A couple years ago, I coined the term "the Calvinati." I was so overwhelmed in that glorious moment that it somehow became firmly implanted in my mind that there simply needed to be a website called www.calvinati.com. I further decided that it would need to be an online hub of all things Calvinist--blogs, churches, books, everything. The launch was successful, picked up by quite a few bloggers, and triggered a huge influx of submissions. Right off the bat, I fell behind in keeping the thing up. I was months behind in updating the catalogs of blogs, sites, and organizations, and the Calvinist flag on the message board came down and up went the spammer flag. My kind volunteer moderators quit shortly thereafter, and interest (including my own) in the mostly-stagnant site began to wane. In April of 2010, I declared it dead, switched the status to "do not renew," and archived it here. The links will undoubtedly be increasingly outdated, but just see it as a snapshot of Calvinism on the web in mid-late 2009.
Before there was www.pastorzach.com, there was www.pastorzach.com! I originally registered this domain to serve as an online résumé as I was finishing seminary. I added a little at a time and it eventually became a way of keeping friends up-to-date on how the search process was going. After I got called to a church, I lost the résumé stuff. If anyone cares, this is how the old page looked on 3/27/06 when I took it offline.
In 2002, a New York woman named Karyn Bosnak started a website called savekaryn.com. The premise was that she had run up $20,000 in credit card debt and was trying to get out. She realized that if twenty-thousand people gave her a buck a piece or five thousand gave her four bucks a piece, she'd be home free and, having learned her lesson, she could go on to live a debt-free life. The website became quite famous (featured on CNN and Newsweek, etc.) and she quickly met her goal. When I heard about the success of her site, I kicked myself, as I seriously had the same idea about paying for seminary a few months earlier. Not afraid to be a cheap knockoff, I became one of the first copycats in a long line of what would come to be called “e-panhandling” sites. Right off the bat, Karyn featured me in her “pass-the-buck” section, which got me a pretty good response for a while. The well dried up after a few months, but it was super fun and it payed for a couple credit hours of seminary. Plus, I was quoted in the NY Times. So, for posterity, here is the one and only www.help-me-with-seminary.com as it looked when it went the way of all flesh in the spring of '03.