What do you think of these pages from the website of University Christian Fellowship in Syracuse, New York:

• Questions We Get Asked About Our Church Service, and Our Snappy Answers
• UCF Order of Worship

Found on Todd Rhoades’ Monday Morning Insight Blog

To be honest, this smells a bit like a conspiracy theory to me, but ....

Proposed Rule Changes Would Tangle The Web

Anyone know any more about this? If it’s true, what are the implications for internet evangelism?

May 7, 2006 is this year’s Internet Evangelism Day. This annual event was initiated and is sponsored by the Internet Evangelism Coalition, an umbrella group of major organizations involved in web ministry. Internet Evangelism Day is a worldwide annual focus day designed to help Christians discover the potential of the internet for reaching out to an unbelieving world.

The Internet Evangelism Day website is a vast resource for 1) people who are just curious about internet evangelism; 2) for those looking for ways to expand their ministry through this medium; and, 3) for established internet evangelists. I highly recommend that you visit the site and carefully review the resources which are available to you.

Although it is obviously too late for a church to hold a special service today, there is no reason why a church cannot hold a service dedicated to internet evangelism on other days of the year. I would highly encourage pastors who read this blog to seriously consider what their local church can do to emphasize the opportunity to use the internet for outreach.

comScore Networks, a global information provider and consultancy to which leading companies turn for consumer behavior insight, issued a press release yesterday claiming that 694 million people, age 15+, used the Internet worldwide from all locations in March 2006. Read the full press release.

A few notes:

1. The figure excludes traffic from public computers such as internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs, segments of internet usage which are much more prominent in the third world than they are in Western countries and which reportedly are on the rise dramatically (especially mobile phones).
2. The figure pertains only to people 15 years of age or older
3. The 694 million people who use the internet represent 14% of the world’s population which is 15 years of age or older
4. The online audience in the U.S. represents less than a quarter of the worldwide online audience — major Asian countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea make up more than 25% of the worldwide online audience.

Kurt Steinbrueck, the Director of Marketing at OurChurch.com, recently wrote a valuable article about developing your church website in such a way that it will rank well in searches conducted at major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Kurt includes a brief but helpful explanation for several tips such as the following:

• Put the location and denomination of your church in your website’s Title tag
• Put the location, denomination, and other defining information in your website’s description tag
• Put your location, denomination and other local search terms on your homepage
• Register with the major directories and search engines
• And several more (some of which you may not have thought of) even if you’re accustomed to thinking about search engine optimization

The one thing I would like to add to Kurt’s article is that we need to be strategic when we are choosing which key words and phrases to include on our church websites. 

Tony Morgan, one of the pastors at Granger Community Church, wrote an intriguing article for his blog a few days ago entitled “Good For Nothing Websites.”

In the article, Tony talks about a few different websites of companies, organizations, and individuals for which he has a certain passion. The manufacturer of the car he drives. The baseball league in which his son plays. His favorite professional baseball team. A leadership organization to which he belongs. Authors whose books he enjoys (or has enjoyed in the past). His old bank and his current bank. What seems to come out of his article is that he consistently uses the websites which offer him something, which in fact are useful to him. Those that are not useful are ignored.

Then he asks a pointed question: “Does your church have a website.” Although I had to read his article 2-3 times to at least come to a place where I think I get his point (I can be dense at times, especially at the end of a long work day!), I’m still not positive. Maybe it’s meant to say different things to different people.

But here’s what I got out of the article and the question: Does your church have a useful website? The answer to that question, I would say, depends on a couple of things:

1. Who do we want to see using our church websites?
2. Is what we offer useful to them?

Unless we answer the first question, we’ll never be able to answer the second.

From my perspective, as you already know if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, I want to see unbelievers using our church websites. And the most useful aspects of a church website to unbelievers are the stories of real people in our congregations — their joys, their struggles, their interests, their hopes and dreams, their crushing disappointments, etc., etc. Not their Christian testimonies. But their stories.

The real stories of real people will be intriguing to unbelievers because those stories are the stuff of real life. Are you telling the stories of the people in your congregation and are unbelievers in your local area intrigued enough to want to meet the people in your congregation in face-to-face relationships. Is your church website, through its stories, drawing people into the authentic community of Christ lived out in the everyday lives of the believers in your area?

Church Beauty is a website I ran across yesterday which highlights well-designed church websites. From the site’s introduction:

My goal with this website is showcase and promote excellent church website design. After doing quite a bit of research I can honestly say that there is not an abundance of high quality, top notch church websites. However, with your help I want to promote the ones that do exist in hopes of inspiring more churches to reach farther and go the extra mile.

The first post is dated March 20, 2006, so the site has not been around too long, but they seem to have a good collection of attractive church websites highlighted. They are actively looking for recommendations for sites to highlight, so if you know of some great church websites, why not stop by and submit your recommendations?

Almost exactly a year ago today, I was sitting in a local coffeehouse with my friend Dave Whiting, the Director of Evangelism at Santa Cruz Bible Church. We were waiting for one of the pastors from Santa Cruz Bible, Chuckk Gerwig, the Family and Youth Pastor at Santa Cruz Bible. Dave had told me that Chuckk (and yes, it’s spelled with two k’s!) wanted to pick my brain about web stuff.

I had never met Chuckk (my loss up until then) and didn’t know what to expect. When he walked into the coffeehouse and sat down, I quickly surmised that we weren’t going to be talking about a traditional Christian website!

Steve Johnson is the Group Vice President Americas of The International Bible Society. Steve talked about some of the leading indicators regarding spirituality on the internet. He also talked about practical ways that a person can use the internet and other electronic technology to make God’s Word more available to friends, family, and business associates. Finally, he identified some of the existing resources that people can use for effective outreach using non-traditional methods. My notes of this session, entitled “Internet Evangelism in a Post-Literature Culture,” follow. As with my notes from Walt Wilson’s session, unless specified, my thoughts do not appear in these notes.

The Word of God has transformational power in itself — how can we make it as widely available as possible in as many media formats as possible?

Walt Wilson is the Founder and Chairman of Global Media Outreach, an internet evangelism ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ. The following are my notes from his keynote address at yesterday’s Techvangelism ‘06 conference (whether or not I specifically attribute something to Walt, they are still his thoughts — what follows is largely a straight transcription of my notes without any added thoughts from me, except where specifically noted).

Walt began his speech with a reference to Matthew 24, especially verses 3 and 14. In verse 3, Jesus’ disciples ask Him what the world will be like in the end time: “As He was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, ‘Tell us, when will these things happen, and what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?’” In verse 14, Jesus gives part of His answer to that question: “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.”

I’m currently attending the Techvangelism Conference in Menlo Park. Look for a few more articles in the next day or two memorializing the valuable sessions.

I was gratified this morning to find an article regarding podcasting on the website of one of my denomination’s primary publications: The Pentecostal Evangel.

In the article, Kirk Noonan gives a good overview of the advantages and challenges of podcasting for the church. He quotes Mark Batterson (pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C.), Mark Kellner (the author of God on the Internet), and Mark Hunt (Vice president and Publisher of New Media for Zondervan). All have interesting things to say.

I was especially heartened by Mark Batterson’s clear assertion of the purpose and proper use of podcasting in the church:

Podcasting is not a substitute for church, it’s a supplement. There never will be a substitute for the human touch or the corporate worship we experience together in church. Our goal is to evangelize people and get them to check out our church in a nonthreatening way, and podcasting allows us to do that.

It’s good to see the Assemblies of God recognizing the value of technology in reaching the lost.