wfn.org | New Internet project hopes to bring Reformed Christians together

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Note #6530 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

21-May-2001
01173

New Internet project hopes to bring Reformed Christians together

New site - www.reformed-online.net - will electronically link 106 million

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International

GENEVA - A new Internet project - "Reformed Online" - has been launched to
help promote unity between the world's more than 700 Protestant
denominations in the Reformed tradition of Christianity.

	According to a recent exhaustive study of Reformed Christianity, the world
has 746 Presbyterian, Congregational, United and Reformed churches linked to
the Reformed tradition. But less than a third of these churches - 214 - are
members of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), the world's main
grouping of Reformed churches, although WARC's member churches account for
the majority of the world's Reformed Christians.

	WARC estimates that 75 million people belong to its member churches. The
total
number of Reformed Christians world-wide is estimated to be roughly 106
million.

	"Reformed churches have an unrivalled capacity for division," Paraic
Reamonn, WARC's communications secretary, told ENI. "It's almost our
defining characteristic. Most Reformed Christians belong to WARC, but most
Reformed churches don't."

	The new Internet project - with the website www.reformed-online.net -
provides  information about Reformed churches world?wide, permitting them to
communicate directly with one another. It complements WARC's official
website (www.warc.ch) which was re?launched at the beginning of this month.

	The new project is the brainchild of Walter Schulz, director of the
Johannes a Lasco library foundation in Emden, northern Germany. The library,
named after a 16th?century Polish Protestant reformer who worked in Emden,
belongs to Germany's Evangelical Reformed Church and houses one of Germany's
most important collections of documents related to Reformed Christianity. A
team set up by the library has put together the new website.

	The project has the support of WARC, the John Knox International Reformed 
Center in Geneva, and the Leuenberg Church Fellowship, a grouping of mainly
European Reformed, Lutheran and Methodist churches.

	While in Geneva recently with the Reformed Online team, Schulz told
journalists that it was often difficult to find an adequate overview of
Reformed Christianity.

	He added that the internet project used as a basis a recent directory - The
Reformed Family Worldwide: A Survey of Reformed Churches, Theological
Schools and International Organizations - produced under the auspices of the
John Knox Center and listing details of all 746 churches linked to the
Reformed tradition.

	Reformed Online is hoping to work with the directory's editors -
Jean-Jacques Bauswein and Lukas Vischer - to update the information in the
published volume and to make it available online.

	Schulz pointed out that advanced Internet online search techniques meant
that scholars could more easily access the wealth of information contained
in the directory.

	However, the Internet site also extends resources available by including a
searchable database of news and information about Reformed churches, major
upcoming meetings and conferences, an encyclopedia of terms related to
Reformed Christianity and a virtual library of documents, books and papers
related to the Reformed tradition. The project also hopes to offer churches
which do not have the necessary resources the chance to set up their own
website.

	Reformed Online will also publish WARC documents in electronic form.

	"What Reformed Online is doing deepens and extends the WARC presence on the
web," Reamonn told ENI. "It enables us to do what we could not do ourselves
- to get online and to make available to the whole Reformed family our whole
back catalogue of publications which otherwise might just gather dust in
libraries.

	"But its importance, in our eyes, goes well beyond that," Reamonn added.
"Reformed Online is already what it claims to be - an information service
for all of Reformed Protestantism. In the years ahead it will grow in
significance as an international Reformed resource."

	The Internet site is now available in German and English. The organizers
hope to add French and Spanish.

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