Churches Offered a Ticket to the Internet
In a basement on a side street near the University of Pittsburgh, a small computer and a staff of 20 are trying to provide every Christian church around the globe with its own World Wide Web site.
The Houses of Worship project opened 16 months ago and plans to reach out to more than 330,000 North American churches by June. By 2000, project leaders expect to circle the world, connecting Christendom’s estimated 2 million churches.
The ambitious project is built around a simple idea: an electronic backbone that supports four Web pages per church for pastoral messages, church and youth activities, and services the church needs.
The pages are free. About 330,000 churches have the pages now, whether they know it or not; all they need is a computer, an Internet service provider and an editor willing to update the pages.
The aim is to cut through the clutter of the Web’s 2 million sites to ensure that churches can be easily found.
“We think this will become an even more profound need in the future,” said Houses of Worship founder Robert Thibadeau, a leading computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the project’s technical guru.
Currently, it serves only Christian churches. “I have a personal hope that the Christian base will embrace other religions. But that can’t come from me,” he said.
Thibadeau is a principal researcher in Carnegie Mellon’s world-leading Robotics Institute. He helped guide development of digital television and designed robotic factories for General Motors, among others.
The Internet project is backed by a $5-million grant from the 137-year-old American Bible Society. Through the nonprofit Pittsburgh Leadership Foundation, organized by Christian pastors, it also is tapping into similar foundations in other cities to recruit more churches.
“There is no other place on the World Wide Web where all the churches appear,” said the society’s communications director, Mike Maus. “We saw it as a way to accomplish the main mission of the American Bible Society, which is to get the Scriptures into the hands of people.”
Thibadeau designed the Houses of Worship project to be easy to use. Its Web site includes a tutorial that teaches even a naive computer user how to edit a church’s text-only Web pages. If a church already has its own home page, the tutorial shows how to link it to the project’s pages.
The project is staffed around the clock, and staff members are alert to any potential abuse such as someone editing in an offensive message or linking to off-color images. As yet, there have not been any problems, but Thibadeau said he expects they will happen as the network attracts more attention.
The rule for dealing with unwanted messages also is simple--the pastor decides what’s appropriate for his or her church.
“We send very nice e-mail, but the pastor always wins. We are very church-centric and churches all seem to have pastors,” Thibadeau said.
In demonstrating the project, Thibadeau clicked on the needs-and-offers page for the First Church of the Nazarene in Gallup, N.M.
“We are in need of young families to work in our congregation,” the posting said.
“If I was anywhere near Gallup, N.M., I’d be showing up at their doorstep so fast it wouldn’t be funny,” Thibadeau said.
Pastor Tom Crider said he got started with the project at his Gallup church less than a month ago, finding it through a Web link with another congregation in the city. He just called Houses of Worship’s toll-free number to get his Web pages.
“It’s been very simple. I wish all the Internet were that easy. There’s a problem just finding things--there’s so much out there,” Crider said.
He’s had no increase yet in his 35-person congregation, which has lost about 100 members over 14 years. But he said it may be too soon to draw interest from a city experiencing a decline in civic activities.
“The Lions Club that used to run a hundred or so is down to 10 or 12. I’m afraid it’s a part of the trend of our society. I guess my hope is if somebody is moving to Gallup and gets on the Web and sees us, they say, ‘I’d like to visit there.’ ” Crider said.
The Internet address for Houses of Worship is https://www.housesofworship.net
