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©2000
The Society of Archbishop Justus, Ltd

Hallo again to all.

This week there's a General Synod in England and a General Convention in the USA. Somehow one would think that they were roughly parallel events, or even (since the Church of England claims to have 25 million church members and ECUSA claims to have 2.5 million) that there would be more noise from England than from the US. But, as you've surely noticed, the ECUSA General Convention is making the news all over the world, while news of the Church of England Synod isn't even making it to the Church of England's own news-release site.

The readership of Anglicans Online has nearly doubled during General Convention. We're sure that once the convention is over the numbers will go back to normal, but it's fun for us to look at statistics. Possibly one of the reasons for the leap in popularity of our site is that we are providing something that people want. As we did for Lambeth 1998, we have provided a web version of the ridiculous PDF files of the Convention Daily, and thousands of people are reading it. The official PDF files are made available at 8:30 am Denver time; so far we have managed to have our conversions complete by noon the same day. We'll see if we can keep it up. This shouldn't be our job, of course, but until the world's church administrators get up to speed on this newfangled technology, we'll keep trying to help them out. We note with amusement that the House of Bishops quickly dodged a resolution to ban certain technology from the convention floor, but the House of Deputies squabbled about it for quite a while before referring it back to committee. Details in the GC News Centre.

Even if you don't care about ECUSA's General Convention (though our readership statistics show that most of you do), you should read Pierre Whalon's newest essay, 'Episcopalian Democracy'. Pierre is a regular contributor to Anglicans Online, and has written this month about the decisionmaking process in ECUSA. Pierre suggests that it is not unfair to refer to the General Convention as the 'synod of the Catholic Church in America' and then argues to support of this rather bold assertion.

We welcome this week new parish listings from Australia, England, and the USA. And we welcome what we believe to be the only active web site devoted to the Anglican Church in the Congo. It's a little hard to categorise; it is not a diocesan site or a parish site or a mission site, but it is maintained by people who spend much of their time in Anglican churches in the Congo.

We note that 422 people responded to the Church Times' readership survey, with another 37 entries that were people responding more than once. We dearly hope that the online edition of the Church Times has more readers than that; perhaps the survey was daunting to many. At least the survey wasn't a PDF file. We applaud all efforts at making technology more responsive to the needs of its audience. But also we are reminded of Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (a huge computer company that is now gone, largely because it didn't know how to do market research), who was fond of saying that market research was like standing near a river counting how many cars were crossing a bridge that hadn't been built yet.

See you next week. But check back every day for GC2000 updates.

Cynthia McFarland cmcf@anglicansonline.org		Brian Reid reid@anglicansonline.org

Last updated: 9 July 2000
URL: http://anglicansonline.org