This message is intended as a general response to the question "how do
I get on your mailing list?".  soc.religion.christian is primarily a
Usenet newsgroup.  While it is possible to get it as email, you should
first check to see if your system participates in Usenet news.  If so,
you subscribe to groups (including this one) be setting up a
configuration file in your direction (often .newsrc).  Your local
support staff should be able to help you with this.  To see whether
you've got news, see if the programs readnews, nn, rn, or vnews
exist on your system.

If you don't have access to news, it is possible to get access to
soc.religion.christian via a listserv.  Listserv works for anyone who
has email access.  You send it a message whose text is a command, e.g.
the command to subscribe.  Once you've subscribed, you get all
articles via email.

To subscribe, send an email message to listserv@spss.com.  The text
of the message should consist of a single line, containing

  subscribe soc-rel-christian FNAME LNAME

where FNAME and LNAME are your first ane last names.  This will add
you to the mailing list.  It will use the mailing address from which
you send the request.  So if you read mail on several machines, make
sure to send the request from the machine where you want to get
soc.religion.christian.

To get the charter of the group, send a messge to listserv@spss.com
containing the line

  get christian charter

To remove yourself from the list, send the line

  unsubscribe soc-rel-christian

To send an article to the list, send it as email to
christian@cs.rutgers.edu.

There is another group that is also available both as a newsgroups of
listserv.  Unlike s.r.c, which is actually a newsgroup that is
gatewayed to a listserv, CHRISTIA is primarily a listserv, which is
gatewayed to news.  (However it's not clear how much this distinction
matters.)  CHRISTIA is intended to be about "practical Christian
living".  It tries to avoid doctrinal discussions, though in fact
that's hard to do.  It is not moderated, but there is a "list owner"
who will intervene if the discussion seems to be going too far
afield.

Here are instructions for joining CHRISTIA:

    LISTSERV is designed to be used by email.  To join a LISTSERV mailing
    list, you send email to the LISTSERV daemon at the site where the
    mailing list is maintained.  In the email message, you put a command.
    E.g. to join CHRISTIA, you would send email to
    LISTSERV@ASUACAD.BITNET.  (If your site doesn't know about bitnet,
    you can try LISTSERV@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU.)  The message would contain
    the command "SUBSCRIBE CHRISTIA John Doe", where you use your first
    and last name instead of John Doe.  To remove yourself from the list, 
    you'd send a command "UNSUBSCRIBE CHRISTIA".  There are a number of 
    additional commands, letting you do things like suspend your subscription 
    while you're on vacation.

    To send an article to the list, you send it to the name of the group
    at the site where the mailing list is maintained. E.g. to send an
    article to CHRISTIA you would email it to CHRISTIA@ASUACAD.BITNET.  Do not
    send requests to join the group to this address.  Commands involving
    subscribing and unsubscribing must be sent to LISTSERV, not the group.

    Many LISTSERV groups maintain a database of past messages and other
    information.  The INDEX and GET commands are used to get a list of all
    files in the database, and to retrive a file.

    The REVIEW command is used to get a list of everyone who is subscribed
    to the group.

CHRISTIA can also be read as usenet news.  It is gatewayed into
the newsgroup bit.listserv.christia.