I’m not certain I know what I want here or even what I’m looking for.

However and looking at it another way, in my professional life if I need additional support I know whom to turn to or where to find it and failing that I can always ask my manager and it is then his responsibility to help me find what I need. Presuming that it fits in with the business direction, etc,

So what do I do when my pastor asks me a technical question I can’t answer? Or if I come up against a problem I can’t find a solution for? I am well versed in wrangling google to answer lots of things but occasionally I come up against a roadblock and I can’t see my way around it.

Back in my job my staff manager is very good at asking the right questions and in helping one look at problems from angles you may not have considered but I don’t have that luxury when working in/for the Church. So what is one supposed to do. A number of Christian based blogs I read, mostly if not all from America, have come up with the Church IT Rountable and have even proposed a National Church IT Association and both of these have undoubted merits.

I do have occasional exchanges with my American counterparts mostly via email but support is not really something I’d expect of them and aside form which they mostly aren’t around when I need them. So what to do? Do we need a UK based Church IT group / association / roundtable / pick-a-name ? Would it be an informal gathering (cyber or real?) that one could call upon for additional support, encouragement, direction, etc? Would it work?

I know from experience that unless you have a leader that is dynamic and forward moving in these groups then it is likely to fail. I was once a founding member of a UK organisation known as “CommUnity – The Computer Communicators Association” (a brief history can still be found here and our initial meeting minutes are archived here, scroll down enough you’ll find my name) – we were an affiliation of BBSes mostly Fido based but some (myself) using other software such as GtPower to run their BBS – I was GTPower Net/Node 050/023 and we could be seen as a UK based EFF but not nearly as organised. Our main aim was to combat the incessant negative press BBSes and the then very young internet was getting for illegal activities. We aimed to educate.

However, despite having a sizeable first meeting and good online interaction and having some good impact in the press, etc we ran out of steam. It’s not as though it became any less necessary for us but British enthusiasm does wane and as Oliver Clarke’s brief history states, CommUnity was driven by Malcolm Arnold and he drove it for a while during its formative and official first year but (and memory fades here) he stepped down for some reason and although we ended up with an able replacement in the form of a policeman the group still waned. The point being is that the physical group faded and died and then the virtual group followed suit even after we dropped the requirement to pay membership subs.

So is my view of a Church IT association of some form clouded because of this, or is it clouded because of my Britishness or maybe deep down I just don’t like groups – I don’t know and I don’t suppose anyone else really knows. I pray that the American initiatives take off because it seems that where they lead in certain areas we feel we can follow – it is just the motivation of new ideas that struggle I guess.