Someone back at WEC UK asked for my views on Internet evangelism. I wrote back a long response which was less than favourable, so pretty much killed the conversation, but here it is for posterity...
See, I'm not sold on Internet evangelism because, as we know, the web is largely (although not exclusively) a pull medium and evangelism is a push medium, so I just don't believe they can fit well together. In other words, in evangelism you want to be going out to reach people, but in constructing web sites you're waiting for people to come to you. Developing material is fantastic but bringing people into contact with it is the tricky part.
Yes, I've read the "bridge strategy" stuff but all the strategies there still feel completely churchy to me. I honestly don't believe that people search the web to find articles about the meaning of life. "Who is Jesus Really?" is, I'm sure, a brilliant site, for people who are already interested in the answer to that question. But that's not the question that most Japanese are starting from. (This can also be understood as a criticism of Alpha in Japan.) Looking over the search keywords people use to stumble on my site in Japanese backs me up here; there are one or two people looking for things like "how to love myself" (self-image is a big issue here) but the vast majority are obviously already Christian, searching for Biblical characters and so on. So if you're going to do this, I reckon that the emphasis really needs to be on constructing communities that people will find and join, or more likely presenting apologetics in existing forums, which is what I tend to do a bit in Usenet, IRC and the like...
I've never seen a satisfactory answer to the question "how are you going to build your audience?" in the web evangelism field. I have seen people throw around terms ("social networking!") as if they were magic cure-alls, instead of means to connect people in the usual way that people connect to people. It's got to come down to going out into the highways and byways, and that takes effort and building personal relationships, the usual missionary grunt work; simply throwing content at the web and hoping it finds its intended audience isn't going to cut it for me.
So at the moment I'm more interested in mobilizing the Internet for serving the existing church community than primarily for evangelism. Social networking for accountability and prayer partnerships, that kind of thing. Mitsuo Fukuda is doing this with his businessmen's groups via SMS; Masaru Aoki of the Diaspora Network Japan runs online Bible studies for Japanese overseas and returnee Christians, and follows them up with Skype discussion and prayer. This is more the kind of thing which I like, since you already have a natural community that you're serving.
This isn't to say don't do it. That's not what I mean. We should try absolutely everything, and maybe save some. I'm sure it does save some. Just saying why it doesn't turn me on much.
Full version - 1 Comment