[TruthTalk] fyi~g :: 'Tucked Behind the Home Page, a Call to Worship'

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 06:15:01 -0800

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January 31, 2004
By JOHN LELAND 
 
 
When Doug Reese put up his Web site, he felt he was
answering a call. A college wrestling coach with a long
involvement in Christian youth ministries, he wanted to
spread a Christian message to people who were not getting
it.
 
Instead of working through his Methodist church, he created
a site with no overtly religious images or affiliation, and
articles about weight lifting, nutrition and profiles of
athletes. Only after users click a few links do they start
to see biblical passages or the religious testimonials of
the athletes.
 
"I wanted it to look like a sports magazine," said Mr.
Reese, who coaches at the University of Minnesota at Morris
and hopes to turn his three-year-old site into a full-time
ministry. "It's a little covert. I know that religion or
Christianity is a turn-off with a great part of the
population. I didn't want to shove it in people's faces."
 
Mr. Reese and his Web site, www.tothenextlevel.org, embody
an increasingly popular strategy for evangelism in the
Internet age. In the segmented realms of the Web, said Tony
Whitaker, editor of a guide for online evangelists, sites
that use overtly Christian material will reach only people
who are already Christians, while everyone else can click
by. Unlike Christian radio or television, the new medium
calls not for powerful religious symbolism or rhetoric but
for the absence of them, he said.
 
"You're not trying to trick people," Mr. Whitaker said.
"You can't appear to be something you're not. But
Christians should legitimately appear to be taking a
starting point on a subject that doesn't appear to be
religious."
 
A report released in December by the Pew Internet and
American Life Project estimated that by December 2002, 35
million Americans had searched for religious or spiritual
information online, compared with 36 million who had
downloaded music files. Until recently, if someone typed
"god" into a search engine, it retrieved as many sites as
typing in "sex," said Quentin J. Schultze, a professor of
communications at Calvin College who has written about
religion and the Web. "So this has been a deeply
evangelistic medium. The influence of religious evangelists
has been greatly unreported."
 
Instead of Scripture, the sites come on with information
about beauty, diet, fitness, sex and celebrities. Some also
have links for donations or offer books or other products
for sale. But the sites are not veiled pitches for money,
and the approach has elicited little controversy.
 
Many sites have no church ties and they represent just a
fraction of the religious traffic online. "The most
creative ones are started by individuals" rather than
churches, said Robby Richardson, director of international
Internet ministries for Gospel Communications
International, a nonprofit umbrella group of 300 ministries
based in Muskegon, Mich., whose www.gospelcom.net reaches
about two million visitors a month, according to
Nielsen//NetRatings. "We're trying to tell church sites,
`Don't forget about evangelism.' "
 
Some sites direct visitors to churches or study groups;
others hope readers will convert on the spot, declaring
themselves by clicking a button or a link. Bruce
Biesenthal, editor of www.thegoal.com, a sports-oriented
site in Seattle, said about 300 people in the last two
years had clicked a button to say they were making a
"decision for Christ" after reading athletes' testimonials
on the site. The articles discuss religious themes only
after delivering the sports news, he said.
 
"The site is for people coming because they want to learn
about the athlete or the sport," he said. "It's subversive.
We want to use the celebrity of the athletes as a
platform."
 
Even as President Bush, in an apparent nod to conservative
Christians in his State of the Union address, urged
Americans to "work together to counter the negative
influence of the culture," many online evangelists are
using the R-rated culture to attract visitors.
 
Some sites discuss gangsta rap or movies like "American
Pie" in relatively neutral language. For example, an
article on www.damaris.org, a nondenominational Christian
ministry based in England, advises, "Eminem and his rap
entourage could be described as radical preachers, speaking
frankly about the broken communities they come from."
 
David Bruce, an evangelical Christian who runs a movie
review site called www.hollywoodjesus.com, said he liked
covering racy films, as long as they were popular, because
they had the attention of "pre-Christians." Parts of his
site refer people to religious groups, and Mr. Bruce, a
former pastor, said he has continuing telephone or e-mail
conversations with 100 users at any time.
 
Mr. Bruce distinguished himself from fundamentalists who
protest or boycott the Harry Potter books and movies as
occultist.
 
"I would say I'm part of a new thinking within
evangelicals," he said, adding that he receives angry
e-mail messages for promoting sexual or violent movies. "I
get so tired of Christians that bash Hollywood."
 
"It isn't content that interests me," he said, continuing
that even exploitation movies provide "common ground" for
biblical discussion.
 
"I was so disappointed `Showgirls' wasn't a hit because I
would have loved to discuss it," Mr. Bruce said.
 
Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of
Evangelicals, which represents 43,000 congregations, said
that the Internet lent itself to all kinds of approaches,
both direct and indirect, because different users were
ready for different levels of information. A site that did
not declare its intentions was the best way to reach some,
just as an evangelist in a public square might begin by
talking about secular concerns. "You have a moral
obligation not to be deceitful," he said. "But you don't
have a moral obligation to tell everything you know
upfront."
 
Yet Mr. Haggard worried that on the Internet, anyone could
come on as a religious authority - "even a crazy person."
He added that because there was so much pornography on the
Internet, online evangelism might prove a mixed benefit.
"We have more people corrupted on the Internet than we have
arrive at the church by the Net," he said.
 
In Vancouver, British Columbia, Karen Schenk works both
direct and indirect approaches to evangelism. She is the
director of Web site strategies for TruthMedia, an
organization of 20 sites affiliated with Campus Crusade for
Christ, an evangelical group. Two sites she oversees are
www.womentodayonline.com and www.christianwomentoday.com.
 
The latter assumes visitors are already involved in
churches, she said, and offers articles like "Dive Deeper
Into God" and "True Spiritual Change." The former is for
women who might not be Christians, and features articles
like "I Am Jealous of His Very Attractive Ex-Wife."
 
It is the secular-looking site that is evangelistic, Mrs.
Schenk said. "We're just being sensitive to where people
are at and inviting them in. We don't have spinning crosses
on Women Today."
 
To illustrate how beauty tips might be used to spread the
gospel, Mrs. Schenk noted that the most popular article on
Women Today Online has been an advice column about frizzy
hair. Before reading advertisements for L'Oreal, readers
see a link that reads, "Are you happy with your body?" If
they click on that, they get the life story of a model who
battled bulimia but then found success after becoming a
born-again Christian. "You can receive Christ right now by
faith through prayer," she writes.
 
Mrs. Schenk said that about 70 percent of the site's
traffic was in the secular areas, but that visitors wanting
more could receive prayers, Bible passages or Christian
mentoring.
 
The Web site www.mops.org, whose initials stand for Mothers
of Preschoolers, offers mothers advice and chat rooms for
topics like playdates, money, sexuality and medical needs,
and organizes more than 3,000 groups that meet in churches
around the country and abroad. The group has 115,000
members, said Karen Parks, the director of ministry
networks. Articles are mostly secular, but the site also
has areas for religious testimonials and outreach.
 
The site avoids discussion of political topics or abortion.
"We never hide that we're a Christian organization, but we
don't want to build any walls or barriers," Ms. Parks said.
"We consider a success anything that leads a mom one step
closer to Jesus, whatever that step is. Hopefully she goes
all the way to meet Jesus, but that might be through
another group, and that's fine."
 
The indirect, or bridge strategy in online evangelizing
continues a broader trend among Christian evangelicals,
said Randall Balmer, chairman of the religion department at
Barnard College and author of "The Encyclopedia of
Evangelicalism." In 1975, the Willow Creek Community Church
in South Barrington, Ill., after surveying local residents
to see why many did not go to church, dispensed with all
Christian iconography, crosses or stained glass windows to
appeal to people who were turned off by these. In the
1990's, many evangelical churches dropped the denomination
from their names, switching to names like Oak Chapel.
 
Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and
American Public Life at Boston College, questioned the
long-term value of online religious conversions, no matter
how many hits the sites got. He pointed to the Internet
outreach in Howard Dean's presidential campaign, which
generated furious activity online but so far has not
translated into first-place finishes in the primaries. "The
Dean camp suggests that meeting through the Internet didn't
work," Mr. Wolfe said. "I wonder if a similar Christian
strategy is going to work either." 
 
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