When we
moved to Minden, we got acquainted with Vic Phares, former youth minister for
the church there. Vic had gone to work
for a computer company, and he approached me about the possibility of beginning
an online ministry. At that time I owned
an XT computer, and the church had upgraded to a 286. These days you’d have to go to a museum
somewhere to find either one of those dinosaurs. I didn’t have an on-line connection, and
didn’t know how to go about getting one.
By 1995 that
had changed, and in January of 1996 we launched a family themed newsletter,
which we sent out to every e-mail address we could find. We then posted the newsletter on a
website. In a way we were sort of on
the ground floor with this website thing.
We started by sending our newsletter to about a hundred addresses, not
realizing we were actually committing a cyberspace social error by sending out
our newsletter to people who hadn’t requested it. We learned a new term – spam. We were spammers and didn’t know it. We quickly corrected that faux pas and began
sending our materials out on a subscription basis, although we’ve never charged
anyone for a subscription. At one point
we had about three thousand addresses. Sixteen
years later, we’re still doing it, although the frequency of our posts has been
substantially reduced. Abilene Christian
University was gracious enough to let us use their server in those early years.
When we
began, we called our newsletter “Family Matters.” We tried to be long on family help and short
on issues. The newspaper had named my
column that when I started writing for them.
Vic began urging us to come up with a different name, but I resisted
it. One day I got an e-mail message from
a man who wanted to send me a script for the “Family Matters” television
show. I decided it was time to listen to
Vic. Ann is actually the person who
came up with “All About Families” and the name has stuck through all this time.
We’ve had
an incredible international audience.
Our materials have been translated into several different languages. At one time we had such an incredible
readership in Australia that an Aussie reader asked me to quit using American
illustrations. He said they didn’t
connect with people in Australia. Our
Australian connection came about because a man with a larger mailing list than
ours asked if he could forward the newsletter to his list.
About the
same time we developed a workshop, which we titled, “Mending a Messed Up
Marriage.” A congregation in
Pascagoula, Mississippi hosted our first workshop. We’ve addressed this topic in several congregations
and at Harding, Pepperdine, and Ohio Valley University.
Little did we
realize that this experience would lead us into a different ministry emphasis
that would become our focus for more than ten years.
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