The Christian is to be a demonstration of the existence of God. But if we as individual Christians, and as the church, act on less than a personal relationship to other men, where is the demonstration that God the Creator is personal? If there is no demonstration in our attitude toward other men that we really take seriously the person-to-person relationship, we might as well keep quiet. There must be a demonstration; that is our calling: to show that there is a reality in personal relationship, and not just words about it. If the individual Christian, and if the church of Christ, is not allowing the Lord Jesus Christ to bring forth his fruit into the world, as a demonstration in the area of personal relationships, we cannot expect the world to believe. Lovelessness is a sea that knows no shore, for it is what God is not. And eventually not only will the other man drown, but I will drown, and worst of all, the demonstration of God drowns as well when there is nothing to be seen but a sea of lovelessness and impersonality.
—Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality
I absolutely love how Schaeffer speaks of communication in True Spirituality. I included this quote here because of the growing importance of dialog in our Christian presentation. Broadcast is no longer a satisfactory method of communication on the web. People want to gauge authenticity; years of televangelist infidelity and political power-plays by the quote-unquote Christian Right have demolished our credibility. Now–perhaps more than any other time in the history of the church–we must declare the Gospel with our lives and not simply our words.
Leonard Sweet: Post-Modern Pilgrims. Two favorite words used in the context of the Web are connected and community. In fact, the two words have become one in the new word connexity. Both eBay and Amazon.com say they are in the ‘connexity’ business–making connections and building communities. Both demonstrate that the Web is less an information source than a social medium…A true Web site is a gathering place–a watering hole that people will go to so that they can meet other people who go there.
Kicking these ideas around made me remember how exicited I was the first time I read Leonard Sweet.
Killing the Buddha: Manifesto. We refuse to accept the internet as a world wide shopping mall. We know intuitively it can be a sort of Talmudic cathedral, a tool of transcendence made of words. We’re here to build it. If the end result looks more like Babel than the City of God, so be it. Babel, after all, came close.
Would that I could be this clever. 
Via the Disseminary.
What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires? What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales? … In many ways, the Internet more resembles an ancient bazaar than it fits the business models companies try to impose upon it. Millions have flocked to the Net in an incredibly short time, not because it was user-friendly–it wasn’t–but because it seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from modern life. In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenized broadcast media, sterilized mass “culture,” and the enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organizations, the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.
—Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto (dead tree, free online)