Manifesto for the future

Online Evangelism: State of Play & Future Goals

Paper for the Internet Evangelism Conference, November 2000

This is a slightly more detailed version of a paper submitted to the Conference. It can be freely republished (in entirety or extracts) in print magazines, study materials, college courses, etc., providing that the notes at the end of the article are complied with. It is available to download as a Rich Text Fornat file 36k which prints out at about 5 pages.

1. Introduction
2. The Gray Matrix
3. The land before us
4. Help international visitors
5. Cross-media strategies
6. Games
7. Children's pages
8. CD option
9. Wap phones
10. Online chat
11. Conclusion

1. Introduction
Seven dog years equals one human year. Internet years are also said to be much shorter than real years! However, let's be humans and say that the Internet first became a widely accessible public medium about five years ago. What is the state of play five years later?

a. Positives
Many Christian groups and individuals are using the Web imaginatively with varied evangelistic approaches. As well as web-site strategies, there is considerable ongoing chat room witness by many faithful individuals.

b. Negatives
There are huge areas of unclaimed land that have not been appropriated. This paper will try to highlight them.

c. It's the old story about the old old story
It has long been true, dare we call it scandalous, that evangelism has had a very low priority for large parts of the Christian church. Go into any Christian bookshop – 99% of the titles and videos are designed for a Christian audience. Perhaps only 1% have been produced primarily for non-Christians or have been made accessible to non-Christians as well as Christians. (And here's a challenge – in some major language groups, you can fit ALL the available evangelistic literature into a shoebox.)

Possible reasons for this:

There is a much smaller market for evangelistic books and videos. Indifferent non-Christians are unlikely to buy them, though they may willingly read/view them if given/loaned by a Christian who has paid for them.
It's easier and more comfortable to minister to Christians than non-Christians.
Some Christians erroneously believe that any Christian material is by nature evangelistic and do not realize the need for targetted material using language and concepts appropriate to non-Christians.

The same situation applies to evangelistic websites. There are probably about 30,000 English-language Christian sites. But it is hard to find even 1% (i.e. 300) which could be classified as broadly evangelistic. Because evangelistic web-sites have no 'product' to sell, the sponsoring ministry has no way of recouping the production and hosting costs. So evangelistic sites fall into two categories:

produced by evangelistic agencies able to pay the costs
operated by individual Christians in their spare time

d. Convince the church
We therefore also have an educational role within the wider church, to demonstrate the effectiveness of online evangelism, so that churches will:

support evangelistic online ministries
encourage individuals to become involved in sparetime online witness

One way is to offer news items and feature articles on web evangelism to Christian print magazines and church newsletters. Andrew Careaga has been very active in this field. I have recently submitted a proposal for a short monthly column to our main UK Christian weekly. We can also encourage Christian ISPs and portals to include specific web evangelism resources on this sites – here's an open letter we can use to make this suggestion.

Training sessions/CDs for church members could also envision and empower Christians for online evangelism.

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2. The Gray Matrix
The 'Gray Matrix' (proposed by Frank Gray of FEBC) is one of a number of modifications of the 'Engel Scale of Spiritual Decision'. The steps on this scale are often expressed slightly differently by different thinkers:

+5 Stewardship
+4 Communion with God
+3 Conceptual and behavioral growth
+2 Incorporation into Body
+1 Post-decision evaluation
New birth
-1 Repentance and faith in Christ
-2 Decision to act
-3 Personal problem recognition
-4 Positive attitude towards Gospel
-5 Grasp implications of Gospel
-6 Awareness of fundamentals of Gospel
-7 Initial awareness of Gospel
-8 Awareness of supreme being, no knowledge of Gospel

The Gray Matrix adds a horizontal axis to the scale – antagonism/enthusiasm. It is a remarkably simple but enlightening viewpoint because it helps us to visualize important evangelistic concepts:

The lower-left purple oval shape represents a group of people who are fairly resistant and lack knowledge. The challenge to us is always to use approaches which reach down as far as we can into the bottom left-hand corner!

General conclusions from the Gray Matrix

Effective evangelism not only requires people to obtain more knowledge. They must also move from a position of antagonism/indifference to a position of enthusiasm. They are unlikely to acquire more knowledge unless they have first obtained a degree of enthusiasm.
Anything which moves people from left to right across the scale is therefore as 'evangelistic' as something which moves them up the scale. This is particularly important for those strongly antagonistic, who will not usually be willing to move up the scale until their antagonism has been substantially reduced.
We can define roughly where a single person, or a target group of people, is situated on the scale, and therefore choose an appropriate approach to reach them.
It validates many different types of evangelistic approach, sometimes those about which Christians may disagree. The instinctive preacher may feel that the only valid method is full-blooded challenge. The debater may see the value of reasoned apologetics and interaction. Others may use gentler approaches. Luke 7:35 sums this up: "But wisdom is justified by all her children."
Much evangelism is directed, wittingly or unconsciously, at the 'once-churched' who have some knowledge of Christian concepts. In societies where there is a pool of such people, evangelism may be quite successful. This apparent success may cover up the fact that the methods used barely touch the 'never-churched' (those at the bottom of the matrix) for whom different strategies are needed.
A negative evangelistic approach which preaches against a person's current religion or philosophy is unlikely to be effective.
In face-to-face evangelism, friendship remains a major factor in most conversions: the life of a Christian is a major part of the message and can transform antagonism/indifference. In a cross-cultural mission context, lives spent in serving others in service projects such as well-digging, education, and medicine will also change attitudes. For some people-groups, apologies offered for the past actions of so-called Christian nations are also healing hurts and reducing antagonism to the Gospel.
Societal and cultural pressures, and the devices of the Enemy, will tend to pull people down towards the bottom left-hand of the Matrix. God's purpose is to draw people to the top right-hand side by His Spirit through the witness of His people.

Implications for Web evangelism:

We must assume zero Christian knowledge and avoid Christian jargon if we are to communicate with people at the bottom of the knowledge scale. "Most Christian literature ... begins too far along the evangelistic process; it assumes that the reader has at least some basic knowledge of Christianity and biblical concepts," said the director of a very effective literature outreach recently in Interlit magazine. Remember that outside USA, far fewer people have any sort of church background. For various reasons, USA still has a very high church attendance which other countries can only dream of. Even in Protestant West Europe, church attendance and the percentage of evangelicals in the population is small. In most of Mediterranean Europe (Portugal, France, across to Greece and Turkey), E Europe and CIS, the needs are incredible and the church small and weak. The majority of Europeans are secular and literally know nothing of the Bible.
For those who are in addition highly antagonistic we must bend over backwards to identify with their feelings and misconceptions.
For specific religious groups – e.g. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus – we need a conceptualized approach which uses their language and engages with their concepts. A general-purpose 'Western' evangelistic approach may not reach many of them. We need pages which explain the Gospel in their concepts and language. At a very minimum, sites intended for Muslims should use the Muslim words e.g. Isa Masih for Jesus Christ, Injil for Gospel, Miriam for Mary, and the Arabic versions of prophets names. (A Bible translation which does this is in course of preparation.) Likewise, a site for Jews should refer to Yeshua instead of Jesus, G-d instead of God, and likewise use other terms which do not have Christian overtones.
Sites which are obviously 'Christian' in style, language, assumptions and graphics may only reach people who are already seeking, have some knowledge and enthusiasm, and possibly have a church background.

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3. Land still to claim: the opportunities before us
Here are a range of suggestions and strategies for online outreach, surely not exhaustive:

a. 'Anything' pages
If most web-users are searching the Web for sites on secular subjects, our major strategy should be to offer them pages on secular subjects – anything and everything. They must not be 'decoy' pages which only pretend to be about the subject, but well-crafted pages which genuinely address the topic. To identify with people's interests is a biblical concept: 1 Cor. 9:20-23. The Web uniquely gives us this way of targeting a special-interest group, with the option of tailoring the presentation of the Gospel to the group's particular viewpoint.

Visitors can then be offered other pages such as:

Testimony of the webmaster or other people who have a relationship to the subject of the site.
Pages which extract a parable or Christian parallel from the site topic. This was the primary means of communication to non-Christians that the Lord Jesus used.
Links to other evangelistic material and a presentation of the Gospel.

We need thousands of such sites. If even 5% of visitors move on to Christian content, the strategy is working. The beauty of this strategy is that invidual special-interest groups can be reached with a message tailored to fit them. Whether they are sports enthusiasts, reptile breeders, sky-divers, retired military, stamp collectors, here is a way to target them. There are also some potential strategies being studied for creating and linking pages like this in an effective way, which will be reported in Web Evangelism Bulletin if they develop.

b. Testimony pages
People are interested in people. Most evangelistic sites can usefully include testimony – though it must be told in language and style appropriate to non-Christians. It is possible to write a testimony without using any Christians words other than 'God', 'Jesus' and 'Bible'. See:

When words get in the way – (NAMB's OnMission magazine article) – so good that everyone should print it out for reference, or link to it.
Angie's Story – a testimony tutorial.

c. Not reinventing the wheel
The availability of a number of world-class gospel presentations means that an evangelistic site does not necessarily need to have its own explanation of the Gospel. A clear alternative option is to link directly to one of these, with the advantage that a follow-up system for inquirers and converts is already in place. "It's a difficult task to write and design an effective online Gospel presentation, but it's very easy to link to one," says Gospelcom's Warren Kramer. For small sites produced by spare-time webmasters, this is an important issue.

However, for sites which are targeting other religions, a specialized contextualized explanation of the Gospel may be better than linking to a general purpose 'one size fits all' presentation designed mainly for western readers.

d. Health and problems
Health is the #2 most searched-for topic on the Web. No prizes for guessing #1. Here is a major opportunity to build a site around a health or trauma problem which also explains the support that God offers. This is a powerful strategy which a few Christian sites are using. Sadly other sites have made themselves inaccessible to non-Christians, by announcing on their sites that they are specifically for Christians with these problems. (Ever felt unwanted?) There are also many other life problems for which people are searching for answers – money, relationships, parenting, worry. Here is an opportunity to offer common-sense general advice and then progress to show that God offers resources for living and does not want people to struggle alone.

e. Music and entertainment
A site can be built around a particular musician, group, or even just a song, play, TV program or film; and extract parable-meanings from the lyrics. This is an approach similar to the Dave Bruce's highly popular Hollywood Jesus for films which pulls in visitors by the million.

The same strategy can be applied to music, art and culture from individual nations. For instance, Iran and India have rich cultures of film-making and many messages can be drawn out of their national films. India's 'Bollywood' film industry produces more films annually than any other. (Try a search engine on 'bollywood'.)

f. Contextualized sites for other religions
There are very few sites attempting to communicate specifically with Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Parsees, New Agers, Wiccans, etc. There is also a huge interest in 'spirituality' which we can tap into. Those who are searching New Age for answers do not realize that their needs are exactly those which Jesus promises to fulfill.

Islam is the hardest to reach. "Asking a Muslim to become a Christian is like asking you or me to have a sex change. The person has to denounce himself, to be cut off from everything he or she knows. That's the price a Muslim pays to follow Jesus." (Dr. J Lee) We should not include additional barriers by offering the message in a western, non-contextualized way.

g. Sites in other languages
In many languages there are virtually none. The biggest needs are probably:

Spanish/Portuguese
South America is rapidly becoming a wired society, aided by having only two, mutually-understandable languages. Spain and Portugal are needy countries.
Japanese
After a slow start, there are now 30 million web users in Japan. And because the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages are so far-removed from English, it is very hard for these nations to acquire sufficient English to easily make sense of English-language sites.
Chinese
Web access in China is doubling every year, with a projected 100 million users by 2003 – equal to the current number of people online in USA! Here is an amazing opportunity for both evangelism and discipling.
Arabic
With the exception of Saudi Arabia, there are relatively few restrictions to Net access for Middle East residents. Although many educated Arabs are competent in English, there is still a big need for evangelistic sites in the 'divine' Arabic language. Online discipling material and email mentoring offer a way to help converts for whom there is no local church to attend.
Turkish and Farsee (Iran)
These are advanced societies with growing Web access, which desperately need contextualized sites in their own languages.
Comics for outreach
In many countries including Japan, comics are incredibly popular among adults as well as children. There is great potential for online comics with gently evangelistic storylines, but no one is doing it.

Who will make these sites?
In many of these countries, there are relatively few Christians with the financial resources or writing/technical skills for online evangelism. Maybe we the West can help:

by initiating or assisting projects in conjunction with national believers.
by encouraging ethnic-minority Christians living in the West to be involved in online evangelism. Thus for example Japanese, Chinese, or Arabic believers (recent immigrants or longer-standing communities) can have a direct input back into their countries of origin. Hispanics living in US can have an input not only to South America, but also to Spain and Portugal. African-Americans and Caribbean British have the opportunity to minister not only to their own communities, but also increasingly to sub-Saharan Africa, which despite poverty is becoming a wired society too.
by encouraging returned/retired missionaries from these countries to apply their language skills and experience towards online outreach to their country of service.

h. Church pages
At present, the majority of church sites seem designed primarily for their members. Yet surely all church sites should include an accessible evangelistic track for non-Christian visitors? Southern Baptists strongly encourage this and provide materials to facilitate it. There are a number of strategies to make church sites accessible to non-Christians.

i. Community portal sites
This concept is very exciting, because it can be replicated for any town, local area, even a small country. The strategy is to create a genuinely useful portal for the best mainly local secular websites in a range of categories – shops, sports, schools, transport, tourism, women, teens, sport, etc. If evangelistic sites are available in these categories, they are included (for instance I am next and Hopenet.net for teens, Women Today Magazine for women, The Goal, To the Next Level for sport). Additional categories of churches' and 'spirituality' give the opportunity for many more Christian links. More on this concept with examples.

j. Interactive Bible Study
This is another strategy waiting to be used. Evangelistic Bible studies on the 'Alpha Course' model are highly effective in local church situations. It is, I believe, simple and effective to transfer the concept to a two-way email discussion list. This a great way to help inquirers who have expressed an interest at an evangelistic or church website. When some friends offered an online course two years ago, it was very successful.

The growing range of online Bibles in different languages (e.g. Bible Gateway) are also an important contribution for seekers.

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4. Helping international site visitors
As the number of online second-language English speakers increases, it becomes even more important that English-language evangelistic sites are made accessible to them by:

avoidance of idiom
elimination of national references only understood within one country
easy language and short sentences (which in any case helps first-language speakers too – reading from a computer-screen is much harder and slower than reading from a printed page)
offering a dictionary translation window or frame to those who need it

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5. Cross-media strategies
There are many opportunities to combine the Web with other media:

Surely the time has come when every tract and piece of evangelistic literature should carry the URL of a Gospel presentation – preferably co-operating with existing world-class sites?
Credit-card sized contact-cards (full-color, both sides) with the Gospel in a nutshell, a couple of one-line testimonies, and the URL of an evangelistic website are small enough to carry and distribute any time. Let's encourage tract producers to do both these things!
Every evangelistic radio ministry can have a linked evangelistic website – each promoting the other and offering additional resources that neither alone could achieve.
An evangelistic site can be part of a local, regional or national advertising campaign on secular radio, TV, press and buses. Power to Change is being effectively promoted in this way.

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6. Games
Computer gaming is very popular and powerful; we can use it for evangelism:

Simple (secular) online games can be added to a website to encourage return visits (i.e. make the site 'sticky'). There are a number of free sources, including simple javascript and java games.
Evangelistic games. There is a huge untapped potential for games which are evangelistic. I do not mean Bible-puzzle type games, which really only relate to Christians, but games which can somehow communicate some element of Christian truth – even just a worldview at variance with the typical game. The Miller brothers' Myst and Riven CD games illustrate this. I know of only two adult web-based game which are not aimed primarily at Christians: Sword of the Elyon and Claymore. There are some excellent children's games by Nadya Andreadis: Underwater Adventure Game and Nadya's Mission X Space Game

Pray that Christian games developers will have the inspiration to exploit this opportunity. One way ahead must surely be role-playing games which involve moral choices and consequences, in a SIM or fantasy environment. (Only Christians can 'do' fantasy/allegory properly – cf. C S Lewis!) More on games for evangelism.

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7. Children's pages
Two years ago, there were no evangelistic sites targetted at teens; now we have several high-quality outreaches.However, there are still virtually no sites for younger children which are evangelistic and target children not already within the Christian community. We need a comprehensive magazine-style site roughly equivalent to I am Next for younger children. More on evangelistic children's pages.

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8. The CD option
There is great potential to create interactive evangelistic CDs. Advantages:

They can be designed as an in-depth interactive experience.
Sound, animated cartoons, games and video clips can be added and will function much better than on a website.
Although ideally designed from scratch to take advantage of the medium, a CD can alternatively carry a number of existing evangelistic websites linked together from a content menu.
Unit cost is only pennies for large production runs: they can be given away. Thus they are cheaper than a small booklet, yet contain much more content.
Especially valuable in countries where Internet access is still expensive and slow.
Can also include external links to websites.
Mini credit-card sized CDs are an option.
A complete evangelistic video will fit on a CD in 'VideoCD' format, (not the same as DVD) which can be played on most existing computers and Playstations. Widely used in the East, it's a useful evangelistic stop-gap tool for several years until everyone has DVD players. In UK recently, there is an exciting project to create an evangelistic apologetics-type CD aimed at students and thinking young people. It could have a major impact on 1000s of students and young people worldwide (probably far more than a book).
More on topic

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9. WAP phones and mobile devices
Another web-based medium, quite different from normal websites. How can we use it? Mobile access to the Web is growing fast.

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10. Chat witness, newsgroups, bulletin boards, etc
We often only think in terms of evangelistic web-pages. But millions of people visit chat rooms every day. Book of Hope/Hopenet.net have just produced a youth resources site to teach effective chat and evangelism techniques.

Chat witness training could be on the curriculum for youth groups, discipleship training and Bible College courses, along with other types of online evangelism.

Bulletin boards, newsgroups, and email lists offer similar opportunities for personal witness. Those who may not have writing or webmaster skills can make a big contribution in these areas. More on chat witness.

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11. Conclusion
The digital revolution offers us tools of immense power. May the next five years see major advances for God's glory and His Kingdom.