Internet Evangelism Day 2008

The vast majority of Christian websites are made by Christians, for Christians. Is that a problem?

Internet Evangelism Day is coming up on Sunday, April 27 - a time for churches and people everywhere to think about how to use this cute little internet thing to reach people for Christ.

Note: this video refers to last year's date.

For more information, visit the Internet Evangelism Day website here.

Update to Christian search engine site

Our friends at Kingdom Engine have revamped their Christian search engine site with a more pleasant appearance and some useful custom search engines available on a variety of topics such as:

• The Bible
• Apologetics
• Creeds and Confessions
• Spurgeon
• Worship Music
  

You can also add these searches to your own site or blog, if you have one.

As they note, the Web has grown so much that searching for "King David" on Google gives you 84,700,000 results. Custom search engines limit searches to just a few hand-selected sites that deal with the topic you're interested in. They're great for research.

Happy searching!

Get ready for your summer missions trip

The excellent site called Heal Your Church Web Site is out with a great article entitled Maximize Your Summer Missions Impact With Disruptive Technologies. The big idea: instant updates and even live reporting from that missions trip are now available. What more can churches be doing to connect congregations with the field other than showing PowerPoint slides (or regular slides) the week after everybody get home tired and tanned? The writer says:

In my line of work, individuals measure ‘tech time’ in terms of ‘dog years,’ meaning one multiplies by a factor of 7.

This means that if you’re are returning to a missions field with the same technological mindset you perhaps traveled with in 2003, then basically you’re hitting the road with know-how that’s 28 years in the past … which for those of us old enough to remember what it was like back then … your digital thinking is ‘disco-era’ … and nobody wants that!

That's a good warning, and it's followed by practical suggestions. Read more here.

Internet Evangelism Day

I dropped the ball on this one even though I had every good intention of talking about it. Internet Evangelism Day was this past Sunday and although it's still not on many folks' radar, the concept seems to be taking off.

Be ready for next year or just pick up useful hints on how to make your church website more evangelistic and less "churchy" all year around by visiting Gospelcom's Internet Evangelism homepage.

Anyone who hasn't yet appreciated the potential of this medium to reach those who need a relationship with God needs to re-think a lot of things. All Christian webmasters and bloggers know, or should know, that their product is read by all sorts of people in all sorts of places. I can't explain why our humble blog, which mostly focuses on Connecticut, is well-read in Australia and New Zealand relative to our total numbers, nor why we've picked up a reader or two in Kansas. But it shows the power of the Web for good as well as for ill.

One suggestion for our friends at Gospelcom: they need to call it something other than IE Day. There is a famous product in the computer world which I used to use and which is often referred to as "IE." They're up to IE7 at the moment. :)