c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) July was supposed to usher in a new era of communications efficiency to save time and money at the national headquarters of the United Church of Christ (UCC) in Cleveland.

Instead, a series of e-mail and telephone failures during the reorganization that began July 1 put staff members out of touch for days and cost the church thousands of dollars to fix.

When asked whether the loss of e-mail for two weeks had hindered daily operations at church headquarters, Director of Information Systems Tony Lisy answered simply: “Tremendously.”

“The UCC relies very heavily upon communication with people throughout the country and throughout the world,” Lisy said. “And not to be able to send e-mail to a number of Internet service providers has actually hindered a lot of people from doing their job.”

Troubles began July 5 when a hacker hijacked the UCC server and used it to send “spam” in the form of thousands of sales messages over the Internet, according to Lisy and UCC spokesman Ron Buford. Internet service providers responded by blocking e-mail access to the corrupted server and consequently cut off all UCC staff.

At a cost of about $5,000, e-mail was finally restored to the church two weeks later on July 19, Lisy said.

Church officials tried to identify the hacker, Lisy said, by calling the 800 number in the “spam” advertisements, but the number was disconnected within days. As of Friday (Aug. 4) the church had neither identified the hacker nor asked law enforcement authorities to investigate.

“We’ve just been too busy with all the other network problems we’ve had to look too much more into it,” Lisy said.

To make matters worse, during the e-mail blackout many staff members were also unreachable by phone due to a massive office shakeup in which nearly all 255 employees moved to new locations with new phone numbers.

Calls placed to old numbers got either a wrong number or a recording _ “this number … is being checked for trouble” _ and received no additional information.

In prior months, national staff had urged the rest of the church to brace for a time of turmoil during reorganization.

“Implementing the restructure will take most of this year and, in the short run, probably will affect service to local churches,” wrote the Rev. W. Evan Golder in a June churchwide letter. He urged members to “especially be patient and kind” and “be resourceful. If you can’t get what you want from the national office, call a colleague in another church” or contact a local office.

But although the church had anticipated some confusion, the e-mail crisis added an unforeseen hurdle to an already flawed transition which, Buford said, “we perhaps could have managed a little better.”

“It was just an awful coincidence,” Buford said.

National restructuring of the 1.4 million-member UCC has been four years in the planning. The goal, according to transition coordinator Bob Witham, is to make the national setting “more attentive, inclusive, responsive and supportive.” In addition to operating fewer independent bureaus and eliminating redundancies, Buford said, the key to success will be to have “frequent conversations (among church leaders so) the communication is tighter.”

During July, church workers elsewhere in the country reported difficulties getting through to national offices but no resulting disasters. The Washington, D.C., Office of Church in Society, for instance, said a series of returned e-mails meant some staff might have missed meetings. But most in state offices said they were able to get by without frequently contacting national staff in July.

“If this (communication trouble) had happened in September or October, it would have been bad,” said the Rev. Hal Chorpenning, spokesman for the UCC’s Connecticut Conference. “But this is really our slow time of year.”

Others had taken the national staff’s warnings to heart and took pitfalls in stride.

“Nobody really expected everything to go perfectly,” said Mary Ellen Matulevich, an administrative assistant at the New Hampshire Conference. “The expectation wasn’t real high.”

By the last week in July, e-mail was working at headquarters and calls to some extensions were being re-routed from numbers that are now defunct. Calls to working numbers were sometimes greeted with voice mail messages from new personnel but offered no explanations about how to reach the last staff member who had been at that number a few weeks earlier.

For UCC members beyond the national setting, what remains to be seen is whether recent communication troubles were a temporary setback or a sign of things to come at the national level.

“They’ve had so much trouble with the personal aspects of restructuring, to add all this hardware stuff to the pot will make it more difficult,” said the Rev. Michael Bolduc, pastor of North Branford (Conn.) Congregational Church. With the reorganization, 100 workers _ almost 40 percent of the national staff _ either left or lost their jobs, according to Buford’s data.

“I’m willing to allow a certain amount of grace for a period of time,” said the Rev. Herman Haller, interim minister of the Southern Conference. “But after another two or three weeks, if there are still problems and we can’t get through, that will be cause for concern.”

DEA END MACDONALD