It all began in February of 1994, when a student at the university of Oxford, England was looking around on the Undernet IRC network and found that there was no Christian chat room. Phillip Miller, then using the IRC nickname, OxOwl (The Oxford Owl) started #Christian.

The goals that he formed for the channel were simple: to provide a place where people could come to know Christ in an atmosphere of fellowship and discussion of Christianity.

The channel grew by leaps and bounds - we were gifted with a BibleBot which enabled users to have ready-access to the Word of God, and some fervent Christians who were dedicated to spreading the Good News, and share their life testimonies in a loving and sympathetic way.

During this time, in order to permit small group discussions outside the stricter paramenters of the original #Christian channel, which would permit in-depth discussions approaching the definition of debates, the bible-bot was configured to also join an unregistered channel called #Christian-debate. This proved to be very succesful for several years, with occupancy (and therefore ownership) established by the bot, and the full co-operation and agreement of the network and its administration.

As the old adage goes, however, "the best laid plans of mice and men go aft aglay", and #Christian proved to be no exception.

Phillip had to spend some time away from the channel as he was emigrating from England's Oxford to America to be with his wife (now known as MrsOwl). During that time, the channel lost some of its original direction and Philip (now known as MrOwl) decided it was necessary to inject some of his original design back into the channel.

It had grown to be what some considered a really fun place to be - there was a lot of chatting and people enjoying themselves - and what others considered to be a room which should give up the name #Christian as it no longer seemed to be Christian in focus.

MrOwl - against opposition - reasserted his ownership of the channel, and he and his successors have progressively made a number of changes which some consider unpleasant, but others feel is for the best. We who manage the channel sincerely hope that the ongoing "growing" changes we are making will enable you to decide if #Christian - or one of its associated channels - is a home for you on the internet.

Other channels have been started at various times by channel regulars, some names being #Christians (abandoned in January 2001 at the time of the attacks, and currently taken over by a group of ætheists), #Church, #fellowship (mainly populated by people from the Pacific region who speak their own languages), and a number of others.

In March, 2001 another Christian channel planting was formalized, with #Christian-debate being registered on the Undernet network after some years of prior existence (see above and below).

In summary: it is our desire to see Christians equipped beyond mere fellowship towards understanding people from different walks in life, backgrounds, culture, religion, and personal history.

Our primary purpose, however, is to allow Christians and non-Christians to learn more about Christianity and the Lord Jesus Christ in a an environment which espouses the following principles: non-condemnatory discussion, honesty, warmness and an open-forum approach.

So, if this is not the type of channel for you, then please refer to other Christian/religious channels to see if one of them suits you better; our well-established policies are not open for change.

Some clarification has been requested on the topic of non-Christian religion within the channels... It is felt at the present time that such topics are acceptable provided they are for the purposes of understanding Christianity better, and do not involve the preaching of another faith.

Recent history
Late in 2000, after a number of abortive attempts to get the www.forchrist.net domain name properly transferred to a server whose owner had offered us a free hosting, we finally took out the new domain name of www.chatministries.org when it was obvious that communication with an automated domain registration authority had broken down.

One can compare that with a recorded message system on a telephone answering service - if you want to do something different from the menu choices, you can't <grin>

Once the registration of the new name had been made, we were able to offer a range of members services and monitoring of website "hits" previously denied.

While that was going on, and in the first few days of January 2001, a stepped up series of vicious attacks on the commercial servers which provide Undernet facilites resulted in almost a shut-down of that network. The history of this can be read elsewhere on this website.

A handful of senior channel people were led by the Lord to establish a safe haven on another, much smaller, and much more reliable network within two days, initially with the offshoot #Christian-Chat, and within a week #Christian and #Christian-debate were also there. This was starlink-irc.org All three channels were registered there on 17th January 2001, and a biblebot provided in advance of that date.

Once it was established that Undernet was going to continue, a decision was made to run the channel ministry in all three channels in both these places simultaneously, using the same policies, and to expand the work to embrace new folk on the other network as well.

Regular channel guests have helped us maintain our presence there, and we have now started to build up a local regular clientelle too.

Over the period June 2000 to February 2001 several attempts were made by others to register the associated debate channel #Christian-debate away from its established usage. These attempts were denied by undernet.org on the basis of their being seen as attempted take-overs because of the length of time of establishment as an unregistered channel.

An application was made in December 2000 by one of the #Christian channel staff which fell into the abyss due to the attacks on undernet on 4th January 2001 and later. It was subsequently reclaimed and registered after the re-establishment of undernet's Channel Service (after 4th March 2001).

You may read about the attacks on undernet in our historical section. Mention of this saga is included to refute claims that we pirated the channel.

Due to an expanded and challenging calling, there was need for a further reshuffling of key channel staff, and there are likely to be more Christian channels coming as things return to normal.

With stablisation of the situation, the time is now ripe to actively develop our presence in starlink-irc.org.

Since that time, some technically-minded members of the ops team have assisted another well-known undernet personality - ^duck^ who operates a series of Christianity-related www servers - to establish a specifically Christian IRC server system, and perhaps one or two channels from irc.chatster.org may associate themselves with our group. chatster currently has US and European servers.

Consolidation of the revamped channel has included the making available of email addresses associated with this website, and also limited web space.

From there we have seen the introduction of a message board where posts on a wide range of topics can be made and discussed, and the ability for guests to leave each other private messages.

Another development has been the establishment of an in-channel bible trivia bot, which is available in several channels on both networks.

Effective January 2003, we established a seperate place where two or three could gather together in jesus' name for prayer, in an unregistered channel called #Christian-Prayer. Three bots occupy the space, to maintain it for channel guests' use, one of which has scripture posting ability.

And of course we have been playing host since before the end of 2002 to many people who found that dalnet was closed with no restoration date in sight, because of nasty vicious attacks like undernet experienced in January 2001.

If you are interested in the history of chatting via the internet, we can point you towards an excellent page by a Swedish IRCer, Daniel Stenberg. This link will open in a new window.