“The last 15 years have changed our world forever,” claims Tony Whittaker, coordinator of Internet Evangelism Day. “Digital media are transforming the way we communicate, behave and even think. If Facebook was a country, it would have the fourth largest population in the world.”

Internet Evangelism Day is a strategic resource to help the worldwide church understand these issues and use the Web to share the good news. It is both a year-round online guide and an annual focus day – to be held this year on Sunday 25 April.

Churches are encouraged to use Internet Evangelism Day resources to create a presentation for their members on or near that Sunday (or at any other time they choose). The IE Day site offers free downloads: PowerPoint, video clips, handouts, drama scripts, music and posters. These enable any church (or homegroup, college, or conference) to build a customized program, lasting from five minutes to fifty.

2010’s focus day will be the sixth to be used by churches around the world since the initiative’s launch in 2005. Over this period, digital media have developed dramatically, with the advent of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the growing use of mobile phones to access online services. The outreach opportunities have multiplied too.

IE Day’s website is also a one-stop resource covering many subjects, including how to build a church website that is ‘outsider friendly’, using Twitter in evangelism, and blogging. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to be technical to share your faith online. And you can volunteer to be an email mentor to inquirers with several large online outreach ministries.

Internet Evangelism Day is an initiative of the Internet Evangelism Coalition, based at the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton. It is supported by a wide range of leaders and groups. “I am glad to commend Internet Evangelism Day,” says John Stott.

For more help, visit the website:
InternetEvangelismDay.com

“How can you know what Jesus really said?”

These are the type of questions people ask when they are searching for God, and the Internet is often where they go to find the answers. Campus Crusade for Christ publishes many websites that answer questions like these, but visitors still want to talk with someone personally about their questions.

This is where you can help. By simply sharing your own spiritual experience with visitors to some of these sites, you can help someone find a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. You can do this by becoming an online mentor and answering email messages that visitors submit from our various websites.

This is where you can find out more and begin the application process.

Spiritually searching people are waiting for you!

T-Mobile MyTouch phone

Google recently release a cool new phone based on its Android phone operating system. This operating system is what our mobile phone project is using, so I borrowed an Android-based phone to get up to speed with it. I’m hoping I can keep this phone long enough to take it with my on the project’s planning trip to Nairobi next month. It has been a long time since my work required me to learn a new gadget, so this has been fun.

Right now our staff members in Africa visit each person on their ministry team every time one of their ministry partners wants to donate to their ministry. For ministry partners who pledge a regular, monthly gift, this means the staff member visits their house monthly to collect this gift. The amount of time this requires puts a very significant strain on the time and ability of the staff member to do their primary ministry!

It isn’t possible for the ministry partner to make an electronic bank transfer to the staff member, in most cases, because retail banking services are not available . The continent’s retail banking industry is quite small.

In the last five years, with the advent of pre-paid mobile phone accounts, the phone companies have become de facto retail banks. They hold an enormous amount of cash on pre-paid cell phone accounts, and most have a system where individuals can transfer minutes from their account to the account of someone else. It is also possible to withdraw some of the balance on a pre-paid account in cash.

Putting this together with the advent of mobile phones in Africa means that virtually every person who has the ability to give to the ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ also has a pre-paid mobile phone account from which they can transfer some of their balance to a staff member’s account. This amount can then be treated as a gift and withdrawn as cash to help meet the financial needs of the CCC staff member.

The project I’m working on will develop software to make this type of transfer work smoothly for both the donor and the ministry staff member. It will provide reminders and receipts for the donor and provide an easy way for the recipient of the gift to thank the giver.

Best of all, it will allow our staff members to spend more time winning people to Christ, building them in their faith, and sending them out to reach others!

And if this project works in Africa, I will work to make it available in South Asia and anywhere else in the world where  it can help our staff members be more effective.

T-Mobile G1 smartphone
- seminary textbook?

One of the things I have been excited about lately is a project I recently started on; a mobile phone-based system for theology training and banking.

To set the context, on the continent of Africa in the last few years, there has been rapid growth in the church. An estimated 20,000 new churches started, most running now without a trained pastor. On the continent of Africa there are about 26 seminaries or centers for theology education, the largest of graduating 50 students a year. Doing the math, you can see there is an enormous need for theology training for pastors in Africa!

Even if you added enough seminaries to equip 20,000 churches with a trained pastor (you’d need 40 new seminaries that can graduate 100 students to equip these churches in the next 5 years!), you would still have the problem of getting these pastors to leave their families for a year, leave their jobs, and travel a long way. Money, time, and family considerations make this simply impossible.

But in the last five years almost half of all Africans acquired a mobile phone. Each of these phones can do two things: send text messages and interact with their account at the phone company.

If you add to this picture a smartphone, like the HTC Hero, you now have a platform for delivering seminary training to the pastor at the location of his church! Add to this a micro-finance loan and you have a way for almost any pastor in Africa to acquire a smartphone. Put it all together and this is a way to train 20,000 pastors in the next five years!

This excites me.

Right we are partnering with a university-based team of programmers developing software to do just this. The software is now in the testing phase, and we hope to deploy it in a test setting this summer. I hope to visit the Campus Crusade for Christ seminary in Nairobi, Kenya in the next couple months and be involved in launching this test.

If all goes well in Kenya, I will start looking for ways we can use the same technology in India or East Asia.

And there’s more….. I’ll write another post about it.

[Note: There is a bit of Campus Crusade lingo used here. VLM = 'virtually-led movements', a term we use internally to describe how we use the Internet to help build spiritual movements online. And there are others...]

MinistryNet Ideas from Dennis Strellman on Vimeo.

MinistryNet and ‘VLM’ Integration from Dennis Strellman on Vimeo.

Knowledge Cafe at MinistryNet
- photo by Mick Haupt

Here’s what one veteran participant had to say about the MinistryNet Conference last week.

International gatherings are inevitably complicated and expectations are hard to meet, given different cultures and languages. I’ve been in my share of so-so conferences like this over the past four decades. But the buzz here in Antalya is palpable. A fellow from Romania said he was so excited he could hardly sleep. A British colleague has people queuing up to discuss how he could help with transforming their corporate websites into a platform for transformational ministry based on his boundary-busting prototype.

Reports like this convince me that God answered the prayers of many people and made last week’s conference a big step forward for our organization’s ability to integrate the use of the Internet with how we work to tell people about the hope of the gospel.

My boss, Keith, wrote the following summary of the MinistryNet Conference.

I’ve been watching the 166 MinistryNet participants leave today. 37 countries on 5 continents are receiving back some highly motivated people with written strategic plans to implement specific steps to leverage internet communication tools in our win-build-send mission. My prayer is that the world will never be the same. That the kingdom will be impacted for eternity because of our days together.

This conference was a special time for me. God reminded me that when I was asked to step into the Chief Technology Officer role in 2001, I asked God what he would have me work towards. I wrote down 4 things. One was “Identifying emerging leaders with a pioneering/entrepreneurial spirit who are willing to claim a part of the internet world for Christ.” This conference was part of God’s gift to me to see it happening.

Summer Tech Team

For most of the summer I have fielded computer questions and resolved laptop problems. This is the team that works with me, all extremely capable. It has been over ten years since I’ve done computer help desk work, but I am enjoying the reprise. We have resurrected nearly-dead laptops, fine tuned slow ones, worked out encoding issues on the Internet broadcast of our conference, and published an online purchasing system to sell off the 70 laptops we used to run the conference and summer programs. They have been a fun team to work with.