Wednesday 14 January 2009

The Return of CyberCell?

A few years ago (when Watling Valley was looking seriously at Cell Church) a few of us began to think about how we would do Cell/Church on-line. We actually got quite a long way into thinking about how this would work. We called the experiment CyberCell - and I bought the name. I also did a bit of web/logo design. CyberCell was ready to go - but my Team Leader responsibilities took over and the project languished...
At the same time the diocese was launching its Cutting Edge ministries - one of which was iChurch. A few of my friends suggested I apply for the iChurch job but it was half-time so I didn't. It has been interesting to watch iChurch evolve from something hugely ambitious into something remarkably similar to our early experiments with CyberCell. It's now a more realistic project - with its own strengths and weaknesses...

Time has now moved on. I've often wonderred whether CyberCell should be relaunched. It would certainly be a valuable fresh expression in a city with global commuters. I'm also interested in the growth of blogs and facebook as tools for church development. Peter Ballantine and Mindy Bell are doing an on-line lent course. The rest of the world seems to be catching up. Maybe this is the time to have another go...

I had a quick look at it this afternoon while I was waiting for the girls to come home. It took me about fifteen minutes to set up a page on Webjam using the rough format we worked out before - isn't web 2.0 woderful! I wonder...

I think I'm going to offer to do a lent course for interested people using the meditations and questions produced by the team. I wonder if anyone would be interested?

2 comments:

Peter Leeson said...

I would be interested in giving it a try...

simon rudiger said...

hi tim, we've just launched a parish website in filey, http://www.fileyparish.org.uk, we're using blogger and trying a community blog approach with a number of people contributing to the site. not a cyber cell as such, but an attempt by a few of us to explore online relationships/conversations. quite a big step for a small yorkshire town!