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Strategic Digital Outreach

Using Affinity Interests in Digital Outreach

Rob Williams is blogging today about the wisdom of using particular interests unbelievers might have (guitars, baseball, gardening, etc.) to develop relationships with them and provide platforms for talking about Jesus. This is at the heart of a very effective strategy for web evangelism, developing websites dedicated to those interests, promoting them, and then engaging site visitors in conversations that lead to discussions about the gospel.

Posted by on 12/09/04 at 07:32 AM
The Collective Voice!
continues the discussion:

Hmm...not so sure I agree - at least with the website building part.  I once challenged the author of those pages on Gospel.com (his name is escaping me) to prove that building and maintaining such a site (hobby or interest-based, but with the intent of evangelizing)was effective. 

All he could answer with was traffic numbers - that the pages were getting viewed.

To which I respond “So what?”.  What’s the traffic mean?  Can you really use server statistics to justify an evangelism effort?

He couldn’t give the names of anyone who had come to Christ as a result of using those pages.

IMHO the Gospel is best communicated via a 1:1
“in the flesh” personal relationship.  So bail on the website for Fender Guitar enthusiasts, and go out and start a band...give lessons..take lessons..whatever.

My wife and I have re-thought this part of our lives in the last year.  We used to be part of a Jeep club here in West MI, but got out of it as the runs typically lasted the weekend, and we’d miss church if we went.

We realized we had it exactly wrong - we were missing the chance to “be the church” to a largely non-Christian group.

We hope to remedy this this coming year.

contributed on 12/31 at 08:08 AM
Frank Johnson continues the discussion:
contributed on 01/02 at 05:13 PM
continues the discussion:

Sorry for the delay in returning to this..I must have not clicked the box to send me an email.

I’m not arguing (I don’t think..smile against affinity based websites.

Where my thoughts are today is that rather than taking on the creation/marketing/tracking of a site as an evangelistic effort, let’s instead find the ones that already exist (because I bet that they already do), and join up.  Spend the time you would have spent building such a site developing relationships with the people already using this existing site.

Or forget the web aspect, and find the local “affnity club” instead.

To me it’s “bottom-up” work, rather than the “top-down” approach of building a site first.

For example - I spend alot of time at http://www.earlycj5.com.  The forums there are quite busy with (mostly) guys talking about old Jeeps.  I’m not spending time there because I have this hidden agenda of evangelising, I’m there because I do love old Jeeps too.  But...once the “relational history” was there where I knew including comments about my faith or God would be OK, I started doing so. 

I can’t image the time and effort it would have taken me to set about building a new site with this goal in mind.  This is the same issue I have with Tony’s “Community-Based sites” - just the overwhelming amount of time it would take to build and maintain, and is that the best use of your time?

contributed on 01/04 at 12:05 PM
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