News
As the internet has developed into a social network where individuals as well as institutions exchange ideas via text, sound and pictures, churches face new opportunities and challenges. At the 13th European Christian Internet Conference in Lyon, France, 13-17 June, participants came from as far away as Iceland and Romania to share their views on how the churches should be "following Jesus into virtual space", as one of the keynote lecturers put it.
Among the presented projects, ranging from an interactive virtual church for Finnish children to a Swiss pastoral care service by e-mail and SMS, was for the first time a cooperation that also originated at a European Christian Internet Conference. The World Council of Churches (WCC), the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria have teamed up to set a standard for a more flexible and integrated way of sharing Christian resources. The project is based on the emerging "semantic web" technology, which according to the "inventor of the worldwide web", Tim Berners-Lee, will be the key ingredient of the internet of the future.
"The semantic web is a chance for churches to share and show what they hold in common. Our dream is to make resources, like the ecumenical prayer cycle, available to other websites in a simple and clever way," says Olivier Schopfer, WCC executive web editor. "We want to help churches to make their best contents available to other Christian websites. This will make the ecumenical fellowship more visible in the virtual world, as it should be in the real world".
More information on the European Christian Internet Conference