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Gospel Online

January 28, 1997

Original Article can be found at http://www.cbn.org/news/stories/970128.htm

Copied here in it's entirety, so we could make some notes... Anything we've added will on a colored background (If you are using a recent browser). The 700 Club has a wonderful Internet ministry. We highly recommend you visit their site, after you've finished looking around here... Be sure to bookmark us before you go, so you can find us again.

Computers are revolutionizing the way we do business and the way we view our world. And now access to the Internet is opening up far-reaching possibilities for spreading the gospel.

Tod Freeman, reporter

What's the most popular draw on the Internet? News? Sports? Sex? Well, the truth is religion is tops on the Net, and specifically, Christianity. Quentin Schultze is author of the book "The Internet for Christians."

"1997 is the year that the Internet is becoming vital in the spiritual lives of many believers and vital in the ministries of many organizations," Schultze said.

A recent Time cover story dubbed this phenomena Jesus Online, saying that when it comes to online inquiries Jesus is even more popular than Microsoft's Bill Gates. Conservative estimates indicate 20 percent of Americans have access to the Internet, about 35 million of us. The average age of online users is 36, with almost half of all users between 30 and 49 years of age.

As online traffic grows, cybersaints are rising up to meet the need.

We had the inspiration to do up The Virtual Perfect Church. Here it is. Hopefully, it's the start of something great. There are lots of ways it can become better. Now it's up to you. The Virtual Perfect Church needs your input to grow and Glorify God in all the ways it is meant to. Learn more about how you can help.

Robbie Richardson is with the Gospel Communications Network, a server for Christian Web sites.

"This is always fascinating to me," said Robbie Richardson of the Gospel Communications Research. "This shows where the hits are coming from. We have from the United Arab Emirates we've had 2,053 requests for files already in the month of January; from Australia, 35,000. You can go down through here and see various countries. We have heard from somewhere close to 175 different countries."

Any ministries we can use The Virtual Perfect Church for will reach around the world!!!

Every month more than 10 million hits or visitors stop by the Gospel Communications Network site, ranking it among the top 2 percent of all Web sites on the Internet worldwide. And the number of ministries on the Gospel Communications Network is growing almost weekly.

Gospelcom has a wonderful Internet ministry. We highly recommend you visit their site, after you've finished looking around here... Be sure to bookmark us before you go, so you can find us again.

When you think of the Radio Bible Class, you probably think of their program "Day of Discovery" or their daily devotional "Our Daily Bread," but the Radio Bible Class is much more than printing presses and television programs. In fact, here in Grand Rapids, the Radio Bible Class has seized on the latest computer technology. Every month more than two million people from around the world visit their Internet home page.

The Internet is the only place that I know of where people can see RBC Ministries in its totality and see that we're not only a print media but we're also an electronic media," said Wiley Stinnett, director of marketing for RBC. "We're also television. We're also radio."

Wiley Stinnett is director of marketing for RBC Ministries. The most popular site visited on their home page is the devotional "Our Daily Bread." What makes RBC's home page so successful is that the information is timely. For example, to find out today's devotional, simply pull up this month's calendar, click on today's date and read "Our Daily Bread" devotional for today.

But there's even more than text. Uncle Charlie and his "Children's Bible Hour" have ministered over the radio waves for more than 40 years. Now Uncle Charlie can be heard anywhere, any time of the day, right on the Internet.

Even many local churches now have Web sites complete with outlines and audio sermons. And coming in February, you'll be able to join the first Cyberchurch, appropriately called the Church on the Web, complete with a pastor, a youth ministry and even a bookstore. Its audience -- shut-ins and those in the far-reaching corners of the globe without access to a conventional church but with access to the information superhighway.

The above paragraph does not refer to The Virtual Perfect Church.

"Frankly, you can reach a lot of people online that you cannot reach through other media, particularly the generation Xers and the baby boomers who are online in droves--if not from their home, at work," Stinnett said.. "And you can't reach these people with regular Christian radio and TV."

The Internet is the next frontier for evangelism, reaching places and people that conventional approaches can't.

"I call the Internet the open gospel. By that, I mean you cannot really effectively stop these digital signals that are going out all over," Stinnett said. "They go through phone lines. They go over the air in remote areas. They can be printed out. I think in some respects what we have with the Internet is the gospel going out across political and economic boundaries in ways that other media were not so effectively able to do."

We hope this article has given you some jabi's... Opened your mind to some of the possibilities of what we could do with The Virtual Perfect Church. Remember, we need your help and ideas to help us grow into the type of ministry the 700 Club is talking about in this article . We removed their navigation map, because we couldn't make it work form our site.

Copyright & 1997 by The Christian Broadcasting Network, Inc. of this page and all contents. All Rights Reserved.

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