Lausanne World Pulse – Mobile, Glocal & Evangelism

June 2007

By Jonathan Petersen

Zbible.mobi is ZondervanBibleSearch.com for small screens, allowing users to look up Bible verses and passages from anywhere.

Glocal
The world is flat, seamlessly integrating the local and the global (“glocal”). In his book Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World, Bob Roberts, Jr., says, “We must orientate ourselves to this strange new ‘flat’ world in which we find ourselves—where we’re closer and more connected than ever before.… Glocalization creates a massive opportunity for the church. The world has changed and opened like never before.”

Now is the time for churches and ministries to expand our vision beyond our mainstream websites. If we are going to continue reaching the world with the message of salvation, we must embrace the mobility of the world and communicate with people where they are and in ways expected by those people. Some are already doing this, such as Campus Crusade with “The Four Spiritual Laws”, “Would You Like To Know God Personally?”and “The Spirit-Filled Life”; RBC Ministries with “Our Daily Bread”; and Back to the Bible with “Lessons on Living”. Another method is what Words of Hope is doing: using text messaging to share the hope of Jesus with citizens of countries that are closed to the open sharing of the gospel.

According to an article by Walt Wilson in the March 2007 issue of Christian Computing Magazine, deep social change is about to happen because of mobile technology, altering the habits of how people listen to music, get information, blog and pay for purchases. Martha Dennis of telecom investors Windward Ventures is quoted as saying, “Babies will be assigned lifetime 12-digit phone numbers at birth. Money will no longer be used” as cell phones become the conduit of transactions.

Mobility and Ministry
Some ministry organizations have already seen the burgeoning power of mobility and have channeled their resources there. Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, offers a sermon, worship times, meditative reflections and directions to the church on its mobile website. The Coptic Orthodox Church Network offers a Bible verse of the day for subscribers’ cell phones. The Church of Christ in Singapore uses a mobile site to communicate with its members about prayer concerns, news, mission updates, service information and contact help.

Tony Whittaker heads up InternetEvangelismDay.com and is keeper of www.web-evangelism.com which has a helpful mobile device component. He suggests churches produce evangelistic video clips that people can share with their friends on their cell phones, and text messaging that integrates the timeless gospel with timely and relevant current events.

Associate director of visionSynergy.net (a collaboration ministry think-tank), Rev. Dave Hackett, is the co-facilitator of mobilev, a mobile evangelism wiki. He says with such strides in technology as Microsoft’s pending release of Deepfish and Google’s site for optimizing any website for mobile functionality, mobile Internet surfing is only going to expand. He points out that 6.2 million people already watch video clips on their phones, up from 2.5 million in early 2006, according to the consulting firm Telephia.

“If you want to see where mobile evangelism and use is heading, look to Korea,” recommends Hackett. “Churches there have done far more to adapt to the Internet age than Western churches.” According to the World Factbook, twenty-six percent of South Korea’s forty-nine million people are Christian. “Several Korean churches have homepages just for cell phones so visitors and members can receive messages from the pastor, information about church events and more,” says Hackett. “And they have studios inside their churches where they produce Christian videos to stream over the Web and to cell phones.” An active Korean Christian website he recommends is www.Godpia.com that includes a mobile evangelism section.

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Jonathan Petersen is director of Internet Marketing for Zondervan. He has worked in network broadcast journalism, print journalism, media relations, corporate reputation management, strategic marketing, retail and direct marketing, Internet marketing, customer relationship management and speech writing. Prior to Zondervan, he was founding religion news editor for United Press International Radio Network in Washington, D.C. (USA). He can be reached at [email protected].