Pilgrim’s Progress
Okay, this is how much of a nerd I am: In 1991, I sold my extensive G.I. Joe collection to buy my first computer.
Yeah.
I did the bulletin board thing in the early 90s until I read about this other thing called the Internet in a Doonesbury strip in 1994. I had to call all over town trying to find Internet access. Even people who worked in computer stores didn't know what it was.
I got intrigued by the idea of websites early on and decided to launch one for our church. The guys at Internet Direct in San Antonio, then a very new company, thought the idea of a church having a website was funny and cool. They gave us free hosting. Amazingly, our original web address still has the redirect page I put online in 1996 when I changed hosting services. I guess no one at Internet Direct, now a very big company, realizes that old page is still online. It's useless since the address it directs you to is now defunct as is the email address listed for me. I haven't called to tell them to take it down because I want to see how long it will stay up before someone realizes it.
Eight years and counting!
Anyway, I launched the first version of the Covenant Baptist Church website early in 1995. I basically stole a page of html and started figuring out how it worked. Don't be too impressed. Html was simple in the early days of the web. Websites were all very primitive, and everything had a kind of gopher look to it. Gray backgrounds, blue hyperlinks, and tables were not yet a part of html.
There were about twenty churches on the planet with websites in those days, and I used to get a lot of email from people all around the world. It was considered odd for a church to have a website. You can't believe the hate mail I used to get. The web was like the wild west in the early days. There was nothing commercial online, and the old timers could get pretty rough. If you had an AOL email address it was like having a "kick me I'm stupid" sign on your forehead. AOL users, newbies, and baptist preachers with websites were suspicious characters and regularly got the shit kicked out of them.
One day I got an email from a college professor in England. He was coming to San Antonio for a convention and thought it would be nice to visit our church.
We were meeting in an elementary school back then. One of our members picked him up at his hotel and brought him to our service. We already had a pot-luck meal planned, so he got to eat with us after church. Later that week I took him to a famous Mexican food restaurant downtown where they have mariachi bands and everything. We've been friends ever since. D. and I have kept up an email correspondence for nine years. He eventually became a minister, and I watched from afar as he finished seminary and went on to pastor a couple of churches.
Jeanene and I harbor a secret fantasy that one day we’ll travel to England and stay in D’s house. At the same time his family would come to San Antonio and stay in our house. I would preach for him at his church, and he would do the same at Covenant. The only problem with this scenario is that he’s already been to San Antonio. If I go to England, I can stay pretty much anywhere and take a train to see things. If you come to San Antonio, you get to see San Antonio and that’s about it. So the pulpit switch thing probably won’t happen, but it’s a cool idea, right?
Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, I wanted to tell you about D's new blog.
D recently began a blog of his own. He’s going to remain anonymous for now, writing under the name “Pilgrim.” If you want to drop by and welcome him to our wacky, blog community, feel free. He’s just getting his feet wet and doesn’t post every day. We’ll see where this goes. I think you’ll like the pictures he has online of some historic holy places in England.
There’s only one thing I don’t like about linking to him. On September 7th he wrote something nice about me. So I’ve been waiting until he posted some other stuff and pushed that thing down the page a bit before I linked to him. I didn’t want it to seem like I was sending you there just to read what he said about me. But he hasn’t posted since the 7th, and I've given up waiting and have decided to link to him and quit worrying about it. He's a very kind man, overly complimentary, and he's apparently forgotten anything but the good memories in the nine years since he visited Texas.
Pilgrim, make yourself at home. Welcome to the revolution!
Pilgrim's Progress
rlp
10:46:28 PM 
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