I have tried, in every instance, to stay as true to the dates and times of events in the above timeline; and in the following History document as possible. Please excuse any errors, and place the blame for any errors solely on my shoulders. – NeoJabez
The Christian Crew came about amongst a group of gamers who were tired and distressed at the continuing lack of social morals and overwhelming profanity, pornography, and outright disregard for fair play and good sportsmanship found on the average game servers, specifically Counter-Strike game servers of the time. Tykur, Agent, and Winky are credited as the original members of the community, or “clan”, with Tykur as the Founder. They officially instituted the first true Christian Crew website and game server on May 20, 2003.
The first game server (and all others since) was called “The Fish” server, referencing both the “Fishers of Men” intent of ministry inherent in the idea of the clan, but also because the first “clan tag” was shaped like a fish with the CC initials inside. We have since added a cross in front of the tag.
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There was originally a small, succinct home page, which linked to a News Page, run and updated by DemonHunter, as well as a Forum Site. There were also a couple of small, user-created CC pages as well. Each basically listed the ideas behind the Christian Mission of the group, and offered another clean, moral place besides game servers to talk, post, and respond in fellowship with like individuals and other members.
Sometime in 2004 or early in 2005, a new website and domain were created by Agent. The new site was located at http://www.christiancs.com, which shows the specificity of preference for Counter-Strike as the game of choice for the clan. This website was running a fairly standard ‘gaming theme’ with little embellishment, and lots of plugins during this period, but had a wonderful sense of community and action. During these years, the game servers grew, expanded and multiplied, and at one point in recent history, the Christian Crew hosted approximately 12 or 13 different servers at once. One was an unranked Battlefield 2 server, the CS:S servers included “BIG FISH” which is the largest and most played server, BIG2, a Private server, used for OGL tournament play, CAL tournament play and more, Custom Maps servers, and at times, two or three MOD servers, featuring everything from GoldenEye James Bond mods, to VIP mods, Surf mods, Gungame, Deathmatch and Zombie mods.
A historical footnote: Not only did Tykur found the Christian Crew itself, but during this time, helped in the formation, training and teaching of the United Mapping Alliance, with Enock, (later known as the United Modding Alliance) which created the great bulk of Custom maps on our custom servers. Anyone who wanted to learn how to create great 3D maps, control AI elements, spawnpoints, or try completely new things with CS:S were encouraged to ask questions and participate.
At or around the middle of summer, 2005, Tykur decided there was a need for some delegation of leadership to help the community thrive and grow, and thus decided to form a Christian Crew Council. Each member of the Council would uphold the good name of the community, resolve disputes, and try to administer and lead a given portion of the community’s many growing and expanding endeavors.
Among these, (and possibly one of the more important of these expansions) were beginning Bible Studies on our TeamSpeak Voice Chat server. Tykur invited Deacon, a very positive, God-led family man to become our Spiritual Leader in this area. Deacon (along with his wife, and son and daughter) enriched our community greatly with his provocative, insightful, and very well done Bible Studies, Debates, and Prayer Meetings.
The Crew continues to lead Bible Studies in our TeamSpeak Discord to this day.
Other Council positions included technical positions concerning the maintenance and upkeep of the servers, (both web and game servers), writing and releasing a newsletter, graphics and other website related media projects, attracting the attention of new recruits, administrators for banning and unbanning from servers, mediators, and even secretaries for the Minutes of Council Meetings. Some Council Members, (if not most) perform a variety of overlapping jobs, much of it behind the scenes, and are easily recognizable around our community. An application system was formed to review applicants to the community, the Christian Crew Constitution, Articles of Faith, and Mission Statement were written, ratified, and voted upon, regular Open Meetings were held so that all the membership could speak in a group setting with the Council Members and come up with new ideas, directions, or simply to vote on game server changes. The Council is a bit smaller now, and the ‘jobs’ are much more comfortable and evenly spread than in the original days…Illustrated by the fact that at one time the Council was 25 members strong, and in 2017 generally there are 9 active members.
Some of the notable people from this time included Council Members: J2, FinalResort, Shadowsbane, Pendragon, NachoCheese, 3Nails4You, AfterImage, Anti-Pop Consortium, Talon, Clarence, Cuda, FatherMike, Goatman, ElectroRock, MinutesMaid, Plato, WWJD, 90lbWuss, Globalkoas, NeoJabez, Shellshock, and many more. Some notable members would include TheRomans (R.I.P.!), Nemesis1960 (R.I.P.!), LadyHawke, Ark, Thamyris, BoughtByBlood, Robin Banks, Moose, Fisher, Grumbles, GFunk, Hoplite, SoulWinner, Reconize, TheWho, Syphon, QweschinMark, CoPyro, Ducky, Mattman, Sarahgirl, MJCaboose, Crosser, Elvis, Oxygencube, and many more.
The ChristianCS website underwent two significant revisions, and by the time it was changed to the current site, the old forums had over 100,000 posts in over 10,000 topics! (Our last forum more than surpassed that, and reached 183,605 posts in 21,567 topics by August of 2017. Our forums were discontinued and are no longer used in 2020, as our community moved to Discord, and most, if not all, of our persistent messaging, voice chat, and video chat take place there.)
In late 2005 and going into 2006, another sub-group of the CC began to take shape, in the interests of artwork and creativity. “ACE” (Artistic & Creative Endeavors) was formed by the artists, poets, musicians, and writers of the CC as a way to learn and teach each other new skills, to ambassador to new members by helping them feel included with gifts of artwork and signatures, and more. ACE has since been involved in helping the Community in designing and creating graphics, headers and footers, banners, and much more. ACE was also a completely separate website, under the CC banner, in two different versions.
On December 31, 2008 at midnight, the Christian Crew moved to its newest domain name https://www.ccaming.com and the website it used for over two years before the current site was developed, making a few subtle changes as per its size and continued expansion. Like our last site, (which used the Joomla CMS), the new website was designed to be more than just a forum for discussion, but also a content-driven site full of great information for the modern Christian. The new content consists of links, articles, testimonies and more, and is another fruit of the great community spirit felt by the members. During all of these years, the CC has run its servers and website ENTIRELY on the donations of its members, and still thrives and pays its bills today. Truly, if a Christian organization of any kind shows fruit, it should know it has God’s Favor, and the CC does this today, as it has since 2003.
Today, CC has consolidated it’s website to a different server setup, no longer running on our own machines in a data center, but instead using a webhost. We save significant amounts of money doing this, but also made the change because the ‘gaming side’ of our community now mainly consists of games we cannot run our own servers for. CCGaming has made some great strides into social networking as well, regularly engaging people using Facebook, Youtube, and Twitch.
The leaders have come and gone, the Council and behind the scenes technicians occasionally change, but through it all, the Christian Crew has tried only to be a beacon of light in the shadowy rooms of the Internet.
May God continue to bless us, accept our appreciation for the blessings of the last several years, and allow us SEVERAL MORE YEARS (or many, many more!) of grace, faith and fellowship in His Name!