chapel Network News will consist of brief classified ads which, in the old days, might have been posted in the form of flyers or notices posted on the bulletin boards at those churches. But there may also be listings which link to external web pages, blog posts or PDF documents which contain more information than can easily be put into brief classified ads.
Also, there may be occasions where folks wish to link to detailed articles, sermons and other items they wish to share with others. Such links could also be used to share media files, such as YouTube videos or audio files.
There are so many options for communicating with one another these days, and so many different things that Christians might wish to communicate with one another, that I am going to try to remain pretty flexible in that regard.
Having said that, I should also say that I do intend to exercise a certain amount of control over the content of each issue of the Chapel Network News, so that the system is not abused in order to communicate contents which are clearly innappropriate in light of the fact that it will be a Christ-centered publication. My desire to exercise that kind of control helps to explain why I have changed my original plan, in terms of the manner of distribution. PDF files will be far easier to control (and to edit, if necessary), compared with the standard "social network", and therefore, far less vulnerable to spammers.
Nevertheless, I believe that if I were to err, I'd rather err on the side of generosity than to err on the side of hindering perfectly innocuous communications which could potentially serve a legitimate need. I agree with a woman I saw recently on TV, who stated that she defined "power" as helping people as much as possible. I'm not a big fan of the other kind of power, which tends to hurt people by denying them access to the kind of help they need.
At the moment, I'm focusing primarily on the area in and around Bellingham, WA, because that's where I live. But really, there's no reason I can see why this concept isn't equally applicable to other regions of the nation, or even other regions of the world, as well.
The first thing you need to know, if you have a computer with Internet access, is that the primary means of distribution of the publication will be in the form of PDF files which can be downloaded and printed. That's because it's much less expensive to do so than it is to print up physical copies and then work out the logistics of distributing those printed copies to all of the churches in the Bellingham area, or whereever I might happen to be living at the time.
Another nice thing about the PDF format is that it can be easily modified for different purposes. That, in turn, enables one to come out with different versions of the publication. For instance, I intend to offer a different version for each specific participating (and sponsoring) church, so as to enable those churches to more easily distribute "church-specific" information which doesn't necessarily pertain to others outside of those local churches.
Of course, churches often sponsor events which pertain to the larger Body of Christ as well, so there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to use other versions of the publication.
In any given church, there might be some ads which would be published only in the church-specific edition for that particular time period, and other ads which would be published in the larger edition for that specific geographic area for that particular time period. There might also be cases where members of that church would run ads in both versions, because they wanted to make sure that the ads were seen by as many fellow Christians as possible.
I may also run an edition specifically for artistic Christians, since I'm currently involved with a somewhat related project I call the Christian Arts Initiative. You can learn more about those projects by visiting the following web sites and reading the information at those sites:
- The Artistic Christians' Network (http://artisticchristians.ning.com)
- The Artistic Rescue Project (www.ArtisticRescue.com or www.ArtisticRescue.info).
I want this to be a ministry even for people who fit that description, and not just for fellow geeks. I therefore intend to offer a version of each edition which is sized and formatted for the kind of simple and inexpensive printer which nearly every church office possesses. I will need to stick with letter-size designs for those particular versions, since some churches can only print on 8 1/2 x 11" paper, not on larger papers. My hope is that each church will regularly distributed a limited number of the lettersize prints, for the benefit of people who can't access the Internet, or who have no means of making prints from the larger page designs. But some folks may prefer the larger page sizes, so that will be an option as well.
I'll be returning to this blog in order to more content to it later. But I was just talking to a pastor at my church, and I suddenly realized that I was talking to empty air. My phone had beeped at me, and apparently, the reason was that I'd totally used up all my available air time! Hopefully, she won't be too annoyed!
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