Technology Breakthroughs to Enhance Communications at Lambeth in 1998
Episcopal News Service. October 17, 1997 [97-1979]
(ENS) Anglican bishops from around the world attending the 1998 Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England, next summer will be able to keep in touch with their dioceses and each other using the Internet.
"The bishops and conference staff will be sending out news and other information in multi-lingual forms as fast as possible," said the Rev. Peter Moore, an Australian priest, serving as a missionary in Uruguay who is heading the electronics media planning team for Lambeth. "They will be able to keep in touch with home and people at home will see the value and usefulness of conferencing here. It will be a two-way deal."
The Lambeth Conference is held every 10 years at the invitation of the archbishop of Canterbury. An international communications planning team for Lambeth recently met at the University of Kent, where an estimated 1,250 bishops, their spouses and staff members will gather for three weeks in July and August next year. Plans include operating a news service, establishing a campus electronic mail system, connecting the conference to the worldwide Internet and establishing web pages for some dioceses or provinces.
"We will be disseminating news and information throughout the Anglican Communion more quickly and widely than at any time in history," said the Rev. Kris Lee, director of telecommunications for the Episcopal Church.
"This new capability to communicate through the Inter Anglican Information Networks (LAIN) can be seen as an 'instrument of unity' for the entire Anglican Communion," said Lee. "Now the people in the pews, around the world, can participate almost as it happens."
"This has been a long-term vision of the staff of the Anglican Communion Offices," said the Rev. Joan Ford, director of telecommunications in London. "We've been working hard to make this happen."
The electronic communications team, including Greg Mills and Clifford Hicks of Australia, the Rev. Ron Barnes and the Rev. Ian McKenzie of British Columbia, Canada, and Ricardo Tucas of Chile, also will provide bishops and staff with demonstrations of computer and software equipment, and offer consultations on how to prepare to use them in their home dioceses.
Basic services to be offered on campus include electronic mail for all bishops. "Each bishop, spouse, and staff member will be assigned an electronic user name when they arrive on campus," Lee explained. "They will be able to use that account during and after the conference when they return home, so that the Lambeth Conference can actually be an ongoing discussion for the Anglican Communion."
A majority of funding for the Lambeth communications project is being supported by grants from Trinity Parish, New York, as part of their global telecommunications ministry for the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Barnes, who manages the Anglican Church of Canada's newest system, NWNet, said the Lambeth system "will be simple, easy to use, and more secure than normal Internet e-mail or meetings."
More traditional communications devices such as mail, telephone and facsimile services also will be provided at the communications center. That program, led by Jim Rosenthal, director of communications for the Lambeth Conference, will include more than 50 volunteers from various provinces of the Anglican Communion. Presiding bishop-elect Frank Griswold will be one of a six-member team to handle press inquiries, Rosenthal said.
Many of the advanced telecommunications plans for Lambeth are the result of recent breakthroughs in hardware, software, and internet capabilities, the planners explained.
"IAIN is conscious that most Anglicans, up to 70 percent, do not have direct Internet access," Tucas explained. "But IAIN will offer dial-up access for global south users to be connected to the rest of the Anglican Communion and to be able to speak to issues which would be much more difficult by standard mail or very expensive by telephone or fax. The LAIN managers have created a system that will allow easy access and participation throughout the communion."
By installing a new program in several locations, the IAIN networks also will be able to connect with each other, said Mills, director of the Australasian Christian Communications Network (ACCNet). An active Anglican lay leader who owns a large computer and telecommunications firm in Deakin, Australia, he added, "Whether our computers are based in Canada, Australia, Africa or the U.S., this new system will allow different networks around the world to be fully integrated and to work with each other. Our worldwide partners have agreed to cooperate in this venture, so that people who are very mobile will now be able to stay in touch around the Anglican Communion," Mills said. "Cooperation is the single biggest strength we have."
"These technological breakthroughs provide an distinct advantage for inclusion, especially for people in the global south," Moore added. "We can now be more than receivers of information, we can now actively participate."
"We will finally be able to operate IAIN the way it was envisioned at Lambeth 1988," Lee said. "We have created a means for helping the conference to communicate, to extend the conference beyond next summer, and provide a means for keeping in touch globally."
The IAIN managers said they plan to inaugurate the new system on Pentecost Sunday 1998, several months before Lambeth.