Colleagues,

Last week the Crossings board of directors held their annual meeting here in St. Louis. As a goldie-oldie I get invited and this year attended for a few hours. I do have to give my report for what I've been doing in the past twelve months with my piece of the pie, these ThTh postings. [I have no vote. It's all honorific. No honorarium. By my choice.]

You may have wondered who these "strange and wonderful" board members are. Here's the current list.

• Steven Kuhl, President, East Troy, WI
• Cathy Lessmann, Secretary, Office Manager, Chesterfield, MO
• Steven Albertin, Zionsville, IN
• Jerome Burce, Lakewood, OH
• Carol Braun, Jersey City, NJ
• Lori Cornell, Federal Way, WA
• Marcus Felde, Indianapolis, IN
• Michael Hoy, Decatur, IL
• Don Tanner, St. Louis, MO
• Tom Law, Webmaster. Marion, IA

Here follows my report at last week's gathering.

Peace and joy!
Ed Schroeder

---

Crossings Community, Inc. Annual Board Meeting, August 12-13, 2009. Thursday Theology report.

Deep background. The first ever "Sabbatheology" was posted to a very short list of folks by EHS on Jan. 27, 1996. [That was a Saturday, hence the strange name that I still pronounce as though there were two "th's" there, even though only one shows up in the spelling. Hence: "Sabbath-theology."] Before long--though not in the first few posts--it became a weekly 6-step text study in the Crossings paradigm, sent out on Saturdays, a 6-step study of one of the pericopes in the Revised Standard Lectionary for the Sunday coming 8 days later. Sabbatheology #88 went out on Nov. 15, 1997, whereupon Robin Morgan and Mike Hoy took over the series beginning with Advent I in the Year of Luke. After recovery from heart surgery early in 1998, EHS--longing to do something on the internet again--fashioned an essay on something or other and sent it out to the listserve. It was May 14, 1998, a Thursday. Therefore Thursday Theology #1. The rest is history. This week's ThTh post is #583.

Since last year's board meeting 52 issues of Thursday Theology have appeared. In addition I have posted six "in-betweeners," documents I received from various sources that interested me enough to prompt me to send them on to the listserve readership under an "FYI" rubric.

Of the 52 issues of ThTh posted this past year, 27 came from my own hand and 25 were offered by guest writers I solicited.

The guest Thursday Theologians were:

• Jeffrey Anderson
• Karl Boehmke
• Ken Dobson (2)
• Jukka Kaariainen
• Peter Keyel
• Phil Kuehnert (2)
• Steve Kuhl
• Steve Krueger (3)
• Sherman Lee
• William Moorhead
• Robin Morgan (4)
• Armencius Munthe +
• Ron Neustadt
• Fred Niedner (3)
• Richard Parsons
• Chris Repp

At last count, Crossings Internet postings--Sabbatheology and Thursday Theology--go to a listserve of 669 receivers. These posts are then archived on the Crossings website www.crossings.org

Crossings webmaster Tom Law regularly updates the logs telling us about the traffic that comes to our website. The logs are available for anyone to see @ http://www.crossings.org/logs/default.shtml. Updated at the end of June 2009 the logs indicate that ThTh gets 10% of the traffic among the 2000-plus folks who visit our website each day. So that is 200 more ThTh-readers each day, 1400 per week. Even if all the listserve folks who receive ThTh automatically do not read it, the ThTh readership is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2K per week.

When you go to the logs, you first see Tom's chart of "The Most Important Stats." When you click on the underlined year (2009) on that chart, you get more info than I know what to do with. But do GO there once and then scroll down to "Domain Report." Take a look at that orange-colored segment of the circle and Tom's figures below that tell you what it is. Among the many interesting--even strange--data from Tom's logs is this particular orange pie-slice. It says that five percent--one out of twenty--of these 2000 visitors per day come from Russia! That's 100 every day!

Can that be true? And if it is, what does that mean? Is there an unknown "Armencius" hustling Crossings in Russia? Is Putin spying on us? How to find out more about this large audience -- concerning whom, from whom, we've never heard a word? There is also a large number of Aussie computers coming to our site, according to Tom's statistics. What's that all about? If/when I post this report as a ThTh offering, perhaps a voice from Vladivostok and/or one from Downunder will give us a clue.

Respectfuly submitted,
Edward H. Schroeder
August 12, 2009