Up until last week, I was a member of i-church's Council - a group of volunteers that had been responsible for leading the church since its last Web Pastor stood down last summer.

i-church is ultimately owned by the Anglican Diocese of Oxford, who have recently asserted their authority over the community in no uncertain terms, and who really pushed me to want to leave.

i-church had been heading towards a community-led model - something which the Web Pastor of last year made a strong start with. Unfortunately, there were a spate of inter-personal problems before Christmas - at least in part caused by the Diocesan Trustees unwillingness to devolve appropriate authority to the i-church community. This led to the Trustees forcibly closing the website, ejecting some trouble-makers, and hastily cobbling together a weighty stack of rules and regulations before re-opening it.

I don't know whether these problems around Christmas were the cause, but the Diocese has now entirely distanced itself from any kind of community-led model. Despite their claims that i-church is a cutting-edge ministry, it is now considerably less cutting edge than many "normal" parish churches. The Trustees have recruited and appointed a new Web Pastor without consulting with the community. And they are apparently committed to dismantling the Council as the representative management team it has grown into, instead giving over the leadership of the church to some hand-picked individuals.

Now, I don't want to come across as being overly interested in politics and management structures. On one level, I was indeed very angry at the way a number of volunteers have worked really hard for the church, taken a lot of flak that should have been directed at the absentee landlords at the Diocese, and then been carelessly undermined and under-valued. But the real issue here is about the retreat from the model of a "fresh expression" to that of a standard parish church.

The "new" model of leadership, which the Trustees have unilaterally implemented, is actually rather stale. I've been involved with three "bricks and mortar" parish churches in recent years, and all of them have been more interested in fostering lay-led activity than i-church. But more worrying than the stale (and frankly moribund) church-leadership style that the i-church Trustees have now embraced is their failure to engage with the medium of the internet.

Vibrant internet communities are scalable. The bigger they get, the more resources they have to support themselves. But the only way you can take advantage of this growing resource is to be community-driven. Another way of putting this is that you can either view a large number of human minds as a problem or an opportunity. Successful Web 2.0 applications create ways of joining people up so that, in their large numbers, they can solve increasingly large problems and engage in relationships that would be impossible in smaller groups. The attempts that fail are the ones that are prescriptive and don't allow people to shape their relationships for themselves.

i-church is now pursuing a path that will lead to its small, hand-picked team of leaders becoming a bottleneck if the community grows. It will view a large community as an increasing liability - threatening to embarass the Diocese if it can't be kept in check. I've heard this very view from the lips of battle-scarred and embittered forum mods. Of course, it's possible that the Trustees aren't particulary interested in Web 2.0 applications (which is a shame, because the i-church community was). But if they're not bothered about bringing together large numbers of people in new and innovative ways, then all they are really doing is making it possible for a small number of people to go to church from their computer, instead of inside a special building.

Whatever; they are either not interested in finding new ways of being a church, or they are too attached to dying models of church to be able to try anything else.

And this just reminds me of all the problems I've had with established church and established religion for most of my life. Constantly whinging about its increasing irrelevance, whilst too afraid to become relevant by changing and engaging.

But I don't mean to sound jaded. I'm quite hopeful for the future of "church". Just a little sorry that i-church wasn't the ray of hope I thought it was.