Since its inception in 2006, our church-wide email list has been an incredible blessing as we continue to communicate with each other more effectively. So that this email group will continue to honor God and accomplish its purposes, we needed to re-frame, re-state, and clarify the reason we have this email group. Please read through each item below to insure future delivery of your email messages to the group.

Since we believe that God is holy, we want to explicitly behave with holy manners, even in our email communications with each other. Below is our attempt at communicating this to everyone in the group.

Purpose:

In a sentence: The purpose of this email group is to facilitate communication at Huntsville Church of Christ of prayer requests, announcements of HCOC church-related activities, and various other essential communications.

Clarifications:

While it is easy to know the nature of prayer requests and announcements of HCOC church-related activities, questions arise as to what is considered "essential" communications. We want to clarify this first because the list is intentionally small. They are essential in that we need everyone to know these things.

• Personal needs for help
  • If you know of someone in our community in need and want to help find people interested in filling that need, it is appropriate to send out an email to our group
• Pastoral / Ministerial Reflections
  • These type of reflections are only to be made by paid ministers and elders

Please Avoid These:

Having laid the foundation for understanding the purposes of our HCOC email group, we want to accomplish the stated purposes by refraining from sending certain types of emails. We've enumerated six types of such emails.

1) Emails of opinion...good or bad
As a diverse group of people, we want to foster safe spaces for us to dialogue together through differences of opinion. Email is certainly a bad place to dialogue together. Misunderstandings happen frequently, so we want to avoid any emails where you are telling the group about your opinion regarding any matter.

2) Emails of political orientation
The explosive nature of the political arena can really hurt our community, especially if we are sending emails out to the whole group advocating one political party. Even so-called "neutral" attempts to advocate both sides of a political issue work against the purposes of our email list. This kind of activity could even jeopardize our tax-except status. We want to avoid any email even hinting of politics.

3) Emails of general discussion (or thanking of an individual)
Even though we might be accustomed to quickly commenting on a facebook status or sending a quick, even sarcastic reply to an email from a friend, we want to avoid these kinds of emails in this group. These "discussions" can quickly get out of hand, and we want to protect the inboxes of the members of this group. If you desire to thank a certain individual, please respond to them individually.

4) Slander of other group members
This is obvious. We will refrain from using zingers, put downs, accusations, insults, or disrespectful comments in our emails.

5) Inappropriate language contained in emails
Our language will be holy and honorable as we communicate with each other.

6) Solicitations for buying something
This is a classic example of SPAM, unsolicited emails.

Final Notes:

We understand that it is sometimes difficult to know what might be considered appropriate. Remember, whenever you are uncertain concerning an email you'd like to send, you can always send it to the church office at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Thank you for helping this group be the success that it is.

As we see questionable emails come out, we will work to communicate graciously and directly with the person who sent the email. We desire everyone in our group to have the ability and the privilege to send out emails to the whole group themselves. If someone continues to abuse this privilege, we will have to moderate this person's emails, resulting in delayed or non delivery of that email.

Thank you so much for using this email list to its fullest. We hope that it continues to bless you as you seek to stay informed with what is going on at Huntsville Church of Christ. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you have any questions or would like further clarifications.