Entering the World of Cyberspace

            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.