Announcement: Important Changes to the ACCH Quarterly

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Announcement: Important Changes to the ACCH Quarterly

Dear Friends,

Over the past two years, we have made significant changes to the ACCH Quarterly, which grew out of the deep roots of John Conway’s “Association of Contemporary Church Historians” monthly e-mail newsletter. For fifteen years, John wrote reviews and passed along timely news concerning contemporary German and European church history. At the end of 2009, a group of John’s friends and colleagues in the field joined him to form an editorial board and began issuing his newsletter as a quarterly journal called the ACCH Quarterly. Our transition to a new web-based format, using the Open Journal System, was made possible thanks to the technical support of staff at Ambrose University College, Calgary.

More recently, however, it has become clear to us that more changes are necessary. Increasingly, academic researchers are recognizing the potential of the technology and format of social networking as an outlet for their scholarly work. Students, academics, and the broader public now regularly turn to search engines and online networks to access new research in history, theology, and many other fields of study. Neither our current journal name nor our existing online platform make effective use of the search engines that now give order to the Internet. Additionally, we have found that our journal website and “subscription” (i.e. sign-up) process are not as user-friendly as we would like them to be. Most problematically, we are currently unable to host all of our past issues in one place online.

For these reasons, we are excited to announce that, beginning this fall, we will be moving to a new WordPress platform for our journal and publishing future issues of our quarterly under a clearer, more concise name—Contemporary Church History—one that captures the original intent of John Conway’s newsletter.

By the end of September, you will receive an e-mail from us, formally announcing the new name and directing you to the journal’s new website. There you will find a livelier, more interactive site, with all the archives (going back to the beginning of John’s newsletter) available in a fully searchable form. We think this will give our work new life, not only for you our regular readers, but also for others interested in contemporary German and European church history, but who haven’t found us yet on the Internet.

On behalf of all the ACCH Quarterly editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College