MyGrissom.com is a community portal for Peru, Indiana recently launched by Grissom Baptist Mission, a new church plant.

MyGrissom.com used the suggestions contained in the Web Evangelism Guide’s Community Portals page and is thus designed to be a geographic resource for the people of Peru, Indiana and eventually lead them to the church’s website (which is fairly innovative in its own right).

We have added MyGrissom.com to our page of localized portals.

Thanks to the Web Evangelism Bulletin for the tip!

The Barna Group today released the results of a survey regarding how Christians share their faith.

Not surprisingly, the survey found that although digital means (primarily email) was one of the least used evangelistic methods among believers, young adults were the most likely to use email as an evangelistic approach:

�Young adults are much more likely to share their faith through ongoing discussions with friends and through e-mail and instant message conversations than are middle-aged and older adults,� Barna explained. �They are less likely to engage in means that their generation finds offensive, such as street preaching or moral confrontation. The early signs suggest that the emerging generation � the Mosaics, who presently are in their early twenties down through early childhood � will continue along this vein. Ministries seeking to prepare people to effectively share their faith in today�s society would advance the process by enabling young adults to carry on knowledgeable conversations about the substance of the Christian faith and how it affects all dimensions of a person�s life. The ability to relate biblical principles to current issues and personal struggles � that is, to interact beyond the level of simply �getting saved� � will be crucial for the future of effective outreach efforts.�

Andrew Careaga has a great post today at E-vangelism.com about how the church is still not asking the right questions about internet strategy. Well worth the read.

This is somewhat off topic for us (since we tend to concentrate on approaches to using digital means for evangelism), but we thought some of our missionary friends might be interested. Missionary Tech Support provides free technical support for evangelical missionaries all over the world.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new website for the India Prayer Drive.

A group of believers in India felt led by the Lord to plan a 21-day drive across the country of India, stopping in main cities along the way to participate in prayer meetings.

The team is able to update the site themselves by sending emails to a moblogging system. Updates can be made both to the front page of the site (which acts as sort of a travelogue) and to the photo gallery.

Check out the site, but most importantly, join the team in prayer if the Lord would so lead you!

Doug Weiss at Outside The Box Ministry has been blogging the past couple of days about localized evangelistic blogs, dedicated to reaching the people in a particular city or county through use of a Bridge Strategy.

That’s interesting to me because I have been noticing over the past month or so a large increase in the number of websites dedicated to some form of web-based city-reaching. I had even begun to compile a list of such websites with the thought of seeing if their developers would be interested in joining a loose affiliation of people doing similar things on the web - as a way of bouncing ideas off of one another, improving our sites, discussing strategy, etc.

I’ve finished compiling an initial list and posted it here.

I’d be very interested to know if anyone has any additions to that list and if any of the owners of those websites would be interested in forming the type of loose affiliation I mentioned above.

Rob over at Effective Web Ministry Notes was blogging my post about pet stores yesterday and brought up some good additions to my list of things which make church websites unfriendly.

I commented on his site and ended up sharing an example of how a church website I developed a couple of years ago tried to be visitor-centric. I thought the example might be helpful to my readers here, so I’m going to repeat some of my comment to Rob. But you should definitely visit Rob’s post as well because he has some valuable insights to add.

That being said, read on to learn about the example.

Hopefully, not much, if my recent experience at a local pet store is the norm!

My nine-year-old daughter has a pet betta fish. Last weekend, we visited our local pet store to buy some fish food. When we came to the counter to pay, I noticed that the clerk’s t-shirt had an interesting message printed on the front:

People like you are the reason people like me take medication.

As we walked out of the store, I thought to myself sarcastically, “What a wonderful message to send to your customers.”

That got me thinking: in what ways are our church websites unfriendly to unbelievers? What do we include on our websites that leaves a bad taste in our visitors mouth, so to speak, and perhaps even keeps them from visiting our community of believers?

Here’s a quick list to get you started:

• Pictures of the church building rather than of people
• Use of “Christianese,” language which is largely gibberish to unbelievers who visit our sites
• Site navigation which is difficult to understand or follow
• Websites which are not accessible - I’m as guilty of this one as anybody; see today’s article at Boyink.com for further discussion, and thanks are due to Mike that this item occurred to me for inclusion in the list)

Can you think of anything else? Feel free to leave comments with other ways our websites can be unfriendly to believers, or ways in which our websites can be friendly to unbelievers.

One last link: HealYourChurchWebsite.com is always a good resource for improving our websites. Pay Dean a visit and see what you learn!

Rob Williams at Effective Web Ministry Notes is blogging today about Outside The Box Ministry, a new blog from Campus Crusade staffer Doug. See especially Doug’s most recent post on Podcasting With Purpose.

Bezahlt(dot)Org has some great things to say in response to the recent discussion about Ellison Research and the Agape Press article. Here’s just a sampling:

While I think the internet is a good way to introduce people to spiritual matters, it certainly is not the best way to care for people. People require interaction. People need to be able to look you in the eye, cry on your shoulder or shout for joy with a person, not a keyboard and monitor. Jesus ministered to people, He did not have Matthew write down a sermon and post it on a sycamore tree or in the town square and wait for others to post rebuttals or praises…. No website, no blog, no band, no book, nothing can ever replace the Holy Spirit working through you and I, reaching out to a lost an dying world. Websites, blogs, streaming audio and media are great teasers but nothing can replace that personal touch that all of us need. We’re the reason the church grows (I’m speaking universally now) not some amalgam of electrons piped into homes across the world. If your church has a website tell your friends about it. Maybe they’ll hop on the internet for a few minutes to check things out. Then follow-up with them. Invite them to meet God at your place of worship. Websites are a tool for drawing people to Christ. Let’s not exalt the tool above the Toolmaker.

Excellent commentary. A church website’s primary purpose should be to draw unbelievers into face-to-face relationships with believers. If our websites don’t accomplish that purpose, I think we need to take a step back and re-evaluate.

A few weeks ago, I posted this article about how New Hope Bible Church in Albany, Ohio is effectively using their website to draw new people to their Christian community.

Unbeknownst to me (I thought I had added their RSS feed to the list of blogs I monitor on a regular basis, but evidently I hadn’t - remedied that today), quite a conversation broke out over the following portion of this white paper:

Consider the following premises which, although they may be shocking to some, reflect what I believe is the common perception unbelievers have about today�s church:     -People don�t care about your service schedule or calendar of events because they don�t plan on attending your meetings.     -People don�t care about your statement of faith because they have little to no desire to become affiliated with your organization.     -People don�t care who is on your pastoral staff because they don�t anticipate any occasion when they might meet those staff members.     -People don�t care where your facilities are located because they can�t foresee a time when they would set foot in those facilities.     -People don�t care what this week�s sermon title is because they don�t plan on listening. A Question: If the above premises are true, why do so many churches make these the most prominent pieces of information on their websites? What DO People Care About?     -People today care about the stories of other people - people with similar interests to their own, people with similar life experiences, and people with similar problems.     -People today care about relationships with people who have similar interests and life experiences.     -People today care about the thought of a possibility of unmerited love revealed in the midst of true community.

You can read the conversation between (I assume) various members of New Hope here and here.

Since the folks who commented raise some excellent points which reveal some possible misconceptions about what my perspective is, I thought it might be helpful for me to respond here for the benefit of others who might read that white paper and come away thinking I’m out of my mind (wouldn’t be the first time someone thought that, though!).

The research project performed by Ellison Research which I mentioned in my last post is getting a fair amount of play in the Christian blogging world today. David Wayne at JollyBlogger has some very insightful comments in response to the article. I would recommend that you go and read the entire article, especially David’s recommendations at the end of his article. A few of his recommendations in particular stood out to me:

Change your church web page to a blog page.  Most churches web pages are of the “brochure” model and, though they communicate information they really don’t build community.  You can still put links on the sidebar to all of the “brochure” type stuff, but let the heart of the web page be a blog that stays constantly updated.  I can envision such a page having a small, static welcome message at the top of the page, followed by blog entries that will build community.  Make sure to allow commenting on everything and make sure that someone reads the comments and responds

And ....

Instead of having a “cyber-pastor” get all staff members to maintain a blog either linked from the church’s “homepage” or somewhere on their own.

And finally ....

Face to face ministry is still the bread and butter of the church so it needs to be the bread and butter of all we do Keeping (this) in mind, don’t forget what was said in the Agape News article - people are using the internet more and more to learn about churches.  Wise use of the internet will be that which facilitates much face to face ministry.