
NEW
THIS WEEK
Basics
Start Here
Anglicans Believe ...
The Prayer Book
The Bible
News
News Centre
News Archive
Newspapers Online
Official Publications
Resources
Resources A to Z, including
Biblical Study
Book of Common Prayer
Books and Magazines
Events
Liturgy
Music
Religious Orders
Preaching
Theology
Youth
Worldwide Anglicanism
Anglican Communion
In Full Communion
Not in the Communion
Dioceses
and Parishes
Africa
Australia
Canada
England
Europe
Ireland
Japan
New Zealand
Scotland
USA
Wales
World
Anglicans Online
Add a Site to AO
Tell Us What You Think
Link to AO
About Us
Staff
Awards and Publicity
Beginnings
AO Today
Our Sponsors
©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.
Last updated: 9 July 2000
URL: http://anglicansonline.org
|