Tips for making effective church websites

The following is a list of localized Christian portals which serve a particular geographic area.

The first two lists are of websites which seem to be involved in some way in web-based city-reaching projects. We are compiling this list in the hopes of forming a loose affiliation of people involved in developing such sites.

The final, and larger, list is of websites for organizations involved in localized outreach. While these websites are not city-reaching projects themselves, I am including them because it seems that some of these might have potential for being the launching pads (even if only in terms of common personnel) for future web-based city-reaching projects.

If you know of any websites which are not included here, please don’t hesitate to so we can add them to the list. As the list grows longer, we will endeavor to organize it more carefully (probably on a geographic basis).

Web-Based Evangelistic Efforts
These are localized websites which have evangelism as their main purpose.

ChilliwackLife
Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada

Downham Online
Downham, United Kingdom

GodLovesIndy.com
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States

KamloopsLife
Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada

LoveChilliwack
Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada

LoveHalifax
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

MyGrissom
Peru, Indiana, United States

Web-Based Christian Portals
These are localized websites which are dedicated to bringing Christians together across denominational and individual church lines, which is foundational for all effective outreach (John 17:21-23).

California Christians
California, United States

ChristianCruz
Santa Cruz, California, United States

ChristianHangSuite
Several cities in the United States

FaithHouston
Houston, Texas, United States

IndyChristian
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States

IllinoisChristian
Illinois, United States

Kansas City Christian
Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri, United States

OhioChristian
Ohio, United States

Pray Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, United States

saWorship
San Antonio, Texas, United States

SaskatoonCity
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Virginia Ministry
Virginia, United States

Beacom
Beacom.com seems to have a local focus with their “Hometowns” feature (claiming portals for Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Orange County, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia, Youngstown and New York City), but their portals do not seem to contain local information, and it doesn’t seem to us that these longstanding websites have been updated anytime recently.

Efforts Which Have A Strong Web Presence In Addition To Offline Efforts
These are websites of localized organizations which are primarily involved in offline outreach efforts, but also have a web presence. In some cases, their web presence is very active while in others, their websites are simply brochures outlining their regional ministry.

Basics in Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States

Chicagoland Prayer Summit
Chicago, Illinois, United States

The Church in the City
Charleston, West Virginia, United States

The Church Guide
Hampton Roads, Virginia, United States

Christian Center of Park City
Park City, Utah, United States

Christian Ministries United
Richmond, Virginia, United States

Citywide Church
Muncie, Indiana, United States

Concerts of Prayer Greater New York
New York City, New York, United States

Family and Children Faith Coalition
South Florida, United States

Florida Prayer Network
Florida, United States

Greater Boston Baptist Association
Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Houston Prays
Houston, Texas, United States

Houston Profile Project
Houston, Texas, United States

Jesus Texas
Texas, United States

Knoxville Leadership Foundation
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States

Metrolina Prayer Network
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

Mission Carolina
North and South Carolina, United States

Mission Columbus
Columbus, Ohio, United States

Mission First Coast
Jacksonville Area, Florida, United States

Mission Greater Modesto
Modesto, California, United States

Mission Houston
Houston, Texas, United States

Mission Spokane
Spokane, Washington, United States

Nashville Baptist Association
Nashville, Tennessee, United States

New England Concerts of Prayer
New England, United States

Pray Federal Way
Federal Way, Washington, United States

Prayer Transformation Ministries
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States

The Regional Church of Lancaster County
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States

Somebody Cares Houston
Houston, Texas, United States

Somebody Cares Tampa Bay
Tampa Bay, Florida, United States

Transform Houston
Houston, Texas, United States

Transformation Cincinnati
Cincinnati, Ohio and Northern Kentucky, United States

Tuscaloosa Prayer Network
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States

Union Baptist Association
Houston, Texas, United States

Unite!
Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Urban Partners
Greater Los Angeles, California, United States

Vision New England
New England, United States

Vision Orlando
Orlando, Florida, United States

The Internet: Friend or Foe for Christians?
This white paper is entitled "The Internet: Friend or Foe for Christians?" and our objective is to attempt to learn some of the ways in which we can guard ourselves and protect ourselves from the enemy's influence on our lives which can come through the internet.

Proverbs 4:23 says, "Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life."

And that's what we want to learn how to do in relation to the internet — how can we use the internet and still watch over our hearts with all diligence?

The Historic Opportunity
Some would say that we should abandon the internet because it is used for evil purposes.

But I'd like to suggest to you that we really can't do that. I believe the internet presents the church with a historic opportunity.

The First Century Church
The first-century church often used a particular strategy to spread the gospel. And that strategy took advantage of the circumstances and technology of the day.

Walter Wilson (to whom I am indebted for many of the thoughts and concepts in this section of this white paper), in his excellent book The Internet Church, describes the circumstances which God had orchestrated to facilitate the spread of the gospel in the first century. The Roman Empire had built a series of roads to enable them to quickly deploy their armies throughout the empire. Koiné Greek had become the common language throughout the empire. And the widespread use of writing had become the cutting-edge technology of the day.

The church's strategy was to use all those things to spread the gospel.

While the Roman Empire built their road system to allow their armies to move quickly, Christian missionaries took advantage of that road system to spread the gospel.

They would travel the roads from city to city, and when they reached a city, they would very often go to the "agora," the marketplace — the location in each city where the majority of the residents, as well as the community's most influential thinkers, gathered on a regular basis to obtain information and for social interaction. And it was there, in the midst of the "agora," that Christian missionaries would declare the gospel.

And then the apostles employed written communication in the form of letters or epistles to encourage and teach existing believers. And these letters were delivered to churches via the Roman system of roads.

Today's Opportunity
Today, the church is faced with a similar historic opportunity.

In many ways, English is becoming a worldwide language. It is the language of international business and economics.

Secondly, in many ways, it is no longer necessary to use roads or other physical means of travel to reach other parts of the world. Today, the "information superhighway" provides the means by which we can travel throughout the world.

Thirdly, the cutting-edge technology of the day, the internet, provides us with the means of communication to reach the entire world.

Finally, the "agora" of today is in many ways no longer a physical place and is much vaster than the first century agora.

The internet (consisting primarily of the World Wide Web, email, usenet newsgroups and instant messaging) is the new "agora," the "place" where an increasing number of people, and certainly where some of the world's most influential people, gather.

The internet is a "place" where people come together to:

• buy and sell;
• exchange ideas and philosophies;
• discuss political and social issues; and,
• access a wide range of information

The following statistics demonstrate the fact that the internet is fast becoming the "agora" of the modern day (we should keep in mind that statistics concerning the internet are out-of-date the moment they are released; these statistics are included only for purposes of illustration - we don't make any claims to perfect accuracy):

• Over 934 million people are currently "on the internet."
• One out of every 4.5 people in the world has been online. One out of every 1.6 people in the United States has internet access.
• 38 new users join the internet every minute in the United States alone.
• In Peru, for the price of a postage stamp, you can get 15 minutes in front of a computer in an internet café and log on to a free email account and surf the web.
• Computers are now outselling television sets in most developed countries (even when handheld devices are not counted).
• Current email volumes exceed the delivery volumes of all post offices in the world combined.
• Every second, nearly 36 individual web pages come online (just to put that in perspective, in the United States, there is a birth every 8 seconds).
• Over 5,700 instant messages are exchanged every second (that's 1.5 billion instant messages every month).
• More than ninety percent of children under the age of 13 regularly use a computer at school.
• Eighty-six percent of American students have gone online, compared to 59 percent of the general population.
• Ninety-two percent of college freshmen have internet access.
• Sixty-two percent of Americans use the web to seek out spiritual information.
• The second most popular topic in Google's approximately 200 million searches per day involve questions regarding God and Jesus Christ (2/3 of those searches come from outside the United States and in 88 different languages).

Walter Wilson, in his challenging book, The Internet Church, writes this of the opportunity which has been presented to us:

This is just the beginning of a wrenching change that is racing throughout the world. The term used to describe this change is radical discontinuity — change so fast that we have no explanation for it. If you think that all of this comes out of Silicon Valley, you're on the wrong track. This is not about human inventions or creative schemes. These developments are about something much bigger and far more dramatic. In fact these events are not about technology at all — they are about the Great Commission. Change this big is being orchestrated by God, not by man.

God is doing something big, and we had best be clearheaded about what is going on around us. The church is in the information business, and we should not be surprised that God has raised up information technology to communicate His Word to the entire world. Christians again must travel the network, only this time it is electronic. This time it is the information superhighway.

From a Silicon Valley perspective, we think we're changing history with our technology, but nothing could be further from the truth. From a Christian perspective, God is doing something historic, and we need to pay serious attention to the tools He is giving us. There is no doubt He intends for us to use them to spread His Word.

We cannot abandon the internet, because it is a core component of what the church's strategy should be to reach the world with the gospel.

Jesus never ran away from the world. He went to parties with tax-gatherers and thieves. One of my favorite quotes is by Scottish minister George Macleod, who founded the nondenominational Iona Community in Glasgow in the 1930's:

I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church.

I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap, on a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew and Latin and Greek, at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where He died and that is what He died about.

And that is where church people should be and what church people should be about.

In Jesus' prayer in John 17, He prayed to the Father and said, "I have given them (that's us) Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one."

And so as we go out into the "world" of the internet, with all its stumbling blocks and entanglements, to the place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldier's gamble, let's remember that Jesus has prayed for us, and continues to pray for us, that the Father would keep us from the evil one.

We should also remember that in order to speak effectively into this world of the internet, we have to speak from a platform of godly character, and that's why it's important for us to learn how to combat the temptations of online evil (pornography, gambling, hate, addictive relationships, etc.)

The State of Online Pornography
In this white paper, I'm choosing to discuss online pornography (rather than other online addictions) because it is perhaps the most rampant online addiction today (with gambling perhaps a close second - The number of gambling sites on the Net has spiked from 6,992 in August 1999 to more than 21,651 as of August 2000, while estimates of pornographic websites range anywhere from 300,000 to 1,000,000).

We should note that Christians (Christian men in particular) have always struggled with pornography. In one sense, it's nothing new. 2 Samuel 11:2 — David looking at Bathsheba from the roof of the palace.

But online pornography presents special problems for at least two reasons:

• ease of access: prior to the internet, surveys showed that men would drive an average of 50 miles to reach an adult bookstore to feed their pornography habit, but now pornography is only a few clicks away.
• privacy / lack of accountability: prior to the internet, there was always the risk that someone would see a man enter an adult bookstore or buy a magazine, but now a man doesn't have to leave his house.

The following statistics, taken from Christian Computing Magazine's video entitled The Internet — The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, are especially disturbing in their profile of the problems the Christian church faces in the area of online pornography (these statistics were compiled in 2002 - I suspect the figures might be higher today):

• In a recent survey conducted by Focus on the Family and Zogby International, 31% of men surveyed said they had visited sex sites and 37% of 18-24 year olds gave that response. Of interest to Focus on the Family was the fact that 17.8% of those who claim to be "born again" Christians and 18% of those who are married have also viewed sex sites.
• Some surveys say as many as 60% of Christian men are struggling with online pornography. Those same surveys say that 70-75% of Christian ministers are struggling with online pornography.
• While most Christian homes in the United States are online, only 5% of Christian homes are doing anything in terms of using filtering mechanisms or providing some form of accountability.
• In the secular world, over one-third of businesses provide some form of filtering mechanism or accountability to their employees. Less than 10% of Christian ministries do the same.
• In a study with only 29 percent of public libraries responding, researchers found 2,000 incidents of people, many of them children, accessing pornography in the library.
• More than half of teenagers have visited Internet sites containing pornography, offensive music lyrics, gambling or messages of violence or hate.
• More than 30 percent of spam, commercial e-mail, contains pornographic material.
• Analysts from Forrester Research say that sex sites on the Web generate at least $1 billion a year in revenue
• According to NetValue, 27.5% of the younger population in the US (age 17 and younger) visited an adult website in Septemnber 2000.

How Can We Battle The Temptations of Online Pornography?
What are some of the weapons we can use in that battle?

First of all, I should say that I don't have all the answers. But in the next few sections of this white paper, I will share with you some of the strategies which help me.

We are going to look at three different categories of "weapons" we can use in this battle: spiritual weapons, relational weapons, and technological weapons.

Spiritual Weapons
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this category of weapon because we could spend weeks and months talking about how to combat sexual temptation in the spiritual realm.

But I do want to at least touch upon it briefly because I can tell you all about filtering software, filtered internet service providers, miscellaneous tips on how to avoid stumbling upon online pornography, etc., etc. But if you haven't settled certain issues in your heart, all of the tips and technology won't help you. These spiritual weapons are foundational in the battle we face, and so we need to at least touch upon these issues.

The primary spiritual weapons which are available to us in our battle against sexual temptation, including online pornography, are the knowledge of who we are in Christ and the knowledge of the purpose for which we were created.

An "Odd" Passage of Scripture
1 Corinthians 6:9-20 reads as follows (emphasis mine):

Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.

All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything. Food is for the stomach, and the stomach is for food; but God will do away with both of them. Yet the body is not for immorality, but for the Lord; and the Lord is for the body. Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? May it never be! Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a harlot is one body with her? For He says, "The two will become one flesh." But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sings against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.

Trying To Follow The Rules
I find it very intriguing that in the middle of a discussion of sexual immorality, Paul says, "All things are lawful for me." In the midst of a discussion of sexual immorality, he basically says, "There are no rules for me." Do you find that odd?

If your sole approach to sexual temptation (in reality, to any temptation) is in trying to follow the rules, I can guarantee that you're going to fail.

Let me use a common illustration to support this point. I have a seven-year-old daughter named Emily.

If Emily and I are in the kitchen one afternoon and I tell her not to take any cookies from the cookie jar because they would spoil her dinner, and then I leave her alone in the kitchen (with the cookie jar), what are her thought processes going to be like?

Emily is a very good girl. She wants to obey her mommy and daddy, so she would probably start thinking along these lines:

Daddy said I shouldn't take any cookies from the cookie jar, and I really want to obey daddy. So I'm not going to take those cookies. Taking those cookies would be wrong, and I don't want to disobey daddy by taking the cookies.

It won't be long before Emily is only thinking about cookies. And once her thoughts are fixated on the cookies, she's lost the battle.

That's why Paul says that the law is the power of sin (1 Corinthians 15:56). The law, or the rule, gives sin its energy in our lives. The law is good, but when I try to live under it, sin is produced in my life. That's why trying to follow the rule in my own strength is not the answer to battling sexual temptation. The rule is not wrong — it's just not the foundation to our success in this battle.

Resistance to Sexual Temptation
Paul defines resistance to sexual temptation, not in terms of following rules, but instead, in terms of realizing who we are and what (or who) we were made for.

According to Paul, this is who I am:

• Someone who used to be a fornicator, or an idolater, or an adulterer, etc., etc.
• Someone who was washed, sanctified, and justified (I'm not the same person I was — I'm a new creation, all things have become new)
• I am set apart for the Lord's purposes (my body is "for the Lord")
• I am empowered ("Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power")
• I have been bought with a price — I belong to Him.

According to Paul, this is what I was created for:

• to live in intimacy with Him — that's much of Paul's point when he talks about us being members of Christ, being joined to the Lord and one spirit with Him, being a temple of the Holy Spirit.

We were created to live in intimacy with God.

It's on the basis of those two basic truths — 1) that I am a new creation, set apart for Christ, empowered by the Lord, the Lord's possession; and, 2) that I was created for intimacy with Him, that we are told to flee immorality and glorify God in our bodies. If we don't resist on the basis of those truths, we're doomed to failure.

And so when I'm tempted sexually, my first response is "That's not who I am and that's not what I was created for."

This issue of intimacy with the Lord is very important, because sexual temptation is ultimately a false promise of intimacy without commitment. The problem is that there is no intimacy without commitment. Online pornography promises a solution to our loneliness, but like all sin, it will never truly satisfy.

Relational Weapons
The primary relational weapon which is available to us in our battle against sexual temptation, including online pornography, is what I like to call "covenant friendship."

This is simply an acknowledgment that you and I need other believers to whom we can be accountable. We need small groups of our fellow believers with whom we can share our struggles, and we need individuals who will pray for us in the midst of battle.

Jonathan and David: Covenant Friends I think the greatest example of covenant friendship in the Bible is the friendship of Jonathan and David.

Not long after his defeat of Goliath, David's life entered a new season. Samuel had anointed David as king. David had become Saul's minstrel. David had defeated the Philistine warrior Goliath.

And when David returned from killing Goliath, the women of all the cities of Israel came out singing and dancing to meet King Saul and they sang, "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands." And the Scripture says that Saul became angry because they were ascribing ten thousands to David but only thousands to Saul. And Saul said "Now what more can he have but the kingdom?" So Saul looked at David as a threat and began to persecute him. This begins the period in which David is a fugitive, fleeing from Saul.

This is a crucial point in David's life. It's the outset of the major season of preparation in David's life. It's during this season of his life that David's major life-battles were won.

This is very significant. David is about to enter the most difficult season of his life — the season in which he will experience the persecution and attack of his enemies in their greatest intensity. He is also about to enter the season which holds the greatest potential for shaping the rest of his life. It is a strategic season in David's life. If David fails here, he largely fails for life. But if he succeeds here, he largely succeeds for life. And at the outset of this crucial period in David's life, God, in His grace, love and incredible mercy, sovereignly provides David with a covenant friend who will fight his battles with him.

And this is very important for you and I, because as people who face all sorts of temptations, you and I need covenant friends who will fight our battles alongside us.

Souls Knit Together
1 Samuel 18:1-4 says this:

Now it came about when he had finished speaking to Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as himself. And Saul took him that day and did not let him return to his father's house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, with his armor, including his sword and his bow and his belt.

The passage tells us that "the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as himself." One translation says that "Jonathan became one in spirit with David."

The Hebrew word which is translated by "knit" or "one in spirit" is qashar, which literally means "to bind." It refers to binding or tying something to something else.

When the word is used of people, it means that two people are inseparably bound together in love. It literally means to be chained together and speaks of inseparable devotion and undying loyalty.

Is there another person in your life (other than your spouse) with whom you have been inseparably bound together in love? With whom you are chained together? With whom you have a relationship characterized by inseparable devotion and undying loyalty? That's the type of relationship you and I need. It also bears mentioning that this other person should be of the same gender as yourself.

Verse 3 of 1 Samuel 18 tells us that not only did Jonathan become one in spirit with David, but "Jonathan made a covenant with David." They made an agreement together. They pledged and vowed and swore to each other before God their unswerving loyalty to one another. They promised unreserved fidelity and whole-hearted commitment to one another.

Andrew Blackwood, a famous expositor of this century, said this: "When (a) covenant has to do with friendship between man and man, we infer that each of them has declared his undying devotion to the other, and that they have bound their hearts together with ties of loyalty as well as love."

We're not told this in our passage, but in typical ancient Middle Eastern practice, covenants were sealed by sacrifice. The parts of the animal (or animals) which were sacrificed were laid side by side, and those who were making the covenant with each other would walk between the parts of the slain animal (or animals). This was a symbolic act by which the participants said to each other, "If we violate this covenant we are making today, may we be slain and cut in two, just as these animals have been slain and cut in two — may our blood be shed and spilled on the ground if we violate this covenant we are making today."

Now, we can't say for sure that such a ceremony took place when Jonathan and David made their covenant (although there is a fairly strong possibility that such a ceremony did take place). But what I want us to understand from this is that, in Middle Eastern thought, a covenant is a very serious thing.

The relationship between Jonathan and David was not a simple, ordinary friendship.

God, in His sovereign mercy, supernaturally and inseparably bound the souls of Jonathan and David together. They were chained together, inseparably devoted to one another. Under God's guidance, they swore undying loyalty, unreserved fidelity and wholehearted commitment to one another.

Do you have a friend like that in your life? God wants to supernaturally and inseparably bind your soul to the soul of a Jonathan — one who will support and strengthen you, one who will fight your battles alongside you.

The Two Major Roles of a Covenant Friend
In verse 4 of 1 Samuel 18, we see that Jonathan does two things which are significant, and each of these corresponds to one of the two major roles of a covenant friend.

First of all, we are told that "Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, ...."

In ancient Middle Eastern culture, the giving of one's clothes to another symbolized the giving of oneself. Beyond that, we need to realize that this was not just any robe. This was Jonathan's princely robe, the symbol of his royalty.

Jonathan was the son of Saul. He was the son of the king of Israel. He was in line for the throne. But David had been anointed as king. He wasn't yet king in the eyes of man, but he had been anointed as king by Samuel, the prophet of God.

And Jonathan recognized the purposes of God in David's life. He recognized that God had called David, and not himself, to the throne. And so, in a symbolic gesture, Jonathan gave David his royal robe.

This is the first major role of a covenant friend: to discern and recognize the purposes of God in the other person's life.

Secondly, Jonathan gave David his weapons — his sword and his bow — as if to say, "I'll fight for you."

And this is the second major role of a covenant friend: to do battle in the spiritual realm on the other person's behalf.

My Experience in Covenant Friendship
Several years ago, the Lord impressed upon me that I needed someone in my life to whom I could be accountable. Someone who I could tell anything and everything. Someone who would check up on me. Someone who would pray for me.

And not only did the Lord tell me I needed a covenant friend, but He told me who that covenant friend would be.

It was someone I didn't know too well. But I knew the Lord was speaking to me.

So if I remember correctly, I asked this person if I could take him to lunch. And I related to him how the Lord had told me that I needed a covenant friend, and that the Lord had also told me that he was the person who I should ask.

He said he needed to think about it for a week or so, and then he agreed.

When we made our covenant together, we told each other everything we could think of about ourselves — about our problems, about our hopes and our dreams, about our struggles.

And that openness and the covenant we made together granted us two things, I think — things which parallel the story of Jonathan and David very closely:

• We began to be able to discern and recognize the purposes of God in each other's life; and,
• We began to sense an authority in prayer that we hadn't known before — an authority as we took part in spiritual battle on the other person's behalf. We began to pray against evil influences in the other person's life rather than simply asking God to remove those evil influences.

After a couple of years of such a covenant friendship, he moved away to a remote town in Northern California. This was before email was prevalent, and neither of us could really afford long distance phone calls, so our relationship slowly stopped having the same depth and the same covenant nature.

I'm largely without a covenant friend at this point in my life, although there is one friendship I have now which I think may be beginning to approach that depth.

These days, with email and instant messaging, and chat rooms, I think there's a greater possibility for long-distance covenant friendships. But I think I would still recommend that you look to those in your geographical area. Above all, though, ask the Lord to reveal to you who He would choose as your covenant friend.

Covenant Friendship In Action
Let's look at covenant friendship in action. 1 Samuel 19:1-6 says this:

Now Saul told Jonathan his son and all his servants to put David to death. But Jonathan, Saul's son, greatly delighted in David. So Jonathan told David saying, "Saul my father is seeking to put you to death. Now therefore, please be on guard in the morning, and stay in a secret place and hide yourself. And I will go out and stand beside my father in the field where you are, and I will speak with my father about you; if I find out anything, then I shall tell you." Then Jonathan spoke well of David to Saul his father, and said to him, "Do not let the king sin against his servant David, since he has not sinned against you, and since his deeds have been very beneficial to you. For he took his life in his hand and struck the Philistine, and the Lord brought about a great deliverance for all Israel; you saw it and rejoiced. Why then will you sin against innocent blood, by putting David to death without a cause?" And Saul listened to the voice of Jonathan, and Saul vowed, "As the Lord lives, he shall not be put to death."

Covenant friendship in action. Jonathan places himself between David and David's enemy and, in effect, says, "Go no further." And as covenant friends, we can do the same in the lives of other people. In prayer, we can say to the enemy, "Go no further in your designs upon this person's life. You have no right to affect this person's life. The Lord rebuke you. The Lord who has chosen this one for His purposes rebuke you."

Covenant Friends Provide Protection
At the end of chapter 1 Samuel 19, Saul is pursuing David to try to kill him. And David comes to Jonathan and pours out his anguish to his covenant friend. Jonathan devises a plan by which he can let David know if, in fact, Saul wants to kill David. Jonathan sounds his father out and discovers that Saul does, in fact, want to kill David. And so Jonathan takes a young boy out to the field where David is hiding, and through a pre-arranged signal between them, Jonathan informs David of Saul's plans. And so David flees.

Again, Jonathan, as David's covenant friend, provides protection and safety for him from David's enemies. And we do the same in our covenant friendships. In prayer, we provide protection and safety for the other person from the attacks of the enemy.

Prevailing in Battle in the Spiritual Realm
1 Samuel 23:15-25 says this:

Now David became aware that Saul had come out to seek his life while David was in the wilderness of Ziph at Horesh. And Jonathan, Saul's son, arose and went to David at Horesh, and encouraged him in God. Thus he said to him, "Do not be afraid, because the hand of Saul my father shall not find you, and you will be king over Israel and I will be next to you; and Saul my father knows that also." So the two of them made a covenant before the Lord; and David stayed at Horesh while Jonathan went to his house. Then Ziphites came up to Saul at Gibeah, saying, "Is David not hiding with us in the strongholds at Horesh, on the hill of Hachilah, which is on the south of Jeshimon? Now then, O king, come down according to all the desire of your soul to do so; and our part shall be to surrender him into the king's hand." And Saul said, "May you be blessed of the Lord; for you have had compassion on me. Go now, make more sure, and investigate and see his place where his haunt is, and who has seen him there; for I am told that he is very cunning. So look, and learn about all the hiding places where he hides himself, and return to me with certainty, and I will go with you; and it shall come about if he is in the land that I will search him out among all the thousands of Judah." Then they arose and went to Ziph before Saul. Now David and his men were in the wilderness of Maon, in the Arabah to the south of Jeshimon. When Saul and his men went to seek him, they told David, and he came down to the rock and stayed in the wilderness of Maon. And when Saul heard it, he pursued David in the wilderness of Maon.

The following are some important points about this passage:

• David was afraid (we know that because Jonathan told him to not be afraid).
• Jonathan again discerns and recognizes the purposes of God in David's life. He says, "My father will not lay a hand on you. You shall be king over Israel, ...."
• Jonathan again fights in the spiritual realm on David's behalf. He encourages him in God. One translation says that Jonathan helped David to find strength in God. Another translation says that Jonathan "strengthened (David's) hand in God."
• The Hebrew word for "encouraged" or "strengthened" or "helped to find strength" is hazaq which means "to be or become strong, to strengthen, to be courageous." It can also mean "to prevail in battle." Jonathan prevailed in battle in the spiritual realm on David's behalf.

The Results of Covenant Friendship
What was the result of Jonathan's prevailing in battle on David's behalf in the spiritual realm?

To find out, let's read what David wrote at this time. Psalm 54 says this:

For the choir director; on stringed instruments. A Maskil of David, when the Ziphites came and said to Saul, "Is not David hiding himself among us?"

Save me, O God, by Thy name, and vindicate me by Thy power. Hear my prayer, O God; give ear to the words of my mouth. For strangers have risen against me, and violent men have sought my life; they have not set God before them. Selah. [I can't prove this, but I believe that before David wrote the next four verses, Jonathan came to him and "strengthened his hand in God"] Verse 4: "Behold, God is my helper; the Lord is the sustainer of my soul, He will recompense the evil to my foes; destroy them in Thy faithfulness. Willingly I will sacrifice to Thee; I will give thanks to Thy name, O Lord, for it is good. For He has delivered me from all trouble; and my eye has looked with satisfaction upon my enemies."

One translation says, "my eyes have looked in triumph on my foes."

Remember that David is still being persecuted, attacked and pursued by his enemies. Nothing has changed outwardly. But he can still say, "My eyes have looked in triumph on my foes." Outwardly, his enemies are still pursuing him. But Jonathan has come and strengthened his hand in God. Jonathan has come and prevailed in battle in the spiritual realm on David's behalf. And so, the eyes of David's heart have looked in triumph on his foes.

Do you want the eyes of your heart to be able to look in triumph on the foes of sexual temptation? You need a Jonathan who can prevail in battle in the spiritual realm on your behalf. Someone who can pray against the sexual temptations you face.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 says this:

Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up. Furthermore, if two lie down together they keep warm, but how can one be warm alone? And if one can overpower him who is alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.

Technological Weapons
Under the category of technological weapons, I'd like to talk to you about four different types of technologies which can help us in the battle against online sexual temptation: filtering software, filtered internet service providers, proxy filtering, and accountability software.

Filtering Software
This is software which is installed on the computer and which will at least theoretically not allow objectionable sites to be accessed.

Examples are NetNanny, SurfControl, We-Blocker, and CyberSitter.

They work from lists of objectionable sites which must be downloaded and updated on a regular basis (the lists are maintained through a variety of means — human staffs who surf the internet, reports from users, etc.

They can be used to block chat rooms, newsgroups, search engines, etc.

These products are good for young children, but are not appropriate for older children or adults — they tend to be too easy to get around.

Filtered Internet Service Providers
An internet service provider is a company through which a person gains internet access or gets on the internet.

Examples of filtered internet service providers are Integrity Online, Internet 4 Families, Mayberry America, PK Family (which is a Promise Keepers service), Lifeway Online (a Southern Baptist service), PaxWay (from Pax-TV), Cleanweb (from iExalt Publishers), Christian-Net, etc.

And there are lots of others — too many to list.

These also work from lists of objectionable sites which are updated by human staffs who surf the internet, reports from users, etc. The difference between these lists and those of filtering software products is that since these lists reside on the ISP's servers, they don't have to be downloaded on a regular basis.

My suggestion is that you visit FilterReview.comwhich lists a large number of filtered internet service providers, complete with reviews from users, charts about the services they offer, etc.

Some of the things you will want to know are:

• Does the service block pornography?
• Does it block hate sites?
• Does it block cult sites?
• Does it block online gambling sites?
• Does it block alternative lifestyle sites?
• Does it block free hosting sites?
• Does it block objectionable email?
• Does it block objectionable instant messenging communication?
• Does it block objectionable chat rooms?
• Does it block objectionable newsgroups?
• Does it have an access phone number in your area?

Which of these questions is important to you depends on your particular situation. You may not be tempted by gambling, so that may not be important to you. Etc., etc.

Filtered internet service providers are a good, all-around solution. They aren't perfect — some sites slip through, some emails are blocked which shouldn't be, some sites are blocked which shouldn't be, for the most part, they don't work with DSL, cable, or other broadband access solutions.

Proxy Filtering
Proxy filtering is a special kind of filtering solution which is especially good for broadband (DSL, cable, etc.) access.

Some examples include Hedgebuilders (also known as A+ Filtering), FamilyConnect, as well as a product offered by Christian-Net. And I am sure there are others as well.

You must already have internet access through an internet service provider. If you want to continue to use Earthlink, for example, you can use Proxy Filtering to protect yourself.

Accountability Software
Some examples include CovenantEyes, EyePromise (from Promise Keepers), and WinGuardian.

WinGuardian is a software package which logs user visited web sites, logs all programs opened and closed, captures all keystrokes typed into Windows programs, takes screenshot images at specified times, and can automatically email out log files for remote viewing.

It's something to consider using with your children and teenagers — if they know that you will be monitoring their internet and computer activities, they are much less likely to become involved in objectionable computer activities.

Since it captures keystrokes and takes screenshot images, it can effectively monitor chat, instant messenger conversations, etc. (things which many filters don't block).

CovenantEyes and EyePromise are software packages specifically designed to be used with accountability partners (or covenant friends, as we've called them today).

The basic idea behind these software packages is that once a week, bi-weekly, or monthly, a list of web sites you have visited is sent via email to one or two accountability partners you have chosen.

There is no way around the program. Wherever you go on the web, your accountability partner will know about it.

Both services cost $6.95 per month, but are available only for Windows 95 and greater.

One advantage to these is that they are effective for any kind of online addiction — pornography, gambling, relationships, etc.

Non-Web Tips
So far, we've basically been looking at how to deal with the issue of online pornography on the web. But the web is not the only online arena in which we are in danger of being exposed to pornography.

Email
Today, we don't have to go looking for pornography because it comes to us in our email box.

If your email address is anywhere on the web (on a website, in a guestbook entry, in a newsgroup posting, etc., etc.), it will be harvested by bulk emailers who use special software to gather email addresses off of the web. This is why most people receive unsolicited email.

Here are some tips for dealing with unsolicited email, or spam:

• Don't unsubscribe unless it's an established list. If you unsubscribe, it tells the bulk emailer that yours is a valid email address. He/she may remove you from their list, but they will sell your email address to someone else.
• Set up filters in your email software. I started out by setting up filters to place emails from my family and friends in special folders. Then I set up filters to place emails from mailing lists to which I have subscribed in special folders. Finally, I set up my filter that places all remaining email in a folder called "Possible Spam." Then when I receive email, I keep the preview feature turned off (because pornographic email sometimes displays photos). After I have downloaded all of my email, I check the Possible Spam folder and delete any email which is pornographic in nature or is just general unsolicited email (I can almost always tell by the subject line of the email if it's spam).
• If you post to a message board or newsgroup, change your email address (add "nospam"). For example, if your email address is , you might use an address of and then tell people in the body of your post to remove the "nospam" part if they want to reply to you via email.
• Consider using multiple, free email accounts and not posting to message boards and newsgroups with your primary email address.
• If you have a website and need your email address to appear, you can encrypt your email address so that it can't be harvested by bulk emailers.

Instant Messaging
The major instant messaging applications (ICQ, AOL Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger) have filtering capabilities and so you should experiment with setting those filters up.

In my personal experience, ICQ is the worst (it has the most pornographic spammers using it) and doesn't seem to respond to filtering.

Conclusion
I will conclude this white paper by citing the same passage of Scripture with which we began. Proverbs 4:23 says, "Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life."

The weapons which we have discussed in this white paper are crucial to us being able to watch over our hearts with all diligence in the realm of online pornography.

We must resist sexual temptation on the basis of who we are in Christ and the purpose for which we were created. We must seek out covenant friends who will join us in battle in the spiritual realm. And we must take advantage of the technological tools which are available to us to help us avoid being exposed to online pornography.

We believe there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We believe this God, in love, created the universe. We believe He also created man and woman in His image and established them in a way of life which brought joy, peace, and satisfaction to the fullest. This way of life included boundaries of lifestyle they could not cross without losing that joy, peace, and satisfaction.

We believe that the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, crossed those lifestyle boundaries and forfeited the essence of a complete life. We believe that mankind as a whole has suffered the consequences of that sin and that, without restoration of life, men and women today are doomed to live without true joy, peace, and satisfaction.

We believe that men and women who have not returned to relationship with God in this life will suffer eternal death and separation from God and that such men and women experience a foreshadowing of that death in the quality of their lives today.

We believe that God is passionately in love with mankind as a whole and with us as individuals.

We believe that God’s love for us is so deep and so intense that, in order to restore us to fulness of life, God became a man and dwelt among us as the man Jesus.

We believe that Jesus lived among us, that He was fully God and fully man, that He died on a cross to take the punishment for our sins, rose from the dead to impart His life to us, and ascended to heaven that the Holy Spirit, the One who comes alongside us and encourages us, might be sent to live within us.

We believe that restoration to fulness of life and deliverance from future punishment for our sins are the possession of all those who place their faith in Christ, casting themselves fully upon Him and upon His death as their only hope for eternal life in God’s presence.

We believe that Jesus will return to gather to Himself in heaven those who have cast themselves upon His sacrifice, both the living and the dead, and that when He returns, it will be without reference to sin, since He took the punishment for our sins once-for-all and declared at the moment of His death that His work had been finished.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

There Must Be More To Life Than This
We were all created to be loved. The "makeup" of our hearts is such that we are not complete until we are living in relationship with one who loves us with a perfect love.

A perfect love is one which doesn't demand anything in return, but loves you only for you. Not because you do good things. Not because you act correctly. Not because you know the right people. Not because you're rich. Not because you were born into the right family. But just because of you. No strings attached.

No one on earth is capable of loving us with such a perfect love. Everyone on earth who loves us (our parents, our siblings, our spouse, our children, our friends), no matter how sincere they are, all want something in return for their love. They want to be loved in return. They want our companionship. They want to be treated well by us. They want access to our things or our money. The problem is that since we are not perfect, we can't always give them what they want. And so their love, not receiving what it demands in return, is fickle. Sometimes we are loved, sometimes we are not.

This leaves us incomplete, longing for something greater and more pure. This longing for a greater, purer love lies behind the feeling we often have that "something is not quite right;" that "this can't be how life is supposed to be;" that "there must be more to life than this."

The famous French philosopher Blaise Pascal recognized this incompleteness when he wrote, "There is a vacuum in the heart of every person that cannot be filled by any created thing."

Because we are not living in relationship with one who loves us with this perfect love, we go through life largely without meaning, without fulfillment, without satisfaction, without a lasting joy.

If this describes your life today, we have good news for you!

A Bible Verse To Ponder
Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light.
- Matthew 11:28-30

A Love Beyond Your Wildest Dreams
Deep in your heart is a desire to come home to the love you were created for. To return to the passion of God's embrace. To yield to His infinite affection. To be immersed into His love which is so deep and so strong that it cannot be comprehended. To be baptized into unbounded gentleness. Consistent and ever-faithful mercy. Tenderness which is relentless and constantly-pursuing. Lavish, extravagant, and unrestrained kindness. This is God's love for you. A love which is passionate in the purest sense of the word. A love which has no limits, a love which is totally unselfish, a love beyond your wildest dreams.

God's greatest desire is to have a close, intimate relationship with you. He desires to be your closest friend, to lavish His love upon you. Intimate friendship is His goal. He wants you to know how deeply you are loved. He wants you to experience His love, and He wants to experience your love for Him (although He will go on loving you whether or not you ever love Him). He wants to converse and dialogue with you - the way friends do.

A well-known philosopher of the 4th century A.D., Saint Augustine, wrote of this desire: "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you."

A Bible Verse To Ponder
See, how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God!
- 1 John 3:1

Separated From God
Although God's greatest desire is to have a close, intimate relationship with us, there is a barrier which stands between us and the full experience of His love: our unbelief. We are separated from Him because of our unbelief.

At the beginning of time, the first man and woman rejected relationship with God in exchange for the promise of being like God and thus being independent from God. Throughout history, mankind has largely reinforced that decision and continued in a stance of independence from God.

This core sin of rejecting relationship with God is what the Bible calls unbelief. In the biblical sense, unbelief is more than a lack of mental assent to a set of facts or doctrines. It is a lack of trust in God, an ongoing desire for independence from Him.

It doesn't stop there, though. The core sin of unbelief leads to all sorts of self-destructive behavior: greed, dishonesty, envy, gossip, arrogance, slander, boasting, lust, theft, murder, anger, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, etc. These (as well as other destructive attitudes and activities) the Bible calls sins.

These activities and attitudes, contrary to what some believe, were not arbitrarily determined to be sinful by God. Instead, God knew that these behaviors and attitudes were harmful for us, that they would ultimately destroy us. And so because of His great love for us, God pleads with us to not engage in these destructive behaviors. He has memorialized His pleas in His laws and has told us that violating these laws will result in self-destruction.

Both the sin of unbelief and the individual sins which result from unbelief have consequences. The Bible says that the wages (or consequences) of sin is death. Spiritual death is the inevitable result of our sin. In biblical terms, death refers to separation from God. From the moment we are born, we are on a path toward that spiritual death and destructiveness. We are separated from God because of our unbelief.

What makes our plight so desperate is that because of the introduction of sin (unbelief) into the world by the first man and woman, all of us have been born with this desire for independence as our natural state. We cannot, on our own, suddenly become dependent upon God because independence from Him is at the core of our nature. We are powerless to solve our problem.

A Bible Verse To Ponder
And seeing the multitudes, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and downcast like sheep without a shepherd.
- Matthew 9:36

God Has Reconciled Himself To Us
God was not willing, however, to leave us in our desperate state. His lavish love caused Him to take action.

In response to our plight, God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus lived on earth for thirty years before beginning an itinerant ministry among the people of Israel.

During the three-and-a-half years of His ministry, Jesus taught people about living in relationship with God, healed the sick, performed miracles, and demonstrated God's passionate love to all with whom He came in contact.

Although it was commonly believed in His day that only holy and righteous people, born into the right segments of society, could have any sort of relationship with God, Jesus taught instead that God's love was available to all, regardless of their lifestyle, background, or standing in society. The Jewish religious leaders of His day were threatened by Jesus and His ministry.

The conflict between Jesus and those religious leaders finally culminated in His crucifixion. The Jewish leaders conspired with one of Jesus' disciples, Judas, to deliver Him into the hands of the Roman ruler of the Jewish province, Pontius Pilate. Pilate, although he tried to claim no responsibility for Jesus' death, presided over His crucifixion.

While there were several parties involved in Jesus' death - Judas, the Jewish religious leaders, Pontius Pilate, the Roman army - ultimately, it was our sin and the sin of all mankind which led to Jesus' death. It was God's plan from the beginning of time for Jesus to die for our sins.

Christ died on a cross to take our place. He died instead of us. The wages of our sin is death, but Jesus took the inevitable penalty and consequence of our sin upon Himself.

Not only did Jesus take the penalty for our sin. When He rose from the dead three days later, He also completed the disarming of sin and its power over us. Remember how we said that from our birth, independence from God is at the core of our nature and that we are powerless to solve our problem? On the cross and through His resurrection, Jesus broke the power of that independent spirit.

This leaves us in a place where we are free to choose to renounce our unbelief and place our trust in God. We are free to cast our lives upon the death of Jesus, believing His sacrifice to be our only hope for entering into a close, intimate friendship with God.

God is not angry with us. The Bible says that He has reconciled Himself to us. That means that from His standpoint, the barrier that separated us from Him - our sin and unbelief - has been eliminated. From His standpoint, there is no longer anything between us that would keep us from having the close, intimate friendship He has always wanted with us. He has taken the first step toward restoring our relationship with Him.

And yet, it remains to be seen whether or not we will reciprocate, and take the next step and reconcile ourselves to Him. While God has made clear His desire for relationship with us, it is up to us to accept His invitation.

A Bible Verse To Ponder
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.
- John 3:16

We Can Be Reconciled To God
If you have a desire to be reconciled to God, or just have questions about what you've just read, we would encourage you to contact us. We would love to make your acquaintance and talk with you about the greatest decision you could ever make in your life.

Bible Verses To Ponder
If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.
- Romans 10:9
Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
- 2 Corinthians 5:17

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Immigrants or Natives?
I'd like to begin this white paper by presenting a hypothetical situation. Suppose that I am a missionary and that I've been sent to a country whose population is made up of two primary segments:

• the majority of people are part of the native population; and,
• there is also a relatively small group of immigrants or expatriate workers.

Each segment of the population has a very different culture. They have different traditions; their social systems are different; they communicate differently. For a variety of reasons, many of those in the immigrant population are nearing retirement age, and as they reach retirement age, they leave the country. And not long after I arrive in the country, the government, controlled by natives, reaches a decision to stop approving new visas for immigrants. And so the immigrant population begins to decrease over time. The native population, on the other hand, is increasing over time as new children are born. The native population is taking up a greater and greater percentage of the overall population, while the immigrant population is taking up a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall population.

Let's further suppose that although I was sent to this country to reach the native population with the gospel, I am more comfortable in the immigrant culture. Their traditions are my traditions. Their social systems are familiar to me. I am accustomed to their methods and patterns of communication. And because I am more comfortable in immigrant culture, I begin to direct more and more of my efforts towards reaching the immigrant population, and I begin to spend less and less time trying to reach the native population.

I hold evangelistic crusades, but I do so in areas of the country dominated by the immigrant culture. My messages are sprinkled with allusions to things that only make sense to immigrants. I start a church which caters to immigrants rather than natives. The music played at evangelistic crusades and in church services is music which is familiar to immigrants. I speak in the mother tongue of the immigrants rather than in the native language.

Am I effectively reaching the country to which I have been sent? Why not?

If my objective is to effectively declare the gospel in a country and disciple a nation, it doesn't make sense, does it, for me to devote all my energies to reach a diminishing, minority segment of the country's population while ignoring the dominant, growing section of the population.

Leonard Sweet, the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey and an acknowledged expert on postmodernism, says that if you were born before 1962, you are an immigrant. Today's culture, with its emphasis on technology, is not your home. You're uncomfortable in a new place. You're learning a new language (gigabyte, megahertz, download, spam, etc.). You're learning new customs (email, surfing the web, shopping online, networking, chatting, linking, blogging, googling).

According to Sweet, if you were born after 1962, you're a native. You're at home in a new world of technology. You are comfortable utilizing new methods and patterns of communication. Your culture is inextricably entwined with the internet and the new digital arena.

It should be noted that Sweet admits that this distinction between immigrants and natives is somewhat artificial. There are people born before 1962 who have the characteristics of "natives" and there are people born after 1962 who seem more like "immigrants". But in general, it is a helpful distinction.

Like the mythical country I told you about earlier, natives are increasing in their dominance in today's culture. Listen to these examples Sweet cites:

• The "Love Bug," a computer virus which wreaked havoc with government agencies, corporations and individuals, causing billions of dollars in damage, was created by two college students living in the slums of Manila in the Philippines.
• In February 2000, "denial of service" attacks were launched against Amazon.com, Yahoo! and CNN.com by a 15-year-old Canadian teenager.
• In early 2000, Cameron Johnson started his second company — SurfingPrizes.com — which, at last report, averages $15,000 per day in revenue. At the time he founded the company, Cameron was 15 years old.
• In 2001, 26,000 credit card numbers (including some owned by Bill Gates) were stolen by two Welsh teenagers.
• Michael Furdyk and an Australian chat room friend he had never met in person started a company called MyDesktop.com. Within a few months, it was making $30,000 per month. Michael and his friend were 17 and 16, respectively.
• The main rival to Microsoft Windows, called Linux, was originally developed by a college student from Helsinki, Finland.

We live in a world where children in some of the poorest places on the planet can do the harm that only governments and generals could do in the past. We live in a culture where, for the first time in history, children don't need authority figures in order to access information — information is available at their fingertips. We live in a culture where, in many ways, children are the authority figures and adults need their help.

Sweet asks an insightful question: Who is the most adept in your house at programming the VCR? Who is the most computer-literate?

Many of us are immigrants in a foreign culture which makes us uncomfortable.

If you're an immigrant, you probably feel most comfortable in protective enclaves of people who share a similar cultural background and customs. And if you're an immigrant within the church, that creates a problem, because immigrants who withdraw into a cultural ghetto will never impact a culture of natives.

Which group of people (immigrants or natives) is growing in number, and which group is decreasing in number? By definition, the number of natives is growing and that group of people is taking up a greater and greater percentage of the world's population. And immigrants are taking up a smaller and smaller percentage of the world's population as some among their number pass away.

In the Fall of 2001, the average age of a Protestant pastor was just under 50 years old — firmly ensconced in immigrant culture. And so the leadership of today's churches are largely immigrants working to reach a native culture.

If we are immigrants, God is sending us as missionaries to a foreign culture of natives in our own country. Their language is different than ours. Their customs are different than ours. Their methods and patterns of communication are different than ours. The important question is this: "Will we learn the language of the native culture? Will we learn the customs of the native culture? Will we learn the methods and patterns of communication used by the native culture? And will we use that knowledge to contextualize the message of Jesus so that it can be understood and seen as relevant by natives?"

Will we put the new wine of the gospel into new wineskins? Or will we attempt to contain the new wine of the gospel within the old wineskins of cultural parameters with which we are comfortable, all the while ignoring natives or unwittingly presenting ourselves to them as irrelevant?

Foundational Assumptions
The objective of this white paper is to investigate the various ways in which a church's website can be targeted toward unbelievers in a church's local community, particularly the growing population of "natives" in a local community.

When I think about internet evangelism in general, I start with a few foundational assumptions (and these don't apply just to church websites — they apply to internet evangelism in general).

Foundational Assumption #1:
The segment of people we are discussing in this white paper is increasingly at home on the internet, and the internet is more and more becoming a primary means of communication for the emerging generations we are trying to reach with the gospel.

If nothing else, this is true because of simple mathematics — younger generations (natives) are completely at home on the internet and use the internet as their primary form of communication. As older generations pass on and current generations make up a greater and greater percentage of the population, it's only natural that the internet will become more and more central to the lives of those we are trying to win for Christ.

If we want to communicate with a generation of "natives," we will need to be "on" the internet, actively communicating our faith through their primary mode of communication.

The good news is that people are already "on" the internet, looking for spiritual information. More than 3 million people currently surf the web every day for spiritual purposes. One in every four Americans has searched for spiritual information on the web. According to a 2001 report, more people use the web for spiritual purposes than for online banking, online investments, or online dating services.

Since an increasing percentage of the world's population is "on" the internet and is using it for more and more of their communication, doesn't it make sense that it is becoming increasingly true that the church must have a "presence" throughout the internet? And having a "presence" throughout the internet involves a lot more than putting up a website. A website is only one facet of a well-rounded Christian approach to the online world. Having a "presence" throughout the internet involves believers spending time in chat rooms, on message boards, using instant messaging applications, participating on email lists, blogging, etc.

We are called to take the gospel to the marketplace and, in many ways, today's marketplace is the internet.

• Over 934 million people are currently "on the internet."
• One out of every 4.5 people in the world has been online. One out of every 1.6 people in the United States has internet access.
• 38 first-time users join the net every minute in the United States alone.
• In Peru, for the price of a postage stamp, you can get 15 minutes in front of a computer in an internet café and log on to a free email account and surf the web.
• Computers are now outselling television sets in most developed countries (even when handheld devices are not counted).
• Current email volumes exceed the delivery volumes of the U.S. Post Office.
• Every second, 36 new web pages come online (just to put that in perspective, in the United States, there is a birth every 8 seconds).
• Over 5,700 instant messages are exchanged every second (that's 15 billion messages every month).
• More than ninety percent of children under the age of 13 regularly use a computer at school.
• Ninety-two percent of college freshmen have internet access.
• Sixty-two percent of Americans use the web to seek out spiritual information.
• The second most popular topic in Google's approximately 200 million searches per day involve questions regarding God and Jesus Christ (2/3 of those searches come from outside the United States and in 88 different languages).

In the first century, Paul and the apostolic band aggressively took the gospel to the marketplace and declared it fearlessly in the midst of the native culture, often using the language and traditions of the culture as a backdrop for the message of truth.

One of my favorite quotes is by Scottish minister George Macleod, who founded the nondenominational Iona Community in Glasgow in the 1930's:

I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap, on a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew and Latin and Greek, at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble, because that is where He died and that is what He died about. And that is where church people should be and what church people should be about.

If we don't take the gospel to the marketplace of the internet, we risk being seen as irrelevant by the "native" culture, by today's postmodern generation.

Foundational Assumption #2:
The most appropriate target audience for a church's website is made up of unbelievers.

When we think in terms of targeting a church's website toward unbelievers, it will be helpful for us if we first take a step back and realize that many of our assumptions about our world are unfortunately incorrect.

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.

If people today really do care about the stories of other people, about relationships, and about the possibility of unmerited love, our websites should have as their priority helping them discover how our churches can meet those needs.

Foundational Assumption #3:
Authentic Christian community is the foundation of all effective outreach.

In John 17:21-23, Jesus prayed, ".... that they may all be one, even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one. I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me."

According to these verses, if Jesus' disciples are one, the world will believe that the Father has sent Jesus. If Jesus' disciples are perfected in unity, the world will know that the Father sent Jesus and that the Father loves them as He loves Jesus.

The converse is true as well. If Jesus' disciples are not one, then the world will not believe that the Father has sent Jesus (this also implies that the world will not believe in Jesus' mission — the world will not believe that Jesus died for their sins). If Jesus' disciples are not perfected in unity, then the world will not know that the Father sent Jesus and that the Father loves them as He loves Jesus.

This means that the environment of an authentic Christian community is required for effective evangelism and outreach. A conversion which takes place without a prior experiential knowledge of authentic Christian community must be considered suspect in its depth and permanence.

If that premise is true, what does it say about internet evangelism?

Foundational Assumption #4:
Internet evangelism is only effective when it is creating and taking advantage of opportunities for conversation between believers and unbelievers and when such online conversations, whenever possible, lead to face-to-face conversations.

And so when we look at the task of developing a church website, we need to look at it with that question in mind: how can we develop the site in such a way that it will create and take advantage of opportunities for conversations between believers and unbelievers?

An Example Of A Church Website Focused On Outreach
In the final section of this white paper, I would like to point you to a church website which was developed with the contents of the previous discussion as its foundational philosophy. Unfortunately, this website is no longer active, but we will use screenshots to demonstrate the various aspects of the site as it existed when it was an active site.

The church whose website we will refer to below, Christian Life Center, is a contemporary church located in the heart of Santa Cruz County, a region with a population of about 250,000 people and a relatively low population of evangelical Christians (we estimate the percentage of born-again Christians in the county at 17 percent). It is a very postmodern area of the world.

When the church first approached me and asked me to develop a site for them. I told them I would be happy to do it, but that I wanted to talk to them about my philosophy of church websites before getting started.

Somewhere along the line, I had become convinced that most church websites were missing a great opportunity. In trying to provide resources for members, we were failing to use the web to present the community of believers to non-Christians in an effective manner. I told the senior pastor that most of my friends at my day job thought of the Christian church in less-than-favorable terms: "I have to wake up early on a Sunday morning, get dressed in uncomfortable clothes, get my kids dressed to go to a place they've never been instead of playing, drive across town, walk into a building where the only people who say 'Hi' are the people at the door and the minister (and it's their job to say Hi), turn my kids over to a stranger (!), be asked for money, have to stand up and introduce myself to a hundred or more people I've never seen, and then hear someone tell me what's wrong with me for half an hour."

I shared with the senior pastor that I thought the best use of a church website would be to target it toward non-Christians and address some of those misconceptions. Over time, the concept grew in our hearts to a point where we felt that the primary purpose of the church's website should be to intrigue the lost, so that they would be motivated to make contact with real people who could then share the Gospel with them in face-to-face encounters. From this germ of an idea grew a system of online profiles and interviews with church members designed to present the community of believers to non-Christians who have similar life experiences and interests to those we profile on the site. The result was, I think, a very non-traditional church website.

In targeting unbelievers, we attempted to stay true to three basic principles:

First, we wanted to present people and their stories more than information (about programs, service times, etc.). Our immediate goal was not that people would see the website and think, "I need to commit my life to Jesus — I'm going to do that right now." Instead our immediate goal was that people would see the website and think, "That's not at all what I expected from a church. I think I want to find out more about these people." — and then we wanted unbelievers to come encounter the community of believers at the church's gatherings (perhaps after being put in contact with people in the congregation). This approach would serve to facilitate conversations between believers and unbelievers around similar interests and common life experiences.

To accomplish this, we set up a page called "What To Expect." When people click through to that page, one of the first things they will see is a section entitled "Who Will I Meet." Under that section are links to five person-specific sections of the website (a man who has hepatitis C, a man who is a champion race car driver, a man who is an actor, a teenage girl who has leukemia, and a man who is a local musician and former Hindu).

Each of these sections included a short profile, an interview transcript, a page of related web resources, and a link to a page describing the "community" within the church for which this person had the greatest passion.

Our hope with this was to be able to promote these person-specific "bridge" sections through search engine positioning, geographically targeted banner ads, geographically targeted email campaigns, postcard mailings, newspaper ads, etc. and thus draw people to the church through presenting people within the church who have similar life experiences and interests to particular unbelievers in our area. We also provided a "tell-a-friend" form for each person's profile so that folks in the congregation could forward the webpage addresses to their unbelieving friends who might have similar interests and/or life experiences.

Secondly, we wanted to avoid church language / Christianese. I think we were fairly successful at doing that. Some of the person-specific sections ended up with more religious language than I would have liked, but for the most part, I think we were able to minimize it.

Thirdly, we wanted to answer some of the questions we feel most unbelievers would have about a church. I think we did a fairly good job of that. On the "What To Expect" page, we just listed what we think some of those questions might be and tried to answer them honestly and in a straightforward manner.

Here are the questions we asked on the "What To Expect" page.

• Do I Have To Stand Up In Front Of People?
• Do I Have To Wake Up Early?
• Do You Want My Money?
• Do I Have To Dress Up?
• Do I Have To Turn My Kids Over To A Stranger?

Conclusion
Using our admittedly somewhat artificial distinction between "immigrants" and "natives," we can say that there are roughly four groups of people in our world today:

1. Immigrants who are believers
2. Immigrants who are unbelievers
3. Natives who are believers
4. Natives who are unbelievers

The first two segments use the internet primarily as a means of obtaining information. The last two segments use the internet primarily as a means of facilitating relationships and community.

The vast majority of church websites are targeted toward immigrants who are believers — these websites provide information (about service schedules, doctrinal beliefs, locations, staff members, programs, etc.) to those who have already become a part of the local church. Secondarily, these websites also provide information to immigrants who are unbelievers (by including propositional versions of the plan of salvation - here are the steps to follow to become a Christian), with the reasoning seemingly being that we ought to include a plan of salvation on the off-chance that an unbeliever might stop by our website.

Immigrants also make up the segment of society which is most likely to be born again, the most churched, and which has the most exposure to the gospel. And so, the majority of church websites today are dedicated to providing static information to those who are the most familiar with the message of the gospel and the Christian life.

There are very few church websites which are targeted toward natives, and even fewer which are targeted toward natives who are unbelievers. But these emerging generations represent the segment of society which is the least Christian, the most unchurched, has the least exposure to the gospel, but is the most likely segment to be "searching for the meaning of life."

My prayer is that many, many church website committees, webmasters, pastoral staff members, board members, etc. will begin to catch the vision for a cyberspace version of Romans 15:20-21: "And thus I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, so that I would not build on another man's foundation; but as it is written, 'THEY WHO HAD NO NEWS OF HIM SHALL SEE, AND THEY WHO HAVE NOT HEARD SHALL UNDERSTAND.'"

The opportunity which the internet presents to us is crucial for evangelism in a postmodern world. If the church fails to use the internet in an effective manner, she risks being seen as irrelevant by emerging generations.

We must aggressively seize the opportunity and establish an effective presence in the midst of today's marketplace so that we can effectively declare the gospel to the internet generation.

A church's website in today's postmodern world should focus on people rather than programs, avoid religious language, and answer the questions most unbelievers would have about a church. And unlike websites targeted toward immigrants (which are primarily used to provide information), websites targeted toward emerging generations should focus primarily on creating opportunities for conversation and relationship (both online and offline) between believers and unbelievers.

The Historic Opportunity Facing The Church
Today's church is faced with a historic opportunity. The internet gives us the ability to present the gospel to untold millions of people who have never committed their lives to Christ.

The opportunity which has been presented to us is, in many ways, not unlike the opportunity faced by the first-century church.

The First-Century Church
The first-century church often used a particular strategy to spread the gospel. And that strategy took advantage of the circumstances and the technology of the day.

Walter Wilson (to whom I am indebted for many of the thoughts and concepts in this introduction), in his excellent book The Internet Church, describes the circumstances which God had orchestrated to facilitate the spread of the gospel in the first century.

The Roman Empire had built a series of roads to enable them to quickly deploy their armies throughout the empire. Koiné Greek had become the common language throughout the empire. And the widespread use of writing had become the cutting-edge technology of the day.

The church's strategy was to use all of those "technological developments" to spread the gospel.

While the Roman Empire built their road system to allow their armies to move quickly, Christian missionaries took advantage of that road system to spread the gospel.

They would travel the roads from city to city, and when they reached a city, they would very often go to the "agora," the marketplace - the location in each city where the majority of the residents, as well as the community's most influential thinkers, gathered on a regular basis to obtain information and for social interaction. And it was there, in the midst of the "agora," that Christian missionaries would declare the gospel, using the common language of Koiné Greek.

And then the apostles employed written communication in the form of letters or epistles to encourage and teach existing believers. And these letters were delivered to churches via the Roman system of roads.¹

Today's Opportunity
Today, the church is faced with a similar historic opportunity.

In many ways, English is becoming a worldwide language. It is the language of international business and economics.

Secondly, in many ways, it is no longer necessary to use roads or other physical means of travel to reach other parts of the world. Today, the "information superhighway" provides the means by which we can "travel" throughout the world.

Thirdly, the cutting-edge technology of the day, the internet, provides us with a means of communication to reach the entire world.²

Finally, the "agora" of today is in many ways no longer a physical place and is much vaster than the first-century agora.

The internet (consisting primarily of the World Wide Web, email, usenet newsgroups, chatrooms, and instant messaging) is the new "agora," the "place" where an increasing number of people, and certainly where some of the world's most influential people, gather.

The internet is a "place" where people come together to:

• buy and sell;
• exchange ideas and philosophies;
• discuss political and social issues; and,
• access a wide range of information.

The following statistics demonstrate the fact that the internet is fast becoming the "agora" of the modern day (we should keep in mind that statistics concerning the internet are out-of-date the moment they are released; these statistics are included only for purposes of illustration - we don't make any claims to perfect accuracy):

• Over 934 million people are currently "on the internet."
• One out of every 4.5 people in the world has been online. One out of every 1.6 people in the United States has internet access.
• 38 new users join the internet every minute in the United States alone.
• In Peru, for the price of a postage stamp, you can get 15 minutes in front of a computer in an internet café and log on to a free email account and surf the web.
• Computers are now outselling television sets in most developed countries (even when handheld devices are not counted).
• Current email volumes exceed the delivery volumes of all post offices in the world combined.
• Every second, nearly 36 individual web pages come online (just to put that in perspective, in the United States, there is a birth every 8 seconds).
• Over 5,700 instant messages are exchanged every second (that's 1.5 billion instant messages every month).
• More than ninety percent of children under the age of 13 regularly use a computer at school.
• Eighty-six percent of American students have gone online, compared to 59 percent of the general population.
• Ninety-two percent of college freshmen have internet access.
• Sixty-two percent of Americans use the web to seek out spiritual information.
• The second most popular topic in Google's approximately 200 million searches per day involve questions regarding God and Jesus Christ (2/3 of those searches come from outside the United States and in 88 different languages).

Wilson writes this of the opportunity which has been presented to us:

This is just the beginning of a wrenching change that is racing throughout the world. The term used to describe this change is radical discontinuity - change so fast that we have no explanation for it. If you think that all of this comes out of Silicon Valley, you're on the wrong track. This is not about human inventions or creative schemes. These developments are about something much bigger and far more dramatic. In fact these events are not about technology at all - they are about the Great Commission. Change this big is being orchestrated by God, not by man.

God is doing something big, and we had best be clearheaded about what is going on around us. The church is in the information business, and we should not be surprised that God has raised up information technology to communicate His Word to the entire world. Christians again must travel the network, only this time it is electronic. This time it is the information superhighway.³

From a Silicon Valley perspective, we think we're changing history with our technology, but nothing could be further from the truth. From a Christian perspective, God is doing something historic, and we need to pay serious attention to the tools He is giving us. There is no doubt he intends for us to use them to spread His Word.⁴

Today, the church has been given the opportunity to travel the world via the internet and declare the gospel in the midst of today's marketplace. The internet is therefore a core component of what the church's strategy should be to reach the world with the gospel.

Various Methods of Outreach
There has been much discussion of late among Christian thinkers about how best to use the internet (websites, email, chat rooms, instant messaging, etc.) for evangelism and outreach to unbelievers.

Various methods are often discussed, including evangelistic websites, frequenting chat rooms, sending email, etc.

While various methods of internet evangelism are discussed, however, we often forget a foundational biblical principle of evangelism which is just as crucial for internet evangelism as it is for more traditional methods of outreach.

Biblical Principles of Evangelism
According to the New Testament, authentic Christian community is the foundation of effective evangelism and outreach.

In John 17:21-23, Jesus prayed, "....that they may all be one, even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one. I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me."

According to these verses, if Jesus' disciples are one, the world will believe that the Father has sent Jesus. If Jesus' disciples are perfected in unity, the world will know that the Father sent Jesus and that the Father loves them as He loves Jesus.

The converse is true. If Jesus' disciples are not one, then the world will not believe that the Father sent Jesus (this also implies that the world will not believe in Jesus' mission - the world will not believe that Jesus died for their sins).

If Jesus' disciples are not perfected in unity, then the world will not know that the Father sent Jesus and that the Father loves them as He loves Jesus.

This means that the environment of an authentic Christian community is required for effective evangelism and outreach. A conversion which takes place without a prior experiential knowledge of authentic Christian community must be considered suspect in its depth and permanence.

The Challenge Which Faces Us
If it's true that the internet should be a core component of the church's strategy to reach the world with the gospel, and if it's also true that the environment of an authentic Christian community is required for effective evangelism and outreach, those two facts beg the following question: how can the internet be used for evangelism and outreach while maintaining an environment of authentic Christian community?

To answer this question, we make two foundational assumptions - that evangelism is at its best:

• when it is local (at most, county-based); and,
• when it places unbelievers in ongoing contact with more than one local believer with a vital faith.

These are the core concepts behind what is sometimes called "oikos evangelism" with "oikos" being the Greek word for "household." It has been increasingly recognized by church growth theorists that the primary method of evangelism reflected in the New Testament and the most effective form of evangelism today is one in which believers reach out to the people who make up their "oikos" - their family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, etc., and that the message of the gospel spreads through these small networks consisting of believers and unbelievers who have ongoing contact and relationship with each other.

Michael Green, author of the foundational work Evangelism in the Early Church, agrees that the oikos, "consisting of blood relations, slaves, clients and friends, was one of the bastions of Graeco-Roman society. Christian missionaries made a deliberate point of gaining whatever households they could as lighthouses .... from which the Gospel could illuminate the surrounding darkness."

Andrew Careaga, in his book E-vangelism, adds the following insights:

For many Christians, evangelism has become institutionalized, impersonal, and far removed from our everyday lives. We tend to think of evangelism as a professional ministry - the duty of the pastor or select lay leaders in our church, people with "the gift." With our culture's emphasis on bigness - huge, evangelistic extravaganzas, big-name preachers, and mega-churches - we sometimes forget that many people come to know Christ not through the efforts of superstar evangelists, but because of personal contact with caring and devoted Christian friends.

Building relationships with people - one to one - is the New Testament model for evangelism. As pastor, evangelist, and missionary Tom Stebbins notes, the majority of early Christians were influenced by those in their "networks of trust relationships," in which the gospel is presented by someone the person already knows and trusts. With this approach, the gospel can be shared in an unhurried manner, and the witness' lifestyle, already known to the non-believer, adds credibility to the message.⁵

How can "oikos evangelism" take place in the context of the internet, which affords us unprecedented breadth of communication, but which also can often serve as a barrier or impediment to authentic relationship?*

How can we take advantage of the cutting-edge technology we have been given and yet remain faithful to the biblical call to authentic community as the foundation of effective outreach? Are the technology and the biblical call mutually exclusive?

How can our two foundational assumptions be maintained in the context of internet evangelism? How can internet evangelism be local (at most, county-based), and how can internet evangelism be used to place unbelievers in ongoing contact with more than one local believer with a vital faith?

This is our challenge - to use the internet to place an individual unbeliever in close contact with several believers with a vital faith who live in the same county as the unbeliever, and to repeat that facilitation of contact numerous times.

The Solution to The Challenge
The solution to the challenge of how to use the internet for evangelism and outreach while maintaining an environment of authentic Christian community lies in an enhancement of a concept in internet evangelism which is growing in popularity - community websites with an evangelistic focus.

Tony Whitaker of The Web Evangelism Guide describes the concept effectively:

Community pages are the amazing strategy for online outreach which very few people are yet using. The concept is to create a site based on the local community - town, local area/county, state, even a small country. The site must offer the best secular links for the community in a range of categories. It must be a genuinely useful resource at this level. But it also contains appropriate Christian links in various categories. The more comprehensive it is, the more that people in the area will use it as their one-stop local neighborhood site, maybe setting it as a 'start page' in their browsers, and become frequent return visitors.

The whole strategy is based on having secular links which really are well-chosen and useful. A good site based on this strategy could become the definitive resource for a town or area - thereby getting potentially thousands of hits a day. The Christian links are there when people wish to look at them, and precisely because they are not preachy and in your face, they have credibility. The page should not 'look' Christian at all.

There are many other creative ways that a Community Portal could genuinely serve people in its local area and build popularity:

• Feature short stories from local writers
• Showcase work of local photographers
• Children's pages and competitions
• Online games
• Chat rooms and bulletin boards on specified topics
• Host announcement pages for local organizations if they don't have their own pages
• Sales, wants, and swaps bulletin board
• Two-way email discussion lists on matters of local interest⁶

The enhancement to this concept which we anticipate implementing is a system to facilitate contact between believers and unbelievers in a particular locality, which, if our assumptions are correct, is crucial for the effectiveness of internet evangelism.

We need websites which will draw general traffic (not just believers), and will create interest among unbelievers in the stories of real people who are believers, and which will then facilitate contact between unbelievers and believers.

A Proposal
We propose the development of thousands of county-based websites dedicated to presenting the gospel to unbelievers by facilitating contact between local believers and unbelievers with similar interests and life experiences in their counties. Such contact will be facilitated primarily through the presentation of hundreds of profiles of local believers, corresponding to various categories of interest.

These websites will draw traffic through becoming the de facto web-based resource for residents of their county. This will be accomplished by featuring a comprehensive set of links to websites of particular interest to county residents, a county-wide calendar of events, local news items of interest to families, a classified advertisement system, etc. The sites will include links to the websites of local businesses, schools, churches, youth organizations, community organizations, family resources, senior resources, government agencies, employment resources, entertainment options, etc.

In many ways, these websites will be "Yahoo!-like" portals for their particular counties.

Through their comprehensive sets of links, as well as ongoing marketing activities such as search engine positioning, online and print advertising, word of mouth, etc., these websites will draw an increasing number of visitors. The goal will be for these county-based portals to become the web-based resources to which their county's residents turn first for information on their county.

These portals will then intrigue those visitors who do not know Christ by presenting online profiles of hundreds of vital believers living within their respective counties. These online profiles will include:

• life summaries;
• interview transcripts which will focus on the believers' interests as well as their testimonies (presented in a tasteful, non-preaching manner since our initial objective will not beconversion but a face-to-face introduction of unbelievers to believers);
• photographs; and,
• collections of favorite web resources which will correspond to various subjects and interest categories which will appeal to Santa Cruz County residents.

To see an example of such a profile, visit a portion of a church website which unfortunately is no longer active, being sure to explore the first three links of the "Find Out More" menu.

The idea will be to present an engaging profile of each believer which will include information on their interests and life experiences (auto racing, surfing, cancer, music, art, hepatitis c, etc.), but which will also include a tasteful presentation of their testimony and how their relationship with Jesus integrates with their interests and life experiences.

Introductions to believers to be profiled will be obtained through relationships with the pastors of local churches. These profiles will also be made available (through syndication technology) to the churches of profiled believers for use on their individual church websites.

Each county portal will enable website visitors to contact the people who have been profiled on the website through the use of email and instant messaging technology, thus facilitating face-to-face contact between unbelievers and believers with similar interests and life experiences. Interested unbelievers may also be referred to specific Christian support groups when appropriate.

These contacts will draw unbelievers into the circle of friends and acquaintances of one or more believers, thus exposing them to the authentic Christian community which will demonstrate to them the love of God and the reality of Jesus' mission.

For example, a page of links to cancer resources in a particular county would also contain links to profiles of 3-5 believers who are cancer survivors and who live in the county. These profiles would include general information about the believer, how they felt when they discovered they had cancer, how their faith enabled them to cope with the disease, what their ongoing struggles are, etc., along with the opportunity to contact the believer through an email form.

The ultimate goal would be to include at least 3-5 profiles for every link category on each website.

Other categories which would include such profiles would be (this is definitely not an exhaustive list):

• single parenting
• surfing
• music (various genres and artists)
• auto racing
• art
• parenting children with terminal illnesses
• camping
• vegetarianism
• spirituality
• hepatitis c
• accounting
• heart disease
• baseball
• strokes
• gourmet restaurants
• foreign students studying in the U.S.
• gardening
• owning dogs
• owning cats
• stamp collecting
• financial planning
• local authors
• environmentalism
• etc., etc.

Through this system of interest-related profiles, our mission of connecting believers and unbelievers in thousands of counties and facilitating face-to-face relationships will be accomplished.

County representatives will maintain ongoing contact with all profiled believers (at a minimum, through online message boards, chats, emails, etc., but ideally through face-to-face conversations and phone meetings) to monitor progress toward meeting objectives and to encourage profiled believers in their contacts with unbelievers facilitated through county portals.

Conclusion
The opportunity which has been presented to us is crucial for evangelism in a postmodern world. The church risks being seen as irrelevant by emerging generations because of its failure to use the internet in an effective manner.

We must aggressively seize the opportunity and establish a presence in the midst of today's marketplace so that we can effectively declare the gospel to the internet generation. County-based portals such as those described in this white paper effectively use the internet but also hold true to the Biblical principle of authentic Christian community as a foundation of outreach and evangelism.

* While chat rooms, instant messaging, and email lists can be valuable supplements to community, it is our conviction that electronic modes of communication will never replace the accountability and encouragement that is found in face-to-face Christian community. When I'm in front of my computer, I can always "turn you off" if I don't like what you say. That's not so easy in the context of face-to-face relationship.

ENDNOTES

¹Walter Wilson, The Internet Church (Nashville: Word Publishing, 2000), pgs. 12-15.

²Ibid, pgs. xiii-xiv.

³Ibid, pgs. xiii-xiv.

⁴Ibid, pg. 4.

⁵Andrew Careaga, E-vangelism (Lafayette, Louisiana: Vital Issues Press, 1999), pgs. 29-30.

⁶http://ied.gospelcom.net/community.php

We are happy to be able to provide you with several resources to help you as you consider a strategy for using digital means to reach your community with the gospel. Below you will find links to white papers we have written, resources you can download, and free articles you can use on your website.

White Papers
The team members of Strategic Digital Outreach have written various white papers which each address a particular aspect of internet strategy for churches and ministries. Our hope is that these articles will help you as you consider how to address issues surrounding the use of the internet in your outreach. Acrobat Reader is required to view these documents.

Effective Church Websites For Emerging Generations
This white paper is designed to provide local churches with a thought-provoking resource to help them make decisions regarding internet strategy in their local area.

A Strategy For Local Internet Outreach
This white paper outlines a unique strategy for using the internet to support local churches and ministries in their outreach efforts to reach their community. The strategy is unique in that it naturally builds the local church rather than resulting in conversions which occur outside the church.

The Internet: Friend Or Foe For Christians?
This white paper is designed to provide Christians with a resource to help them make appropriate choices in the midst of the battle against online pornography.

Downloads
We are happy to provide you with the following downloadable resources. Our hope and prayer is that these resources prove to be helpful for you in your outreach ministry.

Quotations Screen Saver
The Quotations Screen Saver combines vivid nature photographs with quotations from famous Christian personalities. It was specifically developed as a tool to help Christians share their faith with co-workers, friends, and family members. The quotations which the screen saver displays were especially chosen to provoke questions about the Lord in the minds and hearts of those who view the screen saver.

It is a great tool which can help your church members or constituents share their faith. They can install this screen saver on their computers at work and home, and their colleagues and family will be challenged to consider eternal truths. This screen saver is a great “door-opener” and this personal version is completely free! The screen saver is compatible with Windows 95, 98, NT, Me, 2000, and XP.

The screen saver is also available in a Hungarian version. If you are interested in helping us translate the Quotations screen saver into other languages, please contact us.

Pray For The Jula Of Mali Screen Saver
The Pray for the Jula of Mali Screen Saver combines vivid photographs with beautiful music and prayer points for this people group which numbers approximately 60,000 people in Mali alone (with other Jula living in Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Guinea-Bissau). It is designed to serve as a reminder of the needs of this people whose evangelical Christian population is almost non-existent.

InterServe Screen Saver
The InterServe Screen Saver was used by InterServe, an international and interdenominational fellowship of Christians committed to each other in partnership and for service to the peoples of South and Central Asia and the Middle East, to promote its programs and activities to the attendees of the 2000 Urbana Convention.

Free Articles
We are happy to provide you with the following free articles available for you to use on your own website. These articles are available for license under a Creative Commons License.

Good News
This article is a declaration of the good news of Jesus Christ, available for free for you to use on your own website.

Statement Of Faith
This article is a fresh treatment of a traditional statement of faith, available for free for you to use on your own website.

Miscellaneous
Resources which just don’t seem to fit anywhere else!

Localized Portals
A list of websites involved in some way (or with the potential for involvement in some way) with web-based city-reaching projects.