Local Connections
Graham Doel is writing this week on the Emerging Evangelism blog about using the internet to facilitate face-to-face relationships:
I have been thinking for some time about how I can use the anonimity of the Internet to make local connections. As I talk to people I have descovered that there are many people who are interested in God, faith and the Bible, but the thought of coming to some kind of religious meeting (whether in a church building, home or other venue) does not appeal. With that in mind I have come up with this plan:
Click here to read Graham’s plan.
The timing of my reading Graham’s post was fairly interesting, as I had just had a vaguely similar conversation last night during the final session of an internet evangelism course I’ve been teaching over the past month or so.
One of the participants is the director of evangelism at one of the churches in our area. He is a fanatic regarding a particular team sport (both playing and watching). His church is one of the sponsors of a community-wide league designed to reach out to unbelievers. There is no aggressive evangelism happening - mostly building relationships between believers and unbelievers, with the relationships becoming the platform from which believers can speak into the lives of those who may not have previously considered the claims of Christ.
While we were huddled around a laptop last night, looking at various types of venues where online conversations could take place between believers and unbelievers (chat, message boards, blogs, usenet, instant messenger apps, etc.), we used that particular team sport as an example. We went to Yahoo Groups and searched on the name of the sport and the name of one of the cities in our area. Up popped a listing for a Yahoo Group of folks who play that team sport in our area on a recreational basis.
It was a wonderful thing to observe the “Eureka! moment” reflected on the face of the director of evangelism as he realized he could join this Yahoo Group, get to know some other “fanatics” in an online venue, and potentially translate those online relationships into face-to-face encounters by inviting the other enthusiasts to participate in the outreach league his church sponsors.
Search engine companies like Google and Yahoo are recognizing the potential for local applications. Should the Christian community begin to consider the same potential for its online outreach efforts?
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
