Reverend Dr. Sandra Bochonok (the founder of Soul Food Ministry) was attending Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, DC at the time. Her message of outreach evangelism inspired me to volunteer.

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The Rev. Sandra Bochonok generates most of the content. Rev. Vera Bourne, Rev. Luiz Perreira Garupe, and Rev. David Pettitt have also contributed a significant amount of content. Geraldine Wright arranges for the translations. I am the web designer. We have a couple of translation companies: Alfatrad and American Translators. There are also a few volunteers who on ocassion do things like HTML conversion and checking translations.

We hoped from the beginning to invite people from all over the world to the site. Few other countries have the high-speed computer environment and software needed to view multi-media web sites. We concentrated on using standard HTML web pages.

A co-worker provided the key - "Content is the only thing that matters. Conent is King." The eye-candy makes a nice initial impression, but gets tedious after you see it 20 times. People come back for the articles and contemplative writings. The site is designed to be easy to search, with several layers of index pages and a "What's new" section.

In early 1999, the hosting company HostServer went bankrupt. No hosting company means no web site, unless you want to set up a big server computer in your home and run special (very expensive) telephone lines. We were able to switch the domain administration to MindSpring (IBM) and get back on-line in a week. We haven't had any further problems.

Just go and do it. Access to the Internet is more important than ever - compare web usage in 1998 to 2004! If you want to connect to people and communicate your message, go get on the web right now. The tools to create web pages are not hard to learn, and there are many good companies to host your site. Soul Food Ministry costs only us $30 a month to support in hosting fees, and get 25,000 hits per month.

Keep the site running.