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Hallo again to all.

This week we're celebrating Christmastide with all of you, but we're also celebrating ten years of Anglicans Online! (Note: All links in this letter will open a separate browser window, so you can keep reading without interruption.)

The first AO logotype, circa 1995

Created in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on 27 December 1994, Anglicans Online has outlasted most dot-coms and many big-budget websites. For three years AO was under the inspired guidance of Tod Maffin, its founder. Cynthia McFarland took over the management in September 1997 and was soon joined by Brian Reid and a handful of other dedicated colleagues. We celebrated our fifth anniversary in 1999 and published a brief history at that milestone.

And now we are 10. From the beginning, we've been assertively independent, unpaid, updated every week without fail, and relentlessly devoted to the Ecclesia Anglicana, to which, online, we have now devoted a good portion of our lives. A few stats. In 2004, AO had

3.5 million pages viewed (about 10,000 per day)
500,000 different visitors
280,000 regular visitors (two or more times a month)

80 percent of regular visitors (225,000 people) visited once a week.

Those are the numbers; now for some of the stories behind them.

In the last fortnight we've received an abundance of letters from readers of AO about how they use this site. (We wish we could have published them all.) We're deeply honoured to learn something of what AO has enabled through the years. Late at night on Sunday when we're labouring on a new edition, the work can seem very 'unreal'. We wonder, 'Well, what's all this, then? We're not feeding the hungry or sheltering the homeless... How much can this matter? Is this really helping advance the kingdom of heaven?' Mostly we push away those late-night maunderings and get on* with linking the next parish website or news story. But these last few weeks, many readers (bless you!) have enabled us to see something of what our work has enabled. We've

• assisted with a growing ministry in Tanzania and the beginnings of what may be the newest diocese in the Anglican Communion;
• helped a parish priest find his first position after seminary (in Guam);
• enabled a Roman Catholic in Milan to learn about the Anglican Communion and occasionally attend an Anglican service on Sundays;
• kept a priest company throughout his ministry in the States and Japan;
• provided resources for someone looking for an Anglican church in Seoul;
• helped two long-lost friends find each other again;
• got the American poet Wendell Berry's 'Mad Farmer's Liberation Front' stuck on a vestry bulletin board in Australia;
• helped a Congregational Church pastor in Canada on his way to becoming a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada;
• assisted the ministry of the vicar of a cathedral in Chicago and a dean's executive assistant at a seminary in Massachusetts;
• helped bridge the conservative-liberal gap; and
• been designated a Site of Common Surfing, a natural adjunct to the Book of Common Prayer!

We'll end with a letter from a young man in the States named Joshua Matthew Shawnee, because the church is always one generation from extinction. If we've helped Joshua 'keep the faith', then we know our work has a life that will outlast ours.

I'll put this briefly because I have a final exam in ten minutes. Anglicans Online has meant one thing for me:

Communion.

I am a theology major at a Roman Catholic university and live in a place where Anglicans are few and far in between. Whenever I begin to feel as if I am standing alone, I click onto Anglicans Online ... and am home in and with the church all over the world and throughout the ages.

Thank you, Anglicans Online.

Joshua Matthew Shawnee
Emmanuel Episcopal Church
St Gregory's University

Thanks to each of you for being a part of our ten-year's journey. We hope you'll stay with us for the next 10! If you can help us by making a donation, in any amount, that would be splendid. Or perhaps you'd like some little item in our AO shop. But more important than gifts of money, we'd ask this: Tell your friends about AO. Keep reading. Keep praying. Keep loving. Keep the faith ... and keep being Anglican, in the best, truest, most large-hearted sense of the word. And we'll see you here next week, as always, online.

All of us here at Anglicans Online -- Cynthia McFarland, Brian Reid, Simon Sarmiento, Gillian Barr, Peter Owen, Frederic McFarland, and Richard Mammana -- wish each of you a blessed AD 2005.

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

Last updated: 26 December 2004
URL: http://anglicansonline.org

*Meister Eckhardt: 'Wisdom is simply this: to do the next thing that has to be done, to do it with all your heart, and to take delight in doing it'.