Lausanne World Pulse – Global Internet Users Present Vast Opportunities for Online Evangelism

April 2006

By Dave Hackett

The world zipped past an unnoticed milestone as 2006 arrived. Over one billion people were online. Roughly 15.7% of the world’s people connected through the fastest communication service ever devised.¹

Are Evangelistic Websites Drawing Visitors? The following is a sample list of sites divided by language.

Arabic: http://www.maarifa.org/. Called the most popular Arabic-only Christian site on the web, this site has been online for five years. In the last two years the number of visitors to the site has more than doubled. Nearly nine thousand visitors come to the site each month. Forty-four thousand files and thirty-two thousand pages are downloaded each month.

Arabic: http://www.everyarabstudent.com/. Since the site became operational in November 2004, over three thousand people have made a decision for Christ.

French: http://www.topchretien.com/. This premier Christian site records over five million visitors per year. Since 2000 more than eight million people have visited the site. The ministry has 1,800 volunteers and counselors are always available via chat, though most follow-up is done through email. Nearly fifteen thousand people have emailed to say they want to come to Christ after visiting the site.

French: http://www.connaitredieu.com/. In a recent eight-month period, several hundred thousand people visited and over forty-five thousand people indicated a personal decision for Christ through this French-language website. About 2.5% of its visitors have Muslim backgrounds. The ministry has a network of seven hundred counselors to offer email mentoring to contacts.

Dutch: http://www.thelife.nl/. This Netherlands site had over twenty thousand unique visitors in a recent three-week period.

Polish: http://www.podprad.pl/. Drawn by the content in Polish, this site has some twenty-five thousand visitors per month.

Romanian: http://www.fitzuica.ro/. Leaders of this site say that the most-read stories are translations of Bible stories related to college life. Over twelve thousand users are registered with the site and more than forty percent use the site to access its articles.

Contrary to an easy assumption, most of the Internet does not operate in English. Just one third of the web uses English,² leaving two-thirds of the seventeen billion web pages of content³ to be in languages other than English. Only twenty percent of the top fifteen Internet-using countries are English-speaking,⁴ leaving fast-growing user countries such as China, Japan and India to supply almost a quarter of the world’s people online. Compare the United State’s portion with the rest of the world’s web users and we are forced to ask this question: How are Christians preparing to present Christ in this massive medium?

According to Tony Whittaker, a leading proponent of web evangelism who has an article elsewhere in this publication, “The web/digital revolution is changing how we think and communicate in ways we are only starting to see.”

Christian web evangelism pioneers are already making advances into this new frontier. Missionaries and national ministries are using a variety of approaches, some of which are described below, in their innovative efforts to harness the communicational power of the web to share the gospel of Christ.

Even now, years after the Internet has become mainstream media in the West, there are relatively few effective outreach sites in the English language. Most Christian websites have been written purely for Christians.

In other languages, the opportunities have hardly been plumbed. For instance, a highly web-literate country like Japan (with seventy-eight million Internet users; 37.4 million of them active users) only has a tiny handful of outreach websites. The potential to reach the 119 million web users in mainland China is vast. And the web offers a vital route to reach many of the 10/40 Window, hard-to-reach countries in the Islamic world, Africa and Asia.

Rev. David Hackett is associate director at visionSynergy, a ministry developing strategic international Christian networks focused on high impact opportunities for world evangelization. See www.powerofconnecting.net for more information.