Monday, November 15, 2004
Connecting through e-vangelism
God has gone high tech.
As an increasing number of the wired individuals turn to the Internet for spiritual guidance. The market is large: More than half of an estimated 128 million people in the United States with Internet access have gone online for "spiritual or religious purposes," according to a Pew Internet & American Life survey released in April. Of these "online faithful," who are likely to be white, college-educated women, 28 percent exchange information about their spirituality with others, and 26 percent seek information about other religious traditions. Some do both.
Typing "Jesus" into ubiquitous search engine Google turns up 35.5 million Web pages, from Christian rock fan clubs to a site selling Jesus refrigerator magnets.
When the Rev. Kevin Chubb of Celebration Church in Lake Mary saw that more people were finding his church from its Web site than from a Yellow Pages ad, he reduced the conventional ad to a simple listing and concentrated on the Internet.
"We're finding that more and more people, when they even plan a move to the area, if they know they're going to be looking for a church, they do that through the Internet," the Southern Baptist minister says.
"We feel like that's one way we're spreading the Gospel, just a new way to do it," he says. "It's the same message but a different method."
"The Internet is just a natural next step of using the available ways of connecting with people," says Claudia Schippert, assistant professor of humanities and director of the religious-studies program at the University of Central Florida, citing 18th-century tent revivals and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson's 1920s radio broadcasts as examples of methods that were unorthodox at the time.
"In some ways, that is part of the reason why evangelical Christianity has been quite successful at broadening its ministry, unlike some churches that have had declining church attendance," she says.
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