Why so few kids' sites?

There are very few evangelistic sites for children which are not like Sunday School sites – i.e. designed for children who have Christian backgrounds or at least some Christian knowledge. Why this should be? There are, after all, a range of good truly evangelistic sites designed for teens. I think that one answer must be that most children's evangelism is, rightly, 'permission marketing'. In other words, it is usually by the consent of parents or guardians who encourage or allow their children to attend Bible classes, Sunday Schools, evangelistic camps, etc. We do not take younger children to meetings, or even give them evangelistic literature, outside a parental permission context. When they do attend such events, it is easier to present 'straight' Bible stories and activities – they expect it.

It may also be true that children's workers who have sometimes created websites merely by replicating the subject areas that are offered at an evangelistic holiday club. Sites such as Kids4Truth and others listed at Net Ministries are primarily for 'churched' children – those who have some Christian background. However, in almost every country outside USA, such children are a tiny minority of their age-group. The fact that sites such as these can successfully touch Christianized children (particularly in USA with an unusually high church attendance rate) may mask the the harder truth – they are probably not touching 'unchurched' children significantly.

But how do we create evangelistic sites for children? We accept that if they are online at all, they have parental permission and some level of oversight. They will be able to operate the big search engines and special children's listings and directories.

Non-Christian children are most unlikely to be looking for Christian content. Just as with non-Christians everywhere, they will be searching for everything else. If we are to reach them, we need the 'bridge strategy', though designed for their age-group, to create pages about things that they are interested in.

Of course, wise children's evangelists are trained to be sensitive, to avoid scaring children or pressuring them into 'decisions'. And like everyone else, children do not like to be 'talked down to'.

Games can be part of any good children's site. There are many free games that can easily be added to a webpage. Cartoons – either as single jokes, or as consecutive narrative stories – will be valuable too.

Stories do not all HAVE to be Bible stories, or even have a moral tacked on the end. I was looking at some old Jungle Doctor books just recently – great in their day, but now the finger-pointing moralizing is somewhat cringeworthy. Stories can be just plain good fiction with a Christian worldview – think Peanuts. At the same time, the life of Jesus can be very effectively told in a very accessible way using comic strip – see He Lived Among Us in a wide range of languages – the graphics can also be downloaded and added to your site.

A children's site could include book reviews too – and not only Christian books. It could also help kids to start thinking through issues raised by books, TV and film stories, learning how to analyze story-lines and assess the values that are being sold to them through popular culture.

The X-Spectrum helps us to visualize more clearly the likely effective target audience of any children's website.

I visualize huge potential in a magazine-style site not unlike the BBC TV show Blue Peter in concept, with named presenters for children to identify with (not, please, 'aunties' and 'uncles'). It could also include the style of secular Adventures with PosNayko. There could be plenty of material about science, animals, technology, hobbies and a thousasnd other things: there purely to add value to the site, and which fulfils no direct preaching function at all. Help could be offered for common children's problems. Such an outreach would need adequate resourcing, but could be very powerful. Low key or neutral 'bridge strategy' material is not compromise, but essential to the concept. It would be a younger equivalent of IamNext for teens and students. Of course, 5-7s would need a different site than 8-12s.

Designers of children's pages should take account of this usability study.

Please email any children's pages that you think really communicate to kids who have no Christian background.

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