The Story of the Websites
This is the story of www.missionarycare.com and its companion website, www.crossculturalworkers.com. This part is factual. The statements here tell what happened and are based on what I did and statistics of what other people did in terms of helping me and visiting the websites.
I first became aware of the possibilities of the “Internet” in 1973 at a National Science Foundation summer program at the University of Colorado in Boulder. During that program, “Computer science in Social and Behavioral Science Education,” several of us played chess with a computer at Harvard University in Massachusetts. Although I had heard of one computer “communicating” with another far away, this was my first actual experience of doing it.
This was also my first idea of having books in electronic format and being able to revise them frequently. I was author of a chapter in a book that resulted from that program. D. E. Bailey was editor of Computer Science in Social and Behavioral Science Education published in 1978 by Educational Technology Publications in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. The title of my chapter was, “Write your own book and revise it every semester--or instruction personalized by and for the teacher as well as for the student.”
I had written a set of subroutines that enabled instructors to use the computer to generate individualized workbooks for students and make changes as often as they wanted—and the workbooks all had different numbers randomly generated so that everyone’s answers were different! Little did I realize that, 25 years later, I would begin writing books that could be revised whenever I wanted to do so.
While respecializing in counseling psychology (20 years later) at the University of Kentucky during the mid 1990s, I realized that most missionaries had email, and many of them had Internet access. Asbury University had a website, the Psychology Department had a space on the site, and I could post things there for missionaries. With these facts in mind, I began to take steps in the direction of making a series of brochures available on the Internet to missionaries in the late 1990s.
My most important and longest lasting contribution to missionary member care is what I have written. Part II of the book is the detailed and documented story about the last two decades of this ministry. Some of the following contributions have previously been mentioned in Part I.