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As of this year, I have been a college professor for just shy of 40 years-my first
appointment was in 1968. Like many of you, I used an electric typewriter, and I
remember what a remarkable thing the IBM Selectric was. You could actually
change fonts by changing the little whirling ball. By the mid-1980s, like you, I owned
my first computer, my Mac. You could "edit" on the screen. No more retyping and
retyping and retyping of drafts. What was the world coming to?

Now, faster than you can turn around, we are on the internet, connected to a World
Wide Web, literally, and nothing will ever be the same. And we still don't know what
the world is coming to.

In retrospect, what is strange is that, while the coming of the computer changed
how we all do things-particularly how we produce information-it is the coming of the
internet and the web that is actually changing how everything around us is done.
The difference between those two phrases is very important.

For example, a few years ago, how my college students wrote their term papers for
class changed: that is what the computer did. Now, though, how I conduct my
classes, deal with my students, and shape the material that I teach has changed: that
is what the internet and the web have done. The difference is extraordinary!

Now, as part of school registration, every student is given an e-mail address. They
register online, pay their fees online, do who-knows-what-else online. At the
beginning of a new course, my syllabus now goes out to each student by e-mail; no
more hauling a stack of syllabi to class. Everyone in the course is a part of a class
site, a "room," a chat room. I am in instant, and constant, touch with every student,
as I wish to be; or as they wish to be.

And, while we are not quite at the stage of giving and taking exams online-some
places are--that cannot be more than a year or two away, if that. Even in my classes,
though, research papers are now turned is as e-mail attachments. I insert comments
in them and return them as e-mail, grade attached. It is all terribly efficient.

Thank God, we still have class, and everybody is expected to show up in bodily
form and sit in a real chair. But-lectures in my media history class, lectures that I
have worked on for years, digging out facts and anecdotes and stories-those lectures
are already trumped, in a sense, by my having students look up a half dozen web
sites on any given subject. No more "monopoly of information" on the part of the
professor. Many faculty members I know are now putting their lectures notes, or
even their lecture manuscripts, on the class web page. Who needs to give the lecture
when students can just read it?

I do not want to do that! I will not do that! I am shouting now. But who knows? So
when that happens, what will one do in class? Half the fun-both for prof and
student-is "performing" the lecture. When lecturers are good, few things are more
captivating or invigorating than that. So we will have discussions, which we already
do now, of course. But I am at a loss to know how it all may be different in a few
years. The only thing I know for certain is that it will. A lot different.

Now it is time for preachers to think about it all. You are reading this, so you are
internetted and webed.

Congregational web pages. Of course. And hundreds of progressive churches
already have them. Call up churches on your searcher. That's the easy part.

But what else? What are the implications. How will what is happening in education
affect what will happen in churches? Some will say that they are too different-college
classes and churches? But are they?

Your sermons online? Print-out ready? Sure, if you write out every word you say.
Your sermons as streaming audio or video? Of course, it cannot be but a few months
away. So what purpose will that serve, other than a look-what-we-can-do thing. It
will mean that shut-ins have direct access to worship. True again. Will it mean that
you will have a growing number of "shut-ins" who tell you that they were sorry to
miss church, but caught your sermon anyway.

Mid-week church papers, announcements, prayer notes, all online. What money that
will save for the church budget. Church chat rooms for the young people. New ways
to get to know the visitors and the new people-their pictures on the web page.
Mission programs, full color, video with music, live chats with missionaries whatever
they are. Pledge drives online. No more messy pleas for money on Sunday morning.
Hmmm.

On and on. But preachers have to take it from here. There are a lot of other, much
larger implications as well. Can this much change without, at some point, changing
the very nature of the organization-whether in education or religion? Corporations,
large and small, are already experiencing such fundamental shifts in what they are
and how they function in the world. These are some of the things that we will
explore on this web site in coming months.

Remember this, though: the young adults who are coming out of my college classes
and a thousand other classes like mine are the ones that you would like to see in
your churches in the future. And, believe me, this internet/web way of living is
already old hat to them.

--Joseph M. Webb