I recently started using Skype, the popular (and free!) Voice-Over IP phone service. Well, okay - I downloaded it, installed it, and had one conversation with it. But one conversation was enough to be utterly amazed by the quality and ease of use.
Then yesterday, I found an article at News.com which talks about the phenomenon of seemingly random phone calls from strangers, often wanting to practice their skills in a language they are learning. Knowing that teaching the English language can be an effective door-opener for outreach, I was intrigued by the concept.
If I understand it correctly, all you have to do is download and install Skype, hook up a headset / microphone combination to your computer, set your Skype status to “Skype Me” (I’m away from my home system which has the actual Skype software on it, so I may not be exactly right in the terminology I’m using, but I suspect it will be fairly straightforward), and then wait for the calls.
Or even better, search for people who have similar interests to yours and who have their status set to “Skype Me”, and take the initiative to call them! The only thing that I would say about contacting someone this way is that it would be important to contact someone in an area of the world where you know someone who is a believer that you can refer your contact to for face-to-face relationship.
Has anyone had any experience with this sort of approach? I’m writing this without any experience at doing it at all, so I want to be careful that I’m not making impractical, or worse yet inappropriate, suggestions on how to do outreach in the digital arena. From the article, it appeared that people who set their status to “Skype Me” actually want phone calls from strangers. Can anyone confirm this?
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.
