...to help you more fully understand the Church of the Brethren Network (COB-NET). You may also wish to look at our FAQS for questions that relate more properly to the larger Brethren experience. Lots of questions have arrived in our Mail Box over the years, so we decided to put many of them online to help you more quickly gain a better understanding about us. If you should still have a question, please ask the Web Administrator for a personal response. Here is software that will be needed on some pages.
Who We Are
 What is COB-NET?
COB-NET stands for Church of the Brethren Network and that's just what we are, a network of different resources contributed by different people representing many different perspectives to tell the story about the Church of the Brethren. We are ministers, deacons, computer techs, administrators, professors, students, kids, historians, genealogists, educators, volunteers, and of course, ordinary men and women desiring to communicate their extraordinary love for Jesus Christ. Our network was the first national Church of the Brethren web site to go online way back on February 2, 1996. Currently we have about 1,145 documents and around 3,700 graphic and 40+ sound files. Everyday, Visitors (7% from other countries) will request hundreds of our web documents and listen to messages.
Who is really behind COB-NET?
The complete story is contained in Which Ministry? It tells the story of Ron Gordon of the Bunkertown COB (PA Southern District) who almost became a pastor with a congregation. But through a unique series of events, found himself called to be an online minister with a World Wide Web project to coordinate the efforts of many others to globally serve their denomination over the Internet -- and do it without any cost to participants.
Where does your funding come from?
COB-NET is privately funded as a mission project by web administrator Ron Gordon. In other words, the money from personal earnings that he would normally send to foreign and domestic missions, first pays the bills for his online efforts, with any remaining balance continuing on to these same missions. Yes, we have received some very much appreciated donations but we do not actively solicit. In order to maintain our high standards of graphic appearance and textual content, we are constantly buying the latest, high-end graphic software, CD's of clip art, and published Brethren literature.
Why another COB web site?
Actually, we were the first national Church of the Brethren web site (February 2, 1996), almost two full years before our denominational General Board. Over the months, we shared our experiences with them, helped them with technical issues, coached a few operations, and celebrated their online arrival, because this move also relieved us from the many denominational responsibilities that we had been carrying for the General Board. A very good working relationship continues between us and eMountain Communications of Brethren Benefit Trust.
Do you overlap with the official web site?
The General Board concentrates on displaying information for agencies responsible to our governing Annual Conference, plus the interpretation of many denominational programs. We focus on just about everything else, such as but not limited to: free homepages for congregations and church-camps, a heavily used Bulletin Board, heritage, interpretation articles, graphical resources, information center, special activities, archive of literature, Brethren bibliography, genealogical resources, a cookbook, and over 2,600 external links topically arranged under nine different categories. Additionally, we field numerous questions daily from people who express interest in the Church of the Brethren, and the more unusually interesting ones go into our mail-bag.
What's your free homepage offer?
Free homepages are available tosuch as districts & congregations, church-camps, or distinctively Brethren agencies (see Fellowship of Brethren Genealogists). We generally do not offer homepages for private individuals, unless it is a distinctively Brethren ministry. To see how your Brethren organization may acquire a free presence on the Internet, review our Homepage Template which describes all the necessary requirements and expectations.
Is your District/Congregation material up-to-date?
Our district / congregation information is as current as the e-mail that we receive from numerous district and congregational leaders (almost daily). More and more congregations are going online and our listings usually reflect changes the same day, and we deeply appreciate the numerous people who regularly inform us of changes.
Atlantic Northeast,
Indiana Northern,
Indiana SouthCentral,
Ohio Northern,
Ohio Southern,
and PA Southern districts have taken ownership of their respective homepage from the original homepages that we created for the twenty-three districts. Since they now do all the maintenance and send us whole pages at a time, our information is as current as these districts can produce.
Do you have a FAQS page?
Yes. Wayne Sutton of Miami First Church of the Brethren maintains our FAQS document which lists many Brethren heritage and theologically based questions, along with his very helpful and insightful answers. You may also wish to visit the newsgroup that Wayne hosts on UUNET: alt.religion.christian.anabaptist.brethren. It is an open forum (non-subscriber) for exchanging ideas with Christians from all walks of life, primarily under the larger umbrella of Anabaptism or Brethrenism. Stop in and follow the continuing discussion.
Are children safe here?
COB-NET is rated with several family organizations such as Family Friendly and SafeSurf. Our standards are high, perhaps too high, but we wish to assure parents that their children may safely explore these documents and external links without fear of exposure to material which could be deemed inappropriate, confusing, or simply low quality. Every morning, we raise the bar of excellence for ourselves. We set our minds on improving each document for textual content and graphical presentation, so that parents and children may freely walk through our pages to discover the love of God and better understand the culture of the Church of the Brethren - without fear or regret.  Unfortunately, we live in a world that is too often satisfied with low or no standards, and because of increasing disreputable content on too many web sites, plus the growing complexity of parents to successfully monitor their children's access to undesirable material, COB-NET maintains a policy of removing document objects or external links which are deemed substantively inappropriate by our members, and will naturally inform our homepage coordinators if these objections should be voiced towards their documents. (In three years of operation, this has only happened once. And the matter was quickly and amicably resolved.) Web coordinators are encouraged to utilize their free web presence to inform and educate. We desire for them to take ownership of their homepage, but not so as to inadvertently or intentionally abrogate our standards of quality. We live in a world with political and theological viewpoints ranging from one extreme to another. Responsible individuals who desire to passionately express their opinions may easily use creative language to articulate their views without needlessly injuring brothers and sisters of the faith who embrace an opposing viewpoint.
We therefore remain open and sensitive to our visitors who present substantive commentary regarding the textual content and graphical composition of our documents and external linkage, and we pledge to continue that vigilance. You may confidently surf through and enjoy our web site with an easy mind.
How do I complain about something?
We hope that never happens, but we are quick to respond to your concerns. Each of our projects have been crafted with devotion to the idea of globally sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, disseminating information about the Church of the Brethren, plus increasing the general knowledge of our visitors through external links to select educational resources. Unfortunately, we are unable to monitor the content of other web sites, and if you find anything on the Church of the Brethren Network that you consider objectionable, please follow these directions.
 Direct your inquiry to web administrator Ron Gordon
Give the complete URL address (http://www...) of our document
Indicate the location of the object on the document (top, middle, bottom, left, right )
Explain your reasoning and expected solution (alter? remove?)
Does it bug you to receive petty corrections?
Not at all. We deeply appreciate individuals who care enough to let us know that a word is misspelled or grammar needs improvement. Each situation is addressed immediately because responsiveness and flexibility are the two qualities that we strive to maintain. There are mail-drops on most pages that enable you to get to us without running all over the place. The icons usually look like one of these.
Suggestions
 Comments
What are the "Other Links?"
Many people keep a record of their Net surfing, either through bookmarks or a personal web page of links, which is just how Other Links got started. It began as our personal collection of interesting web sites, but after considering that most of the links would also benefit our visitors, we polished it graphically and put it online. Then it kept growing and growing, until we broke it down into nine separate topically arranged documents. The main document gives you a brief description of what you can expect to find in each of the other nine subdocuments.
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Brethren |
Educational |
Personal |
Music |
Kids/Parents |
Associations |
Computer |
Government |
Information |
Have any self-study educational links?
If you are interested in learning a variety of subjects on your own, we celebrate your personal initiative. There are hundreds of links to various educational resources, in numerous disciplines of learning. Also see Other Links immediately above.
Christian Education: We have nine topically unique documents with over 1,700 external links, and this one is our page of links to external web sites that relate to biblical research, theological studies, versions and translations of the Bible, religious software, and various learning utilities. It also has an extensive coverage of church history which is sub-divided into different ecclesiastical periods.
Bibliography: Most of these works are offline, hardcopy printed materials that will tell you more about Brethrenism, Anabaptism, Pietism, and related subjects. Links to web sites offering this same information are provided when known. You will also find information on local congregational histories, music, videos, and of course, web sites affiliated with the Brethren.
Glossary: Here is a vast collection of Brethren terminology for you to discover how everything is connected, and the history behind it. Learn about Annual Conference, the Identity Line, our Logo, the New Windsor Center, colleges affiliated with the Brethren, diaster relief auctions, camping ministries, or the Brethren Encyclopedia.
Reference: This document was originally a part of our College section, but it grew so large that we gave it a home of it's own. Here you will find access to national and international online libraries, dictionaries on a variety of topics, encyclopediae, thesauri, languages grammars, many databases, historical timelines, and college assistance in financial and standards testing matters.
Internet Search: We have links to over 70 major Internet search engines in this General Information section of our nine documents of external links. Use this area to look for your web area of interest. A few search engines are cross-functional, i.e., giving you the ability to enter one word and have the results displayed, as would be found through other search engines.
Timeline: Learn when it happened in the Church of the Brethren. And, in order to better understand the history of the denomination, we have included many additional entries that tell you when significant events in world history also happened.
Navigation
How do I find something?
Our web site is composed of six topically arranged directories of similar material. In each directory are links to each of the other five directories. At the top of most documents is our masthead which allows you to quickly navigate to each of the other directories. It is a mapped graphic which means that when you move the cursor arrow over linkable words, the target document appears in the status line of your browser. A text only menu bar is located at the bottom of almost every document for browsers that do not sense image maps. Here are the six directories and a few examples of their content.
www.cob-net.org
There are three basic methods to find the existence of unknown resources on COB-NET, and each one is fully explained in the next few paragraphs. Special icons or consistent methods of linking allow you to utilize them very quickly. Most browsers have the functionality of creating "bookmarks" that enable you to quickly link to the same web document with a single click (Netscape = CTRL+D). We encourage you to make a Bookmark link to our Search Engine and Site Map.
Search our web site using a full content document text search. It operates through a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) which allows a programmer to do some very intricate maneuvers that are not possible in basic HTML. Most searches will take a little less than half minute to search through every document on COB-NET. Not bad for looking through almost 1,200 separate files! This Search Engine is not case-sensitive so CAMP and camp will give you the same results. You can search for more than one topic at a time. Just remember to separate each word with at least one space and then a comma ( sermon, news, auction, homepage, college, logo ).
Site Map is a highway graphically formatted outline of this web site by each document title listing. Many entries have links built into them so that you can immediately link to that area of your interest. To find a document by it's title, just use your browsers 'Find Next' capability (Netscape, CTRL+F) and choose a word to search on. Your browser will scan down over the title listings and stop at each occurrence. In Netscape, hit F3 to find the next such occurrence of the same word. You may alternately search both 'up and down' through the document. This kind of listing graphically familiarizes a person with the topical groupings of each directory. For the benefit of the visitor, we have included links to some documents in more than one category, such as Genealogy being found in both Literature and Information.
Quick Links is another use of cutting edge web technology. It is written in Java Script which unfortunately makes it invisible to some older browsers. Link action works by scrolling through the list to the document title of your choice, and then single left clicking on that title. When you release the mouse button, the link action is initiated. There are other Picklist or Dropdown menu types which use a GO button to link after a title selection has been made, but it requires two steps to use and is thus much slower. The only drawback to our menu is that link action takes place on a change of title which means that you can't link to the same page twice because there needs to be a title change. In the face of these two options, we chose the faster one.
Heritage
How many Brethren groups are there?
There are five main Brethren Groups that have emerged from the original body that was founded near the village of Schwarzenau, Germany, in the summer of 1708; and later referred to as the German Baptist Brethren after settling in America (1719). You may review an historical and sociological appreciation of their many cultural struggles in 19th Century. Look at the following chart to get a quick overview of the present relationship between the five main Brethren denominations.
There are many other religious groups that include the word Brethren in their denominational label, and you may gain a historical perspective of them at Brethren Groups.
Where do the United Brethren fit in?
There is no relationship between the United Brethren in Christ and the Church of the Brethren, other than sharing a common German ethnic background. The origin of the former group is traced to a Great Meeting near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1767. German Reformed pastor Philip Otterbein after hearing the powerful conversion story of Mennonite speaker Martin Boehm went forward and embraced him, exclaiming: "Wir sind Bruder" (we are Brethren). This meeting later produced a group called the United Brethren.
There appears to be no formal structure to the United Brethren until 1800, when they officially organized near Frederick, Maryland. In order to distinguish themselves from the Moravians who were also called United Brethren from their Latin title Unitas Fratrum, they appended the words "in Christ." A split occurred in the United Brethren in Christ in 1889, with the majority group being known as New Constitution. This more liberal group later merged with the Evangelical Church in 1946, adopting the name Evangelical United Brethren. In 1968, the EUB merged with the Methodist's to form the United Methodist. For more information on all major religious groups using the word Brethren in their denominational label, see Brethren Groups.
Isn't the Brethren Card a creed?
The Brethren Card was first published by the Brethren's Book and Tract Work about 1887, with a minor revision sanctioned by Annual Conference in 1923. We include it as a point of information for our many visitors (specifically non-members) who wish to have a general understanding of Church of the Brethren beliefs. Since there is a virtual explosion of cults and belief systems today, and modern theologians often interpret doctrines with a very broad brush, it is not always explanatory for us to claim a belief in the entire New Testament. Other religious groups may claim the same thing, but their understanding of salvation, atonement, or justification may be entirely different from that which is generally embraced by the Church of the Brethren. For example, some groups believe in a literal hell while others believe in universal restoration, and they both claim the word "salvation" to describe the process. Most denominational literature no longer makes reference to the Brethren Card.
Are the six colleges owned by the denomination?
No, if defined in the sense of a visionary denominational commissioning. Of those founding personages associated with each school who were Brethren, none acted in official roles as representatives of Annual Conference which is our supreme governing body. For this reason, we are careful to use the phrase Brethren affiliated institutions in our documents. A brief history on the founding circumstances of each school is found at Colleges.
Web Technology
What HTML editor do you use?
We design and edit everything in UltraEdit, a basic ascii text editor because we prefer to work directly with text and HTML tags, instead of using wysiwyg graphical interface editors that do not always perform 'exactly' as desired. UltraEdit is far more advanced than other ascii text editors, yet pleasingly very simple to use. It will open multiple documents of any file size, limited only by your computer's resources. "It's a clip & paste heaven." Text formatting capability even rivals high-end word processors with: global file content search, global file word replace, line length rebuilding, hex editing binary files, DOS to MAC, DOS to UNIX, character case conversions, plus an excellent spell checker. After writing a few pages in hypertext, we switch over to Netscape and Explorer to see how everything appears. When text and graphics are finished, we run the document through several other browsers to see whatelse may need to be changed.
What is Java Script?
Java is a fully executable, proprietary computer language of Sun Microsystems, and Java Script is Netscape's scripting version of Java. It allows web pages to come alive with something even beyond exciting text and graphics. It even permits web developers to offer browser compatible documents, by first testing for the browser type and version upon document entry. In other words, Netscape users would be routed to the Netscape version of a web page, and other users would be routed to their own version of the same document. You can even do routing according to different versions of the same browser! Most corporate web sites are now using some degree of Java or Java Script, and most new browsers are generally compatible.
What is Perl?
Practical Extraction and Report Language is one of several methods of accomplishing interactivity through a web site. We used Perl to program our Search Engine to walk through each of our directories and fully scan the text of every document for the keywords that you entered; Bulletin Boards, so that you can post your event or announcement; Greeting Cards for you to send a Virtual eCard to a special person; Bible Quizzes to help you discover your retainment of Bible knowledge; Voting Booth to help us all better understand how we feel about things; and of course, an opportunity for you to help us Improve COB-NET.
Where can I get industry leading web software?
Immediately following are links to industry leading Internet software (mostly free). There is a more extensive list of external links for web related software and information in [OTHER LINKS: Computer].
Browsers
 Hot Java
MS IExplorer
Netscape Communicator
Opera
WebKeys: Prowler (children using a V-Chip)
E-Mail Clients
AK-Mail
Eudora Light
Juno
Poco
Utilities
Adobe Acrobat Reader
Cute FTP
Microsoft Active X
Netscape Plugins
Real Audio
WS_FTP
Win Zip
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