How GCM Began

We Began as a WebRing

Gentle Christian Mothers first began in 1997 as a webring on the old WebRing.org website. Christian mothers who did such things as choose not to let their babies cry-it-out, breastfed on cue, wore their babies, slept with their children--or, as some would put it, attachment parenting mothers (or marsupial mothers!)--didn't have much support from the Christian community in general. I decided to help build a support network by making a webring to link websites of like-minded mamas. I hoped it would encourage other gentle mamas and would help to spread the word that Christianity and attachment parenting are more than compatible and that attachment parenting is biblical.

Back in 1999, after Yahoo bought WebRing they made a lot of changes that, along with other reasons, led me to decide to discontinue the GCM WebRing. Though I considered other types of rings, with the changes the internet was going through and the way that GCM was growing into something far more than a webring, it became clear that having a ring had become unnecessary.

Becoming More than a WebRing

Soon after the GCM WebRing started, I began building a membership list of mothers on my website on Geocities. The list included members of the GCM WebRing and also members who didn't have websites. To be listed, I made a requirement that everyone answer some questions in which they explained what gentle mothering meant to them, and they also shared their testimony of how they came to know Christ as their Savior. Sometime in 2002, I finally took the members' list down from the GCM website because I was unable to keep the list updated, but those on that list helped play a crucial role in helping GCM become a message board.

Beginning a Message Board on ezboard

In August 1999, I emailed all the members and let them know I was starting a message board for Gentle Christian Mothers on ezboard.com. We started with a few members posting, and then other people heard about it, and we began growing.

Sometime probably in the Fall of 1999, I purchased the domain name "http://www.gentlemothering.com" to use for my personal website. I planned for it to be a place to put all the articles I had written. The hosting company (a free site), lost all of my pages, and rather than build a new site, I decided to just use the domain name www.gentlemothering.com for the Gentle Christian Mothers' website.

In October 2002, we moved the message board off of ezboard and moved the GCM website so that they were both hosted by Praising Jesus as Lord Hosting. We found that for less than the amount it cost to have our message board on ezboard, we were able to get a message board on our own website, our domain name, and a lot of webspace for our website.

The domain name gentlechristianmothers.com was purchased in February 2003. We continued using gentlemothering.com as our domain, with gentlechristianmothering.com forwarding there, until our board crashed in early 2005 and we moved the message board to another server. After that we began using the gentlechristianmothers.com domain name for the message board. We also switched to another webhosting company and currently go through one that is owned by a GCM mama, and her and her husband's help with keeping the board running smoothly has been indispensable. Later in 2005 the articles were moved from the old website over to the site that hosts the message board.

In November 2002, I acquired a business license for Gentle Christian Mothers to do business as (DBA) "Gentle Christian Mothers" and sell the print newsletter Gentle Mothering. In December 2002, the first issure of Gentle Mothering was published (you can read the articles in the first issue here). I planned on sending out a newsletter each month, but I found I had neither the time or capability to do that and the newsletter was discontinued.

For more information also see Welcome to My Living Room (aka GCM): A Sharing of My Story and the History of GCM.

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