Will Samson is back from the recent Internet Evangelism for the 21st Century conference and has some probing questions and thoughts surrounding the typical modern concept of conversion and its implications for internet evangelism.
In my favorite excerpt, Will writes the following:
If all I need to do is say a prayer, why be involved in a community of faith? Lesslie Newbigin, in his seminal work, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, talks about the congregation as a “hermeneutic of the gospel”. That is simply a more sophisticated way of saying that people understand the gospel by looking at how it is lived out. This has always been true. The writer of Hebrews tapped into this idea in saying that the expression of Christ’s sacrifice is to meet together. I wonder if one of the reasons people are less likely to follow Jesus but are instead content to simply pray a prayer and consider themselves “saved” is because we have so few compelling congregations?
Internet evangelism which encourages people only to “pray a prayer,” I believe, has to be considered suspect in its ultimate effectiveness because, as Will suggests, it divorces the process from an authentic expression of Christian community.
We tend to believe that Christian community is only a follow-up method once outreach has been “successful” - once someone prays the sinner’s prayer, we encourage them to find a Bible-believing church and join it. Jesus, on the other hand, sees Christian community as the foundation of outreach (cf. John 17:21-23).
Rather than encourage people to “pray a prayer,” I believe that our evangelistic efforts on the web (and through other digital means) should focus on drawing unbelievers into an experience of authentic Christian community (ideally face-to-face community, but in creative access nations, online community may be the only option). The expression of selfless love which the unbeliever will (hopefully) witness and experience in the midst of a community of believers will do far more to convince them of the truth of the gospel than statements of propositional truth and an invitation to pray the sinner’s prayer which they may find on our websites.
I suspect this post may generate some passionate dialogue
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.
