St James Ministry Team

A blog from the Ministry Team of St James Church, Colwall, Herefordshire, UK

2007-09-03

The virtual churchyard

The aim of this would be to make web space available for people to commemorate their loved ones who have died. It would be one web page on the web site, directly accessible from the navigation buttons, with a nice banner and a list of all those commemorated, each one linked to a web page. There would also be instructions on how to add to the list (mainly get in touch with us first).

Each web page could contain a variety of information: pictures (no more than three and not too big), text such as reminiscences, stories, favourite poems and possibly some short audio extracts in MP3 format. All this from a number of people who knew whoever is being commemorated.

There needs to be some rules. We (the rector or his rep) need to control what goes on and there also needs to be an owner who must be a close relative of the deceased who will also control what goes on. However, I think the intention should be to allow anything which was not defamatory or would infringe copyright, so no theological objections. (Well, almost no!) The intention is to leave some memories, not an obituary. This might be difficult to achieve.

The idea would be to keep the churchyard going for as long as we have a web site and someone to maintain it. If we should run out of our ration of web space, I think it would be worth simply buying some more.

I would like to try this idea out for the All Souls service. I am preaching then so I can use the sermon to describe the idea and then leave a contact form at the back of the church for me to follow up later. We only need a few peope to start. Once people have seen some good examples, I think they will want to add to them.

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