Lausanne World Pulse – WORLD PERSPECTIVES – The Twenty-first Century Roman Road–Signposts along the Way

By Tony Whittaker

The EveryStudent.com site receives non-web publicity on campuses, being promoted by Campus Crusade staffers and Christian students using T-shirts, contact cards and word of mouth. Kristi is one of many who found Christ at this site.

The other main option is to use the “Bridge Strategy,” which focuses on building websites around a starting point of secular interest or felt need. This is a major biblical key to reaching the millions who would never dream of searching for Christian content and it enables Christians to target any affinity group of people.²

It is an application of the biblical principle of 1 Corinthians 9:19-23, and illustrates the Schram concept of effective communication.

Bridging Examples
The Bridge Strategy can apply to almost any topic. For instance, WomenTodayMagazine.com addresses many life issues that women face. Because the same team produces an outwardly similar site called ChristianWomenToday.com, we have a powerful case study. At first glance some Christians might assume this to be an outreach site—with its homepage links to Bible study and prayer. In fact, the site is designed primarily for Christians. By comparing the communication methods of each site, we can learn many lessons.³

Editor Claire Colvin of the TruthMedia.com team shares,

It seems so obvious that a Christian site is not necessarily an evangelistic site. One of the biggest barriers that stops a site from being truly evangelistic is language. One thing you’ll notice on the Women Today site is a lack of Christian terminology. You don’t see words like church, pray, salvation, holy, sanctified, born again or repent. Instead, you find articles written from a Christian perspective but presented in regular English.

Colvin goes on, “How can you expect people to hear your message if you speak a language they don’t understand? I think this is hard for many of us who were raised in the church because these words are so familiar. It’s important to remember that an evangelistic website is not about us, or what is comfortable and familiar to us. An outreach site is all about helping the gospel make sense to our audience, using the words and examples, format and tone that make it easy for them to listen and understand. I think we have a great example of this in Christ (big surprise!). When he preached he could have pulled out every theology term in the book and made himself sound very learned in the process, but that’s not what he did. He told stories, he used simple parables to explain the wonders of God to human beings. He didn’t change the truth; he spoke it plainly. And people responded. This is why we have two separate websites. On Christian Women Today we can have a section called Prayer and Online Bible Studies and it’s very effective because we are speaking to an audience for whom these terms have meaning. In Women Today Magazine we approach things differently. We give people a reason to want to listen to us, to speak to them where they are and as we are speaking to their situation we will tell them about Christ in words that they understand.”

Blogs and Other Innovations
Blogs are a specialized diary-style of website, rarely used for evangelism, yet potentially very effective. Check three outreach examples at http://ied.gospelcom.net/blogging.php.

In the future we may see short evangelistic video clips for mobile phones passed “virally” from friend to friend. And the invention of “electronic paper” promises new options for sharing presentations.

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Tony Whittaker is editor of the Web Evangelism Guide and accompanying twice-monthly newsletter, Web Evangelism Bulletin. He is part of SOON Ministries (a branch of WEC International) which produces outreach literature in English, French, Fula, African-Portuguese and Swahili.