Currently we’re working on putting together a series of documents for our church website which will explain who we are and what we believe. Since we’ve only got a first draft ready I’m not going to post or link to the text yet – except as the following:
I generated that tag cloud version of our explanation of the gospel and its centrality to the life of our church with a nifty little tool called wordle, which I ran across in this post on the First Things blog. The size of the words gives a nice graphical depiction of how frequently they’re used. On the whole, I’d say this is encouraging – nice to see words like ‘gospel’, ‘God’, ‘love’, ‘understand’, ’sins’, ‘Jesus’, and ‘church’ standing out. On the other hand, the fact that ‘etc.’ is apparently showing up as often as ‘Christ’ suggests that the prose could stand to be tightened up just a tad.
You might think that this would be a good way of checking whether or not a given piece of text (such as a sermon, as the First Things post suggested) is sufficiently clear, at least in terms of emphasis. One of our elders (whose work involves machine recognition of language) was quick to point out, however, that we’re terribly far from having any algorithm capable of extracting meaning from language with the facility of a typical human (and we may never have one, at least according to this guy). And indeed, our discussion of the draft last night centered almost entirely on making it clearer – as it stands it assumes more familiarity with Christianity, and in particularly reformed theology, than would be appropriate for the general audience (we hope) is visiting our website.
On the other hand, nearly everyone visiting any website is probably familiar with tag clouds – perhaps posting that version of our statement would be clearest of all…
It’s pretty, at least. That’s nice. Good ol’ Reformed Web 2.0.