Here are seven ways you can enhance your Christian experience and mission through the internet.
CHECK OUT OUR CHURCH WEBSITE!
Everyone, especially busy young professionals, has precious little discretionary time. That means that church shopping is increasingly done online. The Barna Research Group reports that over half of all Protestant churches in America have web sites. If a church does not have an informative, attractive website, it will be passed over by an increasingly internet literate Christian public, in favor of a church that knows how to present what it is doing in a way that appeals to people who are internet savvy.
If you are reading this you have already found the website for our church. It gives information about our church ministries and activities and provides links to sites that might be useful for you.
MAKE USE OF EMAIL
It is impossible to communicate too much, so an active email list is vital. With Microsoft’s free Outlook Express you can stay in touch with others and our church can stay in touch with you. Email is cheap, fast and easy. No trees get cut down to make paper as they do for old fashioned snail mail.
BIBLE STUDY
Bible.gospelcom.net will display any Bible passage and do a concordance search of 16 different versions in 30 languages. An exhaustive concordance to the published writings of Ellen G. White is available online at egwdatabase.whiteestate.org. Need a commentary on the Bible? Check out www.bible.org and www.ccel.org.
RESEARCH
Research using the internet has never been easier. These days Google.com stands above the pack as the leading search engine. Want to give a talk on the Good Samaritan? Type in “good Samaritan” and, in less than a second, Google will serve up 18,000 plus sermons on the Good Samaritan. Google is also a national telephone directory. Type in a person’s name and a state; you will get their telephone number and, if you want, can click on a link for a map to their house. (Maybe that’s not so good.)
BOOKS
Entire libraries are available on the net. These include Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Bartleby Books Online. Adventist books can be purchased at adventistbookcenter.com. Need helps for your ministry or for Sabbath school class? www.Plusline.org is excellent. A trusted shopping site for books is amazon.com. A recent search using the word “Sabbath” reported 9000 books available!
EVANGELISM
Several years ago I was privileged to visit the orient on behalf of Adventist World Radio. I was astounded to learn how many people in China are studying the Adventist message over the internet. Our Hong Kong mission office employs a full time evangelist to handle the eNet traffic. The Santa Barbara SDA Church broadcasts its worship service over the internet. An entire evangelistic series by Lonnie Melashenko along with online broadcasts are available from The Voice of Prophecy.
CAUTION!
The web is powerful but with great power always comes great danger. I used a search engine to look for our website and came up with a link to Hot Lancaster Adventist Singles! Happily, nobody’s name I know was listed!
The net can be a great time saver; it can also be a bigger time waster. Never click on any “toxic waste”. Never give out your personal information on a web site if you have not initiated the contact. Malicious people will try to attack your computer with deceptive email, viruses, malware, adware and spyware. Just stay on the straight and narrow and you will enjoy multiple benefits and bonuses.You
