MCCORMICK THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

OUT OF THE CHURCH BASEMENT

AND
INTO CYBERSPACE
INTERNET-BASED RELIGIOUS EDUCATION FOR YOUTH

A THESIS ARTICLE
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF MINISTRY IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

BY
STUART D. SMITH

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
APRIL 2001

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Abstract
Stuart D. Smith
OUT OF THE CHURCH BASEMENT AND INTO CYBERSPACE:
Internet-Based Religious Education for Youth
Most religious educators involvement with the internet has been as a place to post a
web brochure for their institution, for email, and as an entry point into bookstores or
libraries. This project will demonstrate methodologies to use the internet as a venue for
religious educationspecifically religious education for 16- to 25-year-old persons who
are not well integrated into traditional communities of faith.
Progressive religious education is largely affective education. It is not designed
primarily to teach skills or facts but to facilitate dynamic engagement with the subject
matter. During the first years of the internets existence, technical information
dominated online content. Reflecting that denotative style, most current web-based
religious instruction is authoritarian and hierarchical; it does not encourage interaction
only information delivery. It is declarative, but seldom evocative, and almost never
designed to facilitate response or interaction. Consequently, most faith-based sites
practice a conservative paradigm of learning even when the content is theologically
progressive.
Current web technology facilitates the distribution of multimedia, the creation of
real-time small group meetings and message boards, and many types of interaction and
response. These can all be used to good effect in an educational environment. The
current technology is ripe for the development of religious education resources and
methodologies that foster engagement and are more interactive. This project will
demonstrate the use of the internet to create a community of learners. Our participants
for this project will be enlisted from persons who have applied to participate in the
project by completing and submitting an application from Pride Ministries web site,
cafepride.com. This projects ultimate audience, however, will be those educators who
are beginning to look to the internet as a platform from which to practice their vocation.

Contents
Abstract.............................................................................................................................iii
Contents............................................................................................................................iv
Situation Analysis..............................................................................................................1
Research..........................................................................................................................10
Theoretical Framework....................................................................................................17
Interventions....................................................................................................................23
Evaluation........................................................................................................................32
Significance......................................................................................................................34
Appendix A - A Brief History of Caf Pride......................................................................36
Appendix B Caf Prides Spirituality Project.................................................................41
Bibliography...................................................................................................................125

OUT OF THE CHURCH BASEMENT AND INTO CYBERSPACE:

Internet-Based Religious Education for Youth
Situation Analysis
It all started with boredom. He was looking for the next fun thing and like any
seventeen-year-old male there were those hormones he couldnt quite ignore. Cruising
the web was cool. It was as if every picture and every idea ever held in anybodys
head was online for him to check out. He found sites where he could take free classes
on building his own web site, where he could listen to his favorite music, and where he
could collect the coolest screen savers and freeware gizmos for his computer. He even
found sites where he could join real-time conversations and meet other kids like him.
For a kid who was uncomfortable in social gatherings but who was also terribly
lonely, chat rooms were a great place to listen in on conversations and eventually, a
place to chat with the other denizens of the room. The conversations in the chat
rooms were more interesting than television programs. The conversation online was
sexy and sometimes there was an element of the forbidden or of danger; but in the chat
rooms, he was anonymous enough to feel a sense of safety. The web even enabled
him to try out new identities. In one room, he described himself in his profile as a 26year-old guy; in another, he was a forty-five-year-old man; and in a third, he was just
himself. Within a few weeks of entering his favorite chat rooms, he was more at home
in them than among his classmates at school and more comfortable talking with his new
cyber friends than with his own parents.
Not that it was ever easy to talk with any of his family members. Dad had been
mostly out of the picture for years. Mom had her own life, and his older siblings had

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long ago given up on the birth family. Hed also come to realize that his awkwardness
was a part of his being different from his classmates in deeper ways. Sex was more
complicated for him than it seemed for the other boys in his grade, and he knew that
any questions on his part would only expose him to ridicule. Who could he talk to? It
didnt take him long to discover the more specialized chat rooms and web sites where
he could bring his special questions. At first, he used an alias to protect himself but
before too long that protection was only a memory. He sometimes felt that his only real
life was online.
Since the summer of 1995, I have been involved in what is now known as Pride
Ministries Caf Pride project. Late that summer, I saw youths I had known as a street
minister arrested for loitering merely because no commercial establishment was open to
them in the late evenings. In December of 1995, Caf Pride opened in the basement of
Holy Covenant United Methodist Church to be a safe space for these youths. After a
year in that space, we moved to the fellowship hall of Lake View Presbyterian Church
where we remain today.
My life has now been intertwined with some of these youths for over five years. I
listen to their stories; they encouraged me to build our first web site. And together these
courageous and outrageous young people and those of us who serve as adult
volunteers have hosted and ministered to nearly 300 youths who have wandered
through seeking a safe space.
At Caf Pride, we have met several young women and men for whom the online
world is more than a fantasy escape. They feel that it is their only safe place. Not
unlike the slaves in antebellum America who established safe places to meet in the dark

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of night away from the viewand controlof their masters, many youths have found
the web to be their clearing of freedom (Hodgson, 1988 p. 71) It is where they make
friends, where they gain the space to think and process, where they can learn who and
what they are becoming. The web has become for many what churches, social service
centers, after school clubs, and coffeehouses could have been. It is significant that the
majority of the nearly 300 youths who have physically visited Pride Ministries Caf
Pride have found us though our web site, and in over five years not one has reported
that he or she found us though one of our sponsoring churches.
Those of us who live inside the Church and her various specialized support
institutions tend to forget that for many personsparticularly young personsthe
church is an anachronism with virtually no relation to contemporary values, spirituality,
or ethical choices. We maintain styles of worship that were codified nearly four
centuries ago and methods of outreach that made more sense in a checkered past.
Churches are often better known in the popular culture as right-of-center political
institutions than as bearers of Truth. Yet, as in all ages, the Church is called to reach
into the marketplace of ideas with a word of grace. But how can the Church reach the
young man in our opening paragraphs? Like Paul in Athens moving from the
congregation, to the marketplace, and then to the center of intellectual debate, Mars
Hill, if we are to interact with those who have found no entry into our brick and mortar
churches, we need to move out beyond the walls of our classrooms into the center of
todays intellectual marketplacethe internet.
The church cannot ignore the potential for doing outreach and education on the
World Wide Web. The crucial question before the church is how to use this new

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medium to effectively communicate the gospel. How do we seize the possibilities to
reach those who are cruising the web hungry for something more than weather reports,
stock prices, and racy pictures of this weeks popular Hollywood stars?
Moving religious education out of the church basement and into cyberspace
involves several hurdles both small and great, which can be grouped into four areas:

Technical Issues,

Educational Issues,

Developmental Issues, and

Theological Issues.

Technical Issues
Every new communication involves some new technology. Fortunately, anyone who
can use a word processing program to format a document for a desktop printer can
create a passable web site. In fact, not since the invention of the soapbox has it been
so easy and inexpensive to reach people. The equipment needed includes a computer
with a connection to the internet and a space on some host computer; most beginners
will start with a free hosting service like www.tripod.com or www.geocities.com.
For reasons that will be obvious later, a religious education site should include
six elements:

engaging text,

links to online media such as music, visual art, fiction, newspapers or video,

self-evaluation instruments,

email links back to the sites administrator/teacher,

a chat room, and

a message board (also called a guest book, forum, or web board).

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Most of these elements are familiar to anyone with a passing acquaintance with
the internet. A few deserve a bit more explanation. Chat rooms and message boards
are technologies that permit multi-part communication among all the learners involved in
the online educational enterprise. Hosting services often provide simple versions of
these appliances. For more fully featured versions of chat rooms or message boards,
advanced users may choose to install one of several free software programs or
purchase a preformatted appliance. But even with the simplest free software, it will be
possible for learners on opposite sides of the planet to correspond in real time in a chat
room and for the learners who think of the right thing to say a day or a week later to
communicate and participate together via the message board.
A well-built web site will also contain several mechanisms for evaluation.
Although in traditional academic settings it is usually the teacher who does the
evaluating, the learner can be encouraged and excited by (successful) self-evaluations
and tests. The use of the JavaScript language makes creating mechanically graded
quizzes quite easy. The teacher may even choose to design the instruments to receive
email records of the individual learners progress on these quizzes. The technical
coding for such quizzes already exists in libraries online. The educator merely needs to
select a style of evaluation and insert the proper text into the template.
Educational Issues
The first significant educational issue that must be addressed is that merely presenting
information online (or in the classroom) is not education. Following Paulo Freire and
bell hooks, educators have become aware of the problem of assuming that we are
educating when we are merely presenting information and not encouraging response,

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interaction, and even struggle with the subject matter. The Brazilian Freire has called
the use of pure declarative text the banking concept of education (1993 pp.52-67)
which only allows the learner to pull out of his hollow bank-like head whatever her or his
teacher put into it. In a sense, Freire contends the learner is enslaved not liberated by
such deposited information. Religious web sites that do not encourage response,
engagement, and even dissent exemplify Freires critique. Examples include the web
site of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (goarch.org/access/orthodoxy) with its long
essays delineating what one should believe and that of the gay supportive Evangelicals
Concerned organization (ecwr.org), which on the question of belief simply publishes the
Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the National Association of Evangelicals
Statement of Faith. These presentations of religious material do not create openings for
conversation or engagement. This is where the values and opportunities of chat rooms,
message boards, and email become obvious. Open-ended evocative questions in a
traditional text can be useful, but how much more useful when the evocative question
can be followed by give and take responses. The African American educator bell hooks
would even claim that the educator has to be willing to embrace change and the
turbulence and fluidity of multicultural identity conflict to be true to the vocation of
educator (1994 p. 44).
An impediment to education online is the assumption that the entire experience
online is about text. Although the modem speed needed to download real-time voice
conversation and real-time video is only slowly becoming available, that speed is
increasing and becoming more widely available constantly; however, even without these
technical advances it is possible to link the learners with a variety of sources that can

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enhance the learning environment with audiovisual material relevant to the topic at
hand.
Howard Gardner in his book Frames of Mind identifies what has since come to
be known as multiple intelligencesthe several ways the brain takes in information,
processes it, and transmits it in a new form. Although the web cannot address all the
intelligences Gardner identifies1, it does permit more than a textbook or even a
workbook alone and provides for multimedia possibilities that most religious education
classrooms currently lack. Educationally there is no reason that an online educational
experience cannot be rich and diverse.
Developmental Issues
Online education can also be structured to account for the different developmental
abilities that various ages present. Since this project is designed to take into account
the interests and developmental issues related to adolescence, it looks and acts
different from one that is aimed at the developmental issues presented by a senior
citizens online Bible study or an online pre-school religious education class. Beyond
the surface issues of color choices, graphics, and level of engagement with the text, the
online presentation needs to take into consideration the attention span of the audience,
the need for encouraging feedback, and the importance of communal versus individual
interaction with the material.

Gardner identifies and examines linguistic intelligence, musical intelligence, logical-mathematical

intelligence, spatial intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and the personal intelligences. He further
assumes that the list is incomplete.

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Most educators struggle with silence (Parker, 1998 p. 82). It is often easier to fill
the void between teacher and learner with words than to allow space for thought.
Taking developmental issues into account, the educator will keep younger learners
stimulated and engaged with action, sound, and options for interaction while the same
educator might insert reflective music clips to give the more thoughtful older learners a
chance to process the text that was just presented.
Non-threatening evaluation provides the learner appropriate (hopefully positive)
feedback and an opportunity to recognize that learning is going on. The usual multiplechoice quiz online includes a correct answer and no more than two possible-sounding
incorrect answers and some obviously incorrect answers. The educator must
remember that these quizzes are not to identify mastery but to demonstrate to the
learner that she or he is in fact learning. Learners (especially 16- 25-year-old learners)
are more likely to continue in a lesson if they experience success. If they feel they
didnt learn, as an anonymous surfer, they have little incentive to continue. Older
learners on the other hand may be insulted by questions that do not challenge them.
Some online appliances allow the learner to see how his or her scores relate to
others who have taken the quiz. (These templates are often labeled not as quizzes but
as polls.) This is important for youths who are trying to get a sense of how they fit in
and how well they are achieving. Although it is not wise to dwell too heavily on such
comparisons, it is an obvious way to remind the learners that they are not alone in this
endeavor. Such comparisons obviously would be less important for younger learners
who are still largely self-focused.

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Theological Issues
The most notorious of the potential theological impediments to this project is that it does
not facilitate community, but rather can become a substitute for community. Although
there are persons who use the web compulsively, the same can be said for any number
of technologies. The response to the argument that the web can create isolation rather
than community is to provide links for the users of a religious web site to local flesh-andblood congregations that are willing to provide face-to-face ministry.
A related impediment to doing on-line religious education of this kind is the
question of whether a significant number of local congregations really want the youths
that will be reached though online evangelism and education. Perhaps the most
common question from the youths who have contacted me by email over the last three
years of www.cafepride.com s existence is where they can find a church where they
will be welcome. Since I am usually replying to youths of minority sexual orientation, I
frequently have had to refer these youths to congregations that are hours away from
their homes. Although the scope of this project is not to study the integration or
reintroduction into community that is at the heart of religion, I have decided to include on
Caf Prides web site links to congregations that have made a public declaration of
inclusion.
I heartily agree with Mark U. Edwards that the community that is established
among learners online is not an alternative to flesh and blood communities where
people experience all the non-digitizable qualities and failings of human interaction.
The very sharing of the Eucharist itself requires more than cyber presence (2000 p.
1262). It is my hope that these online endeavorsrather than replacements of

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communitycan be a new type of evangelism through education revealing not only
Gods unconditional love but also the inclusive love of religious communities where the
Word is declared and the sacraments are observed.

Research
Some hints about the research that this project will involve have been laid in the
previous pages. Although this will be, primarily, a demonstration project designed to
prove that the internet can be used effectively for quality religious education, the
structure of this project has theological roots deep in Christian tradition, contemporary
culture, social analysis, and personal experience.
Christian Tradition
The declaration of the good news is the heart of the Christian tradition. From ancient
and modern missionary movements to the whole development of the field of religious
education, the Church has sought to obey the Great Commission as recorded in
Matthew 28:18-20, Mark 16:15-18, Luke 24:46-47, and Acts 1:8. Yet, even a cursory
analysis of these related passages indicates that there was not uniform agreement
about the nature of this core teaching within the early Church. Suddenly the declaration
of the gospel becomes a much more complex issue. Anyone attempting to do religious
education or evangelism without having taken the time to come to grips with these
difficulties runs the risk of being confounded by what Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1799
called religions cultured despisers. Schleiermacher is frequently identified as the
father of the current liberal movement within the Reformed tradition. As such, in the
context of a discussion of online religious education and evangelization, however, he is
one of the first in his age to recognize that evangelization was not merely the task of
those Europeans assembling colonial empires. But that new ways of understanding the

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emerging rights of man required new ways to declare the love of God. His use of
liberal approaches to scripture was not intended to be an attack on divine authority but
was a way of doing evangelism in a world that was (and still is) in the process of
rejecting hierarchical feudal authority. Schleiermacher cared enough to use the
emerging paradigms of his time to declare the gospel in a manner appropriate to his
friendscultured, intellectuals who were rejecting the gospel as they overturned the
despised feudal paradigm of hierarchies in all human relationships. In my opinion,
Schleiermacher never met better-prepared cultured despisers or more God-hungry
young people than todays MTV generation.
Where one eventually settles in the struggle with these issues will determine a
great deal about how ones message will be communicated. As a minister in the
Reformed tradition of the Christian church, I believe that a persons salvation is not
dependent on any actions, constancy, or will of the individual but is solely the work of
God through Jesus. As a member of the Reformed tradition living with a contemporary
interpretation of that tradition I choose to believe that, somehow, the logic of double
predestination and limited salvation to the contrary, divine grace is already in place for
all, in the words of Titus 2:11, that the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation to
all (NRSV).
Often remaining consistent with the actual words of a passage requires one to
remain rooted in the First-Century context. Universal suffrage was not on the minds of
the writers of the New Testament. Even when the unity of all believers was declared as
it is in Galatians 3:28 there is no indication that the church took this passage as a
declaration against slavery, sexism, or ethnic division. As Peter Gomes has pointed

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out, Paul was emphatic that in this life distinctions do count (p. 89). My personal
engagement with the Gospel compels me occasionally to cut loose from these FirstCentury assumptions and embrace an egalitarian model of salvation that is not rooted in
class distinctions or the declarations of authoritative councils.
Because of my placement in the Christian tradition concerning the nature of
salvation, I can responsibly structure a web site that is not immediately occupied with
behavior modification on the part of the unchurched or dechurched learner. I am not
bound to quickly press for either an immediate intellectual acquiescence to any
simplified plan of salvation2 or for an immediate exercise of the sacrament of baptism.
This site will be structured under the assumption that the Great Commission and our
evangelistic mission is to create an atmospherean openingthat facilitates the Holy
Spirits work of enabling the learner to recognize and enjoy the gift of salvation already
in place. In these terms, repentance is not about expression of sorrow or guilt or even
entirely about some kind of behavior modification as much as about turning from
alienation from God to enjoyment and ultimately glorification of God. I, therefore, will be
structuring this site and inviting persons to access it without regard to whether or not
they consider themselves to be Christians or believers/practitioners of any religion.

I do not lightly disparage the use of scripture to contend with a seekers struggle. I do, however,

disagree with the use of fragments of Pauls complex discourses stripped from their moorings to lead to a
too tightly guided intellectual assentconversion by thesis pushing. I am further annoyed by remnants
of Christian cultural imperialism exemplified in attempts at conversion by shaming. I would contend that
www.falwell.com is a well designed and largely inoffensive site doing the former and that
www.godhatesfags.com/main is a beautifully designed yet intentionally offensive site demonstrating the
latter.

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My contention in writing curriculum is not so liberal as to respect no boundaries
but rather is willing to recognize that the learners may not all be persons who would be
comfortable in or an appropriate match with the congregation where I worship. The
boundaries of an individual congregation need not be the boundaries of a given
educational setting. Not all supportive churches have the same character or tolerance.
A Welcoming Unitarian Church will be quite different from a More Light Presbyterian
Church and both will be different from an inclusive high-church Episcopal congregation
or an inclusive Reformed Jewish congregation. These faith communities are both
caretakers of complex cultural traditions and communities with integral methods of
communicating those values and belief systems. For example, the sherry hour in an
Episcopal parish and the carry in dinner on the grounds at a rural Presbyterian
congregation each teach with unique integrity the entrance, liminal stages, and full
membership within that community. Although I brook no disparagement of the place of
formal religious education in each community, no formal educational setting
communicates the complex implicit and null curricula the way a shared meal does.
Online religious education can engage young gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
youths from all of these settings at the same time, but even the best online experience
is no substitute for a Seder.
Evangelism if understood from a framework of liberation theology, addresses not
merely lack of knowledge of God as in traditional orthodox theology or a need to
experience God's love (in material or psychosocial ways) as in purely liberal theology,
but an acknowledgment of God's love for all creation and the individual's connection to
all the other "little ones [which] to him belong. Traditional evangelism is about

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absolving guilt before an absolutist God. Liberal evangelism is about overcoming
ignorance of our relationship to God. Liberation evangelism is about reconfiguring
connections. Dorothee Soll has taught (1990 pp. 66-67) that liberation evangelism
among marginalized persons is a process, not of attacking pride, as Reinhold Niebuhr
taught (1941 pp. 188-189), but of building pride. Evangelism among sexual minority
persons is more than teaching that the penitent is loved by God; it is teaching each of
us to turn from shame and rejection of God's creation in ourselves to self acceptance
and integration with all God's good creation.
Contemporary Culture and Social Analysis
Much has already been said in this paper about the need for familiarity and engagement
with the contemporary phenomenon known as the internet. There are, however, other
elements of the contemporary culture that must be addressed as well.
Robert Bellah and his students have done much to make us aware of the
individualistic nature of contemporary American religion. Many religion writers have
decried the isolation and alienation created when persons choose to separate from
worshipping communities and engage in solo spiritual journeyswhat Bellah calls
Sheilaism (p. 221). Given the nature of recent unhealthy community activity among
many religious groups, from the creation of apartheid in South Africa to the sack of
Kosovo, however, many faithful persons must wonder at this past Christian centurys
glorification of organized religious groups with access to power. Among the youths at
Caf Pride who feel they have been driven from the church and battered in the name of
God, the Church is not often seen as the vehicle of Gods love but rather as the center
of right-wing political organizing and occasionally the lair of embodied hate.

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It is a common observation that persons taking academic classes in religion and
even many college graduates coming to seminary need first to be stripped of the faulty
religious education they have absorbed from the contemporary culture. The theology
of the pulpit is not always the problem here. The folk theology that exists in the
community surrounding the Church is often quite powerful and pervasive. But even
church theology has done its damage; many women who were taught self-abasement,
many racial minority persons who were taught passivity, and many sexual minority
persons who were taught shame received this instruction directly from a pulpit. Without
ignoring or demeaning the mission of the Church, it is often easier to do religious
education with persons who do not bring the baggage of life in religious community.
This project has a higher possibility of success because although many youths have
absorbed some of the negative aspects of the cultures folk theology most un-churched
seekers are not already possessed of the preconceptions and prejudices that many
youths within the church bring.
Another contemporary issue that is concurrent with this project is the craving for
spirituality among the youths that I have encountered. The rise in tribal tattoos; the
sales of Eastern and New Age candles, books, and paraphernalia; the popularity of
television shows with spiritualism as a theme; and even youths preoccupation with
hopelessly romantic love indicate that young persons often seek something deeper than
the mere acquisition of things. Tom Beaudoin, in his book Virtual Faith, takes as his
central premise that many younger persons are actively seeking meaning and deeply
crave the spiritual even while rejecting the institutional church. Persons in their late
teens and early twenties are often asking the philosophical, ethical, and theological

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questions their grandparents were afraid to ask but this generation is seldom asking
those questions of the Church.
Personal Experience
Since 1995, my life has been intertwined with these youths. I listen to their stories; they
encouraged me to build our first web site. We have laughed and cried fought a bit and
become friends and mutual support.
One of my young friends, a sixteen-year-old boy, was thrown out of his home in
Barcelona, Spain when his father found out the young man was gay. His mother bought
him an airline ticket to Chicago to live in safety with an aunt. While his plane was over
the Atlantic she went onto the internet and searched for a safe place in Chicago for her
son. She found www.cafepride.com and called him when he landed to tell him about
the place that must be safe because it was in a church. Off and on for two years, he
attended the Caf. Some of our young men taught him to do his own laundry, and he
taught them to cook authentic Spanish cuisine. This past Halloween, one of our adult
volunteers with a laptop computer and a digital camera took pictures at the Cafs
costume party and emailed them to our absent friend across the Atlantic and the teen in
Europe emailed back to those of us in Chicago his critique of each of our costumes.
The young man is now partially reconciled with his father, attending college, and
planning on taking the online class described in this paper from his college dormitory
room half a world away.
Rodrigos mother is not the only one looking for resources online. In the first
forty-five days of having the Spirituality Project online we received 4,012 visitors from
over ten countries including 35 visits from the campus of my own estranged alma mater

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Bob Jones University. My personal experience informs me that pastoral ministry,
religious education, and evangelization can be donein fact is being done nowwith
the aid of the internet, that there are peopleall kinds of peoplesearching cyberspace
for religious resources, and that community can indeed be established and maintained
through the creative use of this new media.

Theoretical Framework
This project, while primarily a demonstration of how quality religious education can be
done over the internet involving learners from all over the world, is also an integral part
of Pride Ministries/Caf Pride; consequently, it is a part of our evangelistic outreach as
well as a demonstration project for the larger community of religious educators.
Theological Mandate
God uses the Church in the work of restoring and reconciling both in the visible realm of
creation and in the invisible realm of the heart and soul. In the last century, we came
into possession of tremendous new mechanisms with which to communicate the
message of Gods love more widely than ever. Yet, the early centurys mass
communication efforts through motion pictures, radio, and television often failed
because they could not foster interactive community unless they were used in intimate
relation to existing religious communities. Ministries concentrating solely on these
media tended to isolate one of Maria Harriss aspects of religious curriculum 3kerygma
or proclamationand to use it to create religious community. Instead of encouraging
engagement, I contend that these media fostered passivity and a spectator mentality.
3

Harris identifies five aspects or curricula, that together, are the vocation of religious community. The five

are koinonia: the curriculum of community, Leiturgia: the curriculum of prayer, didache: the curriculum of
teaching, kerygma: the curriculum of proclamation, and diakonia: the curriculum of service. (1989 pp.5-6)

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Worship is no longer the work of the people it is the religious show that is successful in
relation to how well it touches the audiences emotions.
It is the reaction to this spectator mentality in religious life and the rejection of the
institutions that have been associated with it that has given strength to individualistic
theology and its many related problems. These technologies held great promise, but, I
contend, they have often damaged the Church.
We did during this past century, however, learn to use the telephone to
strengthen and build faith communities. Few American churches no matter how
isolated have not used the telephone to keep in touch with shut-ins, to share prayer
requests at times of crisis, and to organize and schedule incidental meetings. The
crucial difference between film, radio, and television and the telephone is interactivity.
The internet, like the telephone, which is primarily a person to personlisten and
answertechnology, permits, encourages, and even demands interaction and
response. Chat rooms, message boards, interactive quizzes, polls, interactive games,
email, and now emerging audio and video recording and postings allow for person-toperson responses. The television or radio evangelist doesnt know whether I am in the
room or not. The director and producer of the inspirational film doesnt hear me if I ask
for an explanation. Mass media can never be attentive to the pauses, and leading
questions of every individual audience member. But the direct question, the total lack of
response, and the pregnant pause evident on the telephone, the chat room, and in
various ways in each of these interactive technologies allows the educator and the
evangelist to modify the presentation to best reach each learner. By facilitating
interaction, these technologies build community.

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One of the most exciting issues related to community and interactivity is the
release in February 2001 of Phantasy Star Online, an online game that allows persons
using different languages to interact and chat in real time using translation matrices that
are built in to the game. This instant translation application is the next generation of
common online translation programs such as Alta Vistas Babelfish
(babelfish.altavista.digital.com). In a few years it will be possible and (I hope) quite
common to have religious education on the internet available simultaneously to learners
in several languages. This technology will allow the Church, at least on a word-for-word
basis if not yet a cultural basis, to engage in the kind of outreach that was part of the
miracle of its birth at Pentecost. This technology has the potential to build a community
of learners that is worldwide.
Behavioral Challenges
My vision for this project is to see religious educators at all levels bring the vast and
diverse creative abilities they already possess as teachers to this new venue and to
take advantage of the multimedia communication possibilities available through the
internet to expand their ministries. For years, the religious educator has been trying and
creatively using diverse methodologies to make the good news accessible. From the
blackboard and flannel graph, to the filmstrip, movie projector, tape recorder and video
recorder, religious educators have been the leaders in the creative use of media in the
church. Now it is time to enter this new field. With no more equipment than most
churches already possessa computer with an internet linkthe educator can reach
around the world at the speed of light with the message of the gospel.

2
An aspect of the internet that may be an impediment to more widespread use is
the technophobia that all new media engenders. Although I tend to believe that most
true educators are excited by the prospect of new technologies and broader audiences,
it is possible that rolling a cart with a video recorder and a television into a classroom is
the limit of multimedia adventure for some of my colleagues. In that case, I hope to
demonstrate that one need not be a technical wizard to create good online educational
environments.
I would also like to see educators not only build good pages, but also link to other
web sites where talented educators have put together appropriate sites. Technically
advanced teachers could create and post templates for pages with built in interactivity
through forms, quizzes, and polls that will enable the less adventurous to begin
modifying and building their own pages even quicker. Online publishing for educators
can grow from the sharing of lesson plans that is going on now to sharing links, page
designs, and original artwork for pages, and generally encouraging one another in the
practice of using this new medium. Some secular education materials for online
education are also useful, notably The George Washington University educational TIP
center (www.gwu.edu/~tip/), Syracuse Universitys Manal El-Tigis study of online
education (web.syr.edu/~maeltigi/), and The U.S. Department of Educations
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) (ericir.syr.edu/).
One institutional behavior that I would like to see modified requires the
recognition that building a good online educational site is indeed a ministry and
deserves the attention, time, and support of staff. This is not something that can be
posted and forgotten like last months sermon. It not only takes time to create; it takes

2
time to maintain. The educator will be moderating chat rooms, answering email,
updating links, and generally continuing to teach a class as long as the site remains on
the web. Religious institutions need to follow the lead of secular education institutions
and the training divisions in industry and change their attitudes regarding the use of
funds and staff time to appropriately use this new medium. Standing in stole and gown
in front of a congregation or with chalk in hand before a class is no longer the only time
an educator is actively presenting the gospel.
The primary persons that will directly participate in this project are those who do
not need to be convinced of the utility of the web. They are youths who have self
selected to participate in this study and who in many cases discovered this project
because of their own search for online spirituality resources. The ultimate audience for
this demonstration, however, is religious educators in seminaries and congregations
who currently limit their ministries either within a single brick-and-mortar classroom or to
traditionally published ink-and-paper materials.
Change Theory
Since this is a demonstration project, the change theory will utilize a change strategy
that is primarily educational and occasionally cultural. I will provide a series of options
and demonstrate how each can be used in the enterprise of religious education. For
most religious educators the concept of building creative and innovative educational
sites online is a dream. Some already have this dream but dont know how or where to
pursue it and others are still in the process of focusing in on the dream. For others
particularly older persons, women, and African Americans, the internet is too associated
with young white male interests and has been outside their understanding of

2
themselves and of their communities. This perception that the World Wide Web is only
a white boys club and, consequently, that it is not either welcoming or accessible to
women, older persons, or persons of color is often called digital divide. Throughout the
short life of the internet there have been studies of the demographics of those online.
Some persons frozen by fears of racial, ageist, and gender distinctions have rejected
the internet as merely the province of those with large sums of disposable income.
Surely there are no homeless people online. Computers are just too expensive.
The perception of a digital divide, however, is changing rapidly. According to an
article in IBM Research, technologies are in development that will make the internet
much easier for older persons to use such as voice activated browsing and browsers
that will actively redesign and simplify pages for persons with vision problems
(research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/2000/number_1/inbrief100.html). From the
beginning of this project to the present women regularly using the internet have gone
from a minority to as much as 60 percent of the current users. In fact, younger women
13-30 years old (also known as chick clickers) are now the fastest growing demographic
group on the web (slashdot.org/features/00/03/30/1339259.shtml). And African
Americans are crossing over the digital divide as the creation of portals like Black
Chicago Online (blackchicago.com), African-American genealogical sites (e.g.
ccharity.com), and popular articles like The Buffalo Soldiers on the Western Frontier
(imh.org/imh/buf/buf2.html) demonstrate. Even some homeless persons, including
several of Caf Prides patrons, check their email at public libraries. It is also
noteworthy that one of the first churches in America to broadcast its services on the
internet was the Salem Baptist Church (sbcoc.org), a largely African-American

2
congregation on Chicagos south side, which has broadcast its services online since
1999. Similar gains can also be identified among Hispanic Americans although,
according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, along with Native Americans they are
still significantly underrepresented online. The divide appears to be becoming more a
rural/urban phenomenon rather than a purely racial one (digitaldivide.gov).
This demonstration project should spark ideas. But the change I am concerned
with has to do with the experience of being frozen into older forms of communication,
frozen in the face of unfamiliar technology, frozen in the hierarchies of who should be
working with this technical material (educators or technical engineers) and frozen in
doubts about how well affective education can be done with this medium. Through this
paper and the publication of Pride Ministries/Caf Pride Spirituality Project
(www.cafepride.com/spirit), I hope to demonstrate this new technology and begin the
process of refreezing the intended audience into confident acceptance of the utility and
possibilities of online education in their settings.

Interventions
The educational processes I will be attempting to demonstrate online are:

Engagement through real-time debate and postings creating multiparty

discussions that enable the learners to become full participants in the educational
environment, as opposed to being passive recipients as Paulo Freire and bell
hooks have critiqued.

Presentation of a cross section of the materials that already exist on the internet
and that can be brought into the educational setting. Although I cannot engage
all the intelligences that Howard Gardner has delineated, I can introduce a
variety of media that will enrich the learning setting.

Demonstration of methods of feedback that keep this a living educational

experience through email and online evaluation instruments.

I will also be answering the following questions:

How complicated is the process?

How expensive is the process?

How time consuming is the process? and

How can we publish the product so that the average seeker can find it?
The true objective for this project is to demonstrate that quality religious

education can be done using the existing, relatively inexpensive technologies already
available and the existing visual and audio resources of the internet. This objective will
be met through the presentation of a series of lessons, whichalthough useful in and of
themselves will primarily demonstrate the use of these resources. Each of these
lessons (beginning at www.cafepride.com/spirit) will be both an intervention and an
example.
Each lesson will contain text presenting the concepts at hand; links to a variety of
artwork, voice recordings, music files, animation and fiction sites, and a set of review
questions. At a mutually agreed upon time, all the learners will have been invited to
come together in the chat room for a real-time discussion of the topics and the relevant
surfing. Throughout the entire period of the project they will be able to post longer,
more permanent observations and questions on the message board.
The segments themselves are:

What does it mean to be spiritual?

What does it mean to be part of a community?

How can I know real love?

How can I make sense of pain? and

How can I figure out my future?

2
How Complicated Is the Process?
The first web site that Caf Pride had was on Geocities.com, a free host. I designed it
using only the graphics and design ideas that were available from Geocities.com or that
I found on other sites. Both Geocities.com and Tripod.com, another free-hosting site,
offer a wealth of advice, free appliances, and online editing programs so that it would be
possible to create a good site with no other input. Arguably, every church with a
computer, modem, phone line, and internet access (even free access like NetZero.net)
can have a web site with no further expense beyond staff time. If, however, money is
not an immediate impediment and youd like to go an even easier route, Commercial
hosting sites with built-in appliances and easy to learn commercial web authoring
programs like Microsofts FrontPage, Macromedias Dreamweaver, or Allaires
HomeSite simplify much of the work of building an attractive site. There are also free
software programs to aid you in web design and in the creation of graphics for the web.
(For examples, see download.cnet.com/downloads). Additionally for a serious outlay of
cash ($3000 suggested retail) Macromedias Web Learning Studio is specifically
designed to build online learning and training sites incorporating everything from text
and graphics to animation, audio, and video.
I began to use the online editing program on the Geocities site and quickly had a
useful although static site. It was primarily a way to promote our organization and let
others know who we were, where we were, and what we believed in. Very quickly,
however, I recognized that anything that I had created on my computer from fliers and
newsletters to papers for D.Min. classes could very easily be posted to this site and
made available to anyone seeking to learn more about our work.

2
My first foray into the world of interactivity was to create a form that allowed
surfers to send me an email asking to be added to our newsletter mailing list. I also
began to assemble a list of interactive links to other organizations that complemented
Caf Prides mission. Eventually adding a chat room, message boards, and an online
bookstore were logical outgrowths.
In the world of software and web design, imitation is flattery. It is perfectly
acceptable to look at the coding of someone elses page to see how to get a certain
result. Although obviously it would be wrong to steal someone elses design, it is
always acceptable to learn from their examples. The simplest level of web design is the
hypertext markup language or html. It is a very simple language and can be learned
online in tutorials such as hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/authoring. I learned the
basics of html there. Over time, I developed my own collection of links, which I regularly
use to introduce music and art into one of my web sites. I refer the reader to
www.cafepride.com/spirit/sources.htm to see an assortment of what the web offers.
How Expensive Is the Process?
There are two schools of thought concerning the expense of this process. You can go
as cheaply as possible and invest a good deal of time or you can invest a little money
and save a lot of time. In actuality, little can be done with high priced software that
cannot be done with free software. The difference is in the expenditure of time. Some
coding that would take five minutes in a web authoring software program can take hours
of typing otherwise. The only costs I have chosen to incur on the Caf Pride site are the
registration of a name, renting space on a commercial hosting site, and purchasing
Microsofts FrontPage Software. This adds up to $35 a year to register a name

2
(sometimes you can get this cheaper), $250 a year to rent space on a commercial
hosting site (again smaller sites cost less and renting for a longer period can lower your
costs), and a one time charge for FrontPage which now sells for about $70. If I had
stayed on Geocities and been satisfied to have advertisements on my pages, if I had
been willing to have a meaningless URL address rather than our recognizable
www.cafepride.com, and if I had been willing to work with a free web authoring
program rather than an industry standard, I could have posted an almost identical page
for free. In light of my investment of time and of the professional look our site now has, I
believe the money is well spent.
How Time Consuming Is the Process?
The time involved in preparing a quality web site depends a great deal on the
personality of the educator. I am sure there are people who can work on a lesson plan
and then use it without change for years. There are people who can write a book and
then not think about how they could improve it if a second edition were to come out. I
am not like that and the web allows me to be constantly juggling and fine tuning my
product. I fully expect that just as a homeowner needs to occasionally rearrange the
furniture and try a new color on the walls, I will always be playing with my pages. It is
significant that some sites, notably www.pantone.com, exist to inform the web designer
and others of the current seasons popular color combinations for web sites. I also
regularly compare my site with the sites of Fortune 500 companies and see which of us
is following or breaking various design rules. And occasionally there are national lists of
the best and worst designed or fastest loading sites. These comparisons, lists, and
color options always give us new ideas and suggest improvements so that our teaching
environment can continue to evolve and improve.

2
But how much time should one budget to keep a site up to date. At present, I
plan on four to five hours a month to fine-tune and maintain the site. I also plan on that
much time to answer and catalog the email the site generates. The original site has
been redone several times so I dont know the exact amount of time it took to put up,
but I would guess it took about 120 hours to build the original site, create its graphics,
and write most of its content. Some of the content was produced for other projects and
inserted here later. The whole site is 47 pages long and some of those pages are
several screens long. This would correspond to around 200 pages of traditional text.
Another major expenditure of time will be taken up with the creation of
appropriate evaluation instruments. These are not particularly difficult, but they can
occasionally be tricky and need to be tested and re-tested over and over again. In the
online project I have chosen to use five different styles of evaluation in order to
demonstrate some of the possibilities available. In a regular site, the educator might
choose to use just one or two styles of evaluation instruments and use them more
frequently with fewer items. I have also tried to keep up to date on the various
technologies available for chat rooms and message boards. You may note that I
currently have two chat rooms running simultaneously on the chat room page
(www.cafepride.com/chat.html). This is primarily to demonstrate the possibilities of
white board usage over the internet, a technology that might be useful for some realtime classes online.
Although there are several languages that can be used to create active pages, I
have stayed with JavaScript. At present, it is the most common of the interactive
languages and several online libraries (e.g. www.javascripts.com, www.jsworld.com,

2
and javascript.internet.com) are full of cut-and-paste templates already written in that
language. Other forms of evaluation and feedback maintain and access a database
that is generated from the users input. Perhaps you have visited an online bookstore
like Amazon or Barnes and Noble and on entering your name and password find that
the site remembers your address, the last five books you purchased, and perhaps
even your credit card number. Imagine if your students could come to a page and after
signing in be reminded of where they left off in the lesson, what their scores were on the
last three quizzes, or where they ranked among the other online learners. This is all
possible for an online educational setting now, but the technical expertise is beyond an
entry-level discussion like this. Within a few years, however, these technical options will
seem no more complex than the filmstrip projector.
How Can We Publish the Product so that the Average Seeker Can Find It?
Posting a site without working to make it accessible to those who are seeking you would
be like writing a book and then leaving all the printed copies in a warehouse. There are
tens of thousands of sites promoting churches and various religious institutions in many
languages and from many perspectives. Making your site known is essential if you are
to have a wider audience than those you can reach by more common means.
The first step in making your site known is to register with the major search
engines. Some of those registration sites are:

Yahoo-- http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/,

Hotbot/Lycos-- http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp,

Altavista-- http://doc.altavista.com/addurl/, and

Google-- http://dmoz.org/add.html.

3
Registration involves answering a set of questions about the content and intent of
the site and of your organization and then submitting the site to one or more of the
categories the search engine uses.
For the Pride Ministries/Caf Pride site I also inserted a series of meta tags in
the source code to make the page more easily visible to the software programs (called
bots and spiders) that regularly search the net for clues to cataloging. Several
companies exist only to write these tags and seem to try to keep the whole process a
secret. MSN Search for instance charges from $199 to $99 to catalog a commercial
site manually. The process of making your site visible to the search engines robots is,
really, not terribly complex. You just need to figure out how you want to be classified
and make sure that you have a tag within the coding of your page that communicates
that classification. I learned to do this by taking online tutorials. I suggest
hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/96/51/index2a.html,
www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html, or
info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/meta-user.html.
Another even more elemental way of promoting your site is by making friends
with others who have similar sites. As anyone who has surfed the web knows, you
dont often find what you want in your first stop. You check links and look for related
sites through one after another. Caf Pride is linked with all the members of the
following organizations, the Queer Youth Web Ring (www.youthresource.com), the Ring
for Gay Youth (members.aol.com/LoLforever), and the Gay Teen Resources Ring
(www.gayteenresources.org). Additionally we share links with our supporting churches
and with a variety of social service organizations and gay religious caucuses. Although

3
it is true that this will eventually link you within a few clicks to potentially objectionable
material, it can be argued that a corresponding theory to the six degrees of separation
between any two people on earth is the belief that you can surf from any site to
practically any other properly linked site with no more than ten clicks.
Here are a few random suggestions from my experience that I would like to pass
on to other educators:

Do not think of the web site as a book that must be perfect before it can be
online. As in ink-and-paper publication, the perfect is always the enemy of the
good. Get the thing online and continue to work and rework it. If you wait till
everything is perfect, you will never get online. If you find a better link or a better
way of saying something, you can always make a change. The first great aspect
of internet interactivity is our ability as web authors to interact with our own
writing.

Work to eventually make your site conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The act began to cover government web sites in August of 2000 and may never
be enforced against religious web sites, but I have known several blind internet
users and have watched the frustration they have with web sites that are not
designed to be compatible with the special non-graphic browsers they use. I
suggest that as a justice issue as well as a practical one that we work to keep our
online lessons as accessible as possible. For guidance in this area, I suggest
you look at www.w3.org/WAI/.

Be conscious of the navigation structure of your site. Great graphics and

compelling text can be lost if the site is two complicated to surf through. Many
designers try to make sure there are always two doors into any of the next
pages within your site that you are suggesting to your audience. Remember that
your audience may not be using the most state of the art browser and may not be
able to see let alone click on the nifty dancing Jesus you have used to link to
your lesson on the synoptic gospels.

Finally, avoid the use of fancy effects. Specifically I suggest you avoid the use of
framesthe division of a page into several smaller pages that scroll and
change independently. This technique, although capable of making a variety of
interesting effects, is one of the most complication-prone of any technology on
the web. For instance, it is quite difficult to bookmark such a changeable page or
add it to a favorites list. Frameslike blinking text, scrolling text, rotating
mailboxes and embedded music files you cannot turn offare the growing pains
of the web and are often considered the mark of an annoying, amateur web site.

Evaluation
Since this is a demonstration project, there will actually be two audiences involved in
determining the success of this thesis project: the adolescent learners and the larger
community of religious educators. To evaluate this project among the learners
immediately involved, at the end of the five lessons, I asked participants to provide me
with a completed online form made up of multiple choice and short answer questions
evaluating their experience. Specifically:

Did you find participation in the Spirituality Project useful?

Would you recommend it as a method of education?

Did the introductory text in each lesson prepare you for the surfing expedition in
the middle of each lesson?

Did the links provide you with a variety of kinds of input in a coherent manner?

Did the self-evaluation instruments (quizzes and reviews) help you stay involved,
i.e. did they generate a sense of accomplishment?
A pre and post test would not be useful since the learners are primarily youths

who have already self identified and self selected as having a great deal of interest and,
therefore, at least some experience in dealing with these issues. It is unlikely that any
of them will receive significant new information on these topics. As a measure of
affective education rather than the acquisition of new information, the level of
engagement, involvement, and response during the period of the project will indicate
more than correct answers alone.
Although the mandate of the project is to encourage the community of religious
educators to generate more online educational opportunities, I am not aware of any
method within the purview of this thesis project that would measure that increase. In

3
short, the only method for evaluating change within that community will be to watch and
wait.
I am disappointed to report that during the first three weeks since the project was
published the number of surfers through the site has been small. Although several of
the youths who I had invited and who I later re-contacted reported that they had looked
at the site, they said that they intended to spend time actually working through the
lessons later when they had more time. I had used as my model for the pacing of these
lessons web sites teaching web design and various computer languages. I have now
concluded that sites dealing with more esoteric material such as spirituality may need to
be broken up into shorter, ten-minute-or-less lessons. I am planning on rewriting this
project into fifteen smaller lessons rather than the existing five medium-sized lessons. I
will also add a great deal more interactivity and shorter evaluative instruments to make
the site more engaging to teens.
There is another phenomenon at play as well. During the same period when I
have had few youths complete the lessons, I have had many youths fill out the Caf
Pride email form and asked to be involved in future projects. The site is steadily gaining
traffic even though few youths report having completed the entire online class. I am
choosing to consider this phenomenon as parallel to the phenomenon of un-churched or
dechurched persons being comforted by the existence of a welcoming local
congregation even while they are not physically joining the congregation. The mere
existence of sites like thislike the existence of welcoming congregationsdestabilizes
pre-existing paradigms of what it means to be spiritual. For many youths like the young
woman who this month contacted Caf Pride to find a lesbian-supportive congregation

3
in Puerto Rico there may be a larger appreciative audience out there than is reflected in
the numbers of completed surveys.
The length of the evaluation instruments may also be a problem. I have decided
that in my redesign these instruments should have no more than five questions, that
they should be designed to be a little less difficult, and that they should be more
frequent. I intend to have a one- or two-question instrument for every two screens of
text.

Significance
Determining significance in a demonstration project such as this requires that the larger
community of educators become excited and engaged by the possibilities of the
technologies and methodologies being used. I doubt that there is a religious educator in
America who is unaware of the internet. This project is designed to encourage them to
experiment with their own online site and to model ways that existing, inexpensive
even freetechnologies can be used to reach a larger audience than could have been
imagined only a few years ago. It is not enough that religious educators turn to the
internet only to post lesson plans, or publish text-only materials like sermons or lectures,
even if beautifully written. Educators recoil from so flat a presentation in the classroom
and would do well to avoid such a presentation online as well. This project is significant
as a model that allows other educators to think beyond the page and beyond the
classroom walls. This project is significant as an illustration of methodologies and uses
for technologies that can be replicated in religious education materials on other topics.
By demonstrating or reminding religious educators of the audio-visual resources

3
available online that directly parallel what they might choose to bring into a brick-andmortar classroom to illustrate their lessons.
This project is ultimately not about teaching youths about spirituality; it is about
teaching anyone surfing the internet and willing to stop for a moment about the love of
God. Paul began his declaration of the good news to the people of Athens in the
synagogue, and then in the marketplace, and finally, apparently unwillingly, in the
middle of the Areopagus, or Mars Hill, the forum for debate and the rough and tumble
of competing, often contentious, ideologies (Acts 17:16-34). The Hill of Mars was not a
pristine natural setting. It was as contaminated with evil and ungodly influences as
any place could be. It literally was a pagan stronghold. This project is about convincing
my fellow educatorssometimes unwillinglyto make the internet our modern Mars
Hill. It is time for us to move out of the mildew, stale air, and relative safety of the
church basement and elbow our way into the rough and tumble of cyberspace. Let us
claim a platform on the web to declare that God is near even in the midst of
commercialization, tawdriness, and obscenity let us claim a place where, in the words
written by an earlier religious educator, some may scoff, and others may need to hear
again, but where some will join us and perhaps, like the First-Century Athenians
Dionysius, and Damaris, and maybe even the lonely seventeen-year-old youth from our
opening paragraphs become members with us in the household of faith.

Appendix A - A Brief History of Caf Pride

Caf Pride is a coffeehouse serving underagesixteen to twenty-one year-old
persons who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, who are questioning their
orientation, or who are supportive friends of such youths. The Caf is not an attempt to
change anyone's orientation, neither is it a place for traditional social service
intervention. Caf Pride is a ministry of providing safe space in a supportive
environment. It is staffed by adults who are integrated into the local community and into
local churches. Our mission is to provide what Peter Hodgson (1988 p. 71) calls a
"clearing of freedom" in which young persons can "catch their breath. A place where
they can examine their lives without the usual external pressures of homophobic society
that attempts to quash their orientation. A place where they can be free from the
pressures to engage in unwanted sexual activity and substance abuse, which dominate
many adult "gay-friendly" venues clandestinely open to underage persons.
Caf Pride began as a result of what Holland and Henriot call the "Pastoral
Circle" (1983 p. 8). I had ministered in the gay and lesbian community for nine years
addressing the pastoral needs of adults and some youths who, although not always
economically distressed, had matured in an environment that devalued and
marginalized them by denying them equal legal protections, free association, and
access to religious community. These persons, although occasionally high achievers,
were often deeply wounded. I ministered from the position of a gay-friendly ecumenical
agency, which in turn was supported by several radically inclusive churches. My point
of insertion was to recognize the experience of the "poor and oppressed" of this
community. Much of my social analysis over the years has informed me that the self-

3
destructive behaviors I witnessed among gay and lesbian adults usually stemmed
directly from their feeling of unworthiness and marginalization as children and youths.
Whether corporate lawyer or street hustler, these adults were scarred by the self-hate
they had absorbed almost with their mother's milk.
Although I had little access to pre-adolescents who might be forming destructive
beliefs and attitudes, I occasionally had access to youths who were just beginning,
because of the relative mobility and freedom of the late teenage years, to come to the
attention of law enforcement personnel and school officials as "problems" because of
their overt sexuality or awkward forays into the world of alcohol, drugs, and/or
prostitution. Once I worked past the convenient middle-class assumption that these
were just "bad kids" and began to know some of them personally and to hear and see
the world from their perspective, I had to struggle with the pastoral/theological question
of what the church should do or be to counteract the system of teaching youths to hate
themselves and become self-destructive. It is not enough to be part of a Presbyterian
"More-Light Church" (a gay-inclusive congregation) if the persons who need to know
that God's love includes them are not in the congregation or aware of the
denominational jargon we use to signal parish-level inclusion in the face of general
religiously based homophobia.
The last straw for my pastoral "paralysis of analysis" was the ejection of many of
my young parishioners from the one low-cost hangout for sexual minority youths when
that establishment, previously a coffeehouse, received a liquor license and could no
longer host persons under twenty-one years-old. Within a few weeks, several of my
young friends had been arrested or detained for hanging out on the streets. They

3
needed a place to be, to socialize, to laugh, and with no commercial establishment
welcoming them, the police determined that otherwise harmless "hanging out" was
panhandling or a cover for solicitation. Additionally, for many of these youths, to be
arrested or accused of illegality was the last barrier to actually trying out some of these
illicit activities. These young adults were getting in trouble with the authorities for no
other reason than that there was no safe place for them to congregate. Yet many
nights, they were being arrested within a few feet of a darkened church building. They
needed and deserved a chance at sanctuary.
Opening Caf Pride involved several months of false starts and temporary
arrangements. We thrived for a year in the basement of Holy Covenant United
Methodist Church on Diversey Avenue. Currently, Lake View Presbyterian Church at
Addison and Broadway hosts Caf Pride, and the Caf receives funding and additional
support from Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church, First United Church of Oak Park, and
Grace Baptist Church. Even one of the local synagogues has recognized us as a
valuable community resource and listed us on their web page.
Evangelism among sexual minority persons is more than teaching that God loves
the penitent; it is teaching the penitent to grow up and honor herself or himselfto learn
to sing God's praises with one's own voice. Persons of many marginalized groups need
to experience what the New Testament Greek terms metanoia, often translated
repentance (literally "turning from" or "turning away"), not as turning away from pride
and rebellion to godly submission but as turning from shame and rejection of God's
creation in one's self to self acceptance and integration with all God's good creation.

3
Pride Ministries was founded as a result of hours of "parking lot" conversations
among Caf Pride's staff and interested friends. These conversations led to the
following conclusions.

There exists a need to do appropriate evangelism in sexual minority communities

particularly in the neighborhoods we had identified.

Caf Pride can effectively do ministry among only one age group of sexual
minority persons.

Many congregations recognize the need to reach out to persons marginalized as

a result of minority orientation but are ill equipped through traditional models to
provide appropriate outreach. These congregations could benefit from those of
us associated with Caf Pride aggressively marketing ourselves as speakers and
consultants and/or publishing as experts in sexual minority, liberation
evangelism.
Because of these conversations initiated by our attempts to adapt to our string of

crises, the volunteer staff of Caf Pride began to approach local congregations and
resource persons to create a broader "self-sustaining" organization to manage Caf
Pride and address the other needs we had observed. We would come to call this
organization "Pride Ministries."
Pride Ministries' Vision/Mission Statement
"Pride Ministries is dedicated to the proposition that the Good News of God's love is
broader than any one denominational creed or religious understanding. It is, therefore,
not limited to service among any one type of religious community. Pride Ministries is
dedicated to the concept that the needs of all persons transcend the merely material
and include access to religious tradition, ritual, community life, and opportunities to
serve others."
"Therefore, Pride Ministries is a religious organization that exists

To provide assistance to religious communities considering outreach among

persons in their neighborhoods' sexual minority communities.

To consult with religious communities designing or redesigning sexual minority

outreach programs or any type of radically inclusive ministry.

To guide religious communities in the study of urban ministry in general by

leading guided street walks, by providing resource persons for study groups
(Sunday School classes, youth groups, or academic classes), by writing study
guides, and by offering more intensive consultation."

Caf Pride's Mission Statement

"Caf Pride is a religious outreach of Pride Ministries that exists

To provide sexual minority youths with a safe space for fellowship with peers and
to interact with adults who are integrated into the community.

To challenge the exclusion which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youths
often experience from religious communities and the attendant spiritual alienation
that many sexual minority persons experience.

To offer the wider community an example of inclusive ministry."

Appendix B Caf Prides Spirituality Project

The following pages are printed directly from the World Wide Web beginning at
www.cafepride.com/spirit using the print functions of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5.
These are the pages, as they existed on the afternoon of April 5, 2001. These pages
might not have appeared or printed exactly the same in another browser. It is also
significant that these pages are not static. The web author has the responsibility to not
only publish but to maintain her or his pages. Links disappear. Pages are redesigned
and the links that worked today may not work tomorrow. The author needs to regularly
check and correct or remove broken or outdated links. Much like an abundance of
misspellings in a research paper, broken links communicate to the surfer that the
material is out of date, poorly regarded by its author, or otherwise not deserving of
respect.

125

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