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.

Mike:

Thanks so much for commenting! You said:

> IMHO the Gospel is best communicated via a 1:1
> �in the flesh� personal relationship.

Absolutely! I firmly believe this as well.

I think evangelistic websites should act as catalysts to establish such personal relationships. Ideally, an affinity website with an evangelistic purpose should have a geographic angle as well, so that people who visit the site will have the opportunity to meet believers face-to-face who have similar interests and/or life experiences as the website visitors who are unbelievers.

With people increasingly turning to the web even for local information, I think it is important for the church to be actively promoting the stories of their people in the web arena. So that someone searching, for example, for cancer resources in Santa Cruz County, California will find the information about real believers in Santa Cruz County who have experienced cancer whose stories are so compelling that unbelievers will want to meet those believers.

For example, although I’m sure your Jeep blog has a readership broader than Western Michigan, I’m going to venture a guess that there may be readers who live in Western Michigan and who may not yet be a member of the Jeep club. They may not know about the club. If they read your blog, become interested in the Jeep club and join, and then meet you and your wife, your blog has accomplished something wonderful for the kingdom. It has introduced believers and unbelievers to each other around a common interest. And that really creates a much more natural venue for sharing our faith than some of the church’s traditional approaches today (Evangelism Explosion, street preaching, crusades, etc.).

For a more specific treatment of this idea, see our whitepaper entitled A Strategy For Local Internet Outreach, especially from the section entitled “Various Methods of Outreach” through the section entitled “A Proposal.”

Some random thoughts:

1. You’re right - traffic numbers don’t prove the effectiveness of an online evangelism effort. What would help to prove the effectiveness would be effective recordkeeping by churches and ministries of real people who were first introduced to the Christian community through a website and ultimately gave their lives to Christ through the influence of that community. I would love to find a church who would be willing to launch a website which reflects the strategy outlined here and then keep meticulous records about how unbelievers who give their lives to Christ initially learned about their church.

2. If I’m not mistaken, Campus Crusade has had some documented success (i.e., actual converts) with their EveryStudent.com and WomenTodayMagazine.com websites.

3. One of the reasons affinity-based websites have not been successful is that there are not sufficient funds to market them effectively. For example, I don’t know of many who are promoting such sites through pay-per-click advertising.

4. I have come to believe that there are certain situations (primarily in creative access nations) in which personal relationships can be 1:1, but not face-to-face. In such situations, instant messaging applications can serve a purpose. Again, affinity-based websites can serve as the catalyst to introduce unbelievers to believers around a common theme.

5. For what it’s worth, I think your decision to “be the church” to the Jeep club is an excellent one, the type of decision I wish more believers would make.

Thanks again for your comments - I appreciate your participation!

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.. 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?