The 2004 Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year is "blog," and this year has seen the launch of a handful of blogs talking about doing online ministry (including this one, the eQuip blog, which launched in May 2004):

• www.churchmarketingsucks.com
• www.e-vangelism.com
• www.eministrynotes.com
• www.greatchurchwebsites.org
• mediastrategy.blogspot.com
  
• www.strategicdigitaloutreach.com
  

Churches and Christians now have a great set of resources to stay equipped for online ministry, joining veteran online witnesses like:

• www.web-evangelism.com
• www.internetevangelism.net
• www.healyourchurchwebsite.com

What else can we do here to encourage and equip your online ministry? Add your comment online or send an email to djchuang@forministry.com . We look forward to hearing from you!

This week's tsunamis and earthquakes has tragically affected millions in 12 South Asian countries. This is a list of trusted humanitarian organizations responding to the crisis. (This list is by no means complete or exhaustive of all worthy organizations.) [List is courtesy of Sojourners' SojoMail, found via Asian American Center.]

Catholic Relief Service

Christian Aid

Church World Service

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Lutheran World Relief

Mennonite Central Committee

Mercy Corps

World Relief

World Vision

Yesterday at the Impact Movement conference, I met the father-and-son team who had recently launched www.christianhangsuite.com - an urban web portal for young adult Christians around the world. ChristianHangSuite.com has more than thirty different sections for Christian news and information, including Event Listings, Prayer and Worship, Business and Career, Audio Sermons, Studio Session, Lifestyle, Commentary, Churches listing, and more. They've started with Washington DC, and they hope to expand their services in the future to other cities, like New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more.

www.strategicdigitaloutreach.com explores the various ways that today's Internet technology can be used to spread the Gospel, providing regular articles about internet strategies and storytelling. Its resource section has valuable & thoughtful white papers: Effective Church Websites For Emerging Generations, A Strategy For Local Internet Outreach, and The Internet: Friend Or Foe For Christians?

LeaderU is an abbreviation for Leadership University, CLM's (Christian Leadership Ministries) flagship Web site and one of the most successful Christian Internet projects ever. LeaderU was developed with the purpose of providing free online access to a thoughtful, scholarly Christian worldview on any topic or issue. LeaderU houses more than 8,000 resources in an "online library" or resource center which address hundreds of topics. Many university faculty have found LeaderU content useful as course bibliography or additional reading. The changing homepage special regularly features a focus on current issues.

While History Channel presents its secular perspective in "The History of Christmas" on cable television and its Website, and companies advertise their Christmas & holiday sales, I wondered what churches and Christians were doing online to celebrate and to share the message of Christmas -- besides promoting their own Christmas programs at their local churches.

Www.ChristmasInCyberspace.com/ celebrates Christmas in Cyberspace from a Christian perspective, ChristianAnswers.net has a large Web page with lots of articles and information about Christmas, and About.com has its share of articles about Advent and Christmas.

A very popular portal (perhaps the most popular in the world) for relevant information about the holiday, shopping, and the spiritual truth of Christmas is Christmas.com. Online since 1995, it presents a clear message of Christmas under its first navigation menu labeled "Faith & Spirituality" and links to charitable organizations under "Giving", along with other seasonal information. Overall, it's an engaging way to introduce the Christ of Christmas amidst all the holiday festivities.

Merry Christmas one and all!

www.christianforums.com is the 19th most active web-based message board on the Internet, according to www.big-boards.com (a statistics tracker for message boards). With over 95,000 registered members and over 1,000,000 discussion threads, a lot of conversations from around the world are happening at the largest Christian message board!

www.off-the-map.org is an incredibly resourceful website run by Jim Henderson. The website is packed full of free resources, especially notable are videos of interviews with non-Christians, average normal people. Sometimes being an actively involved Christian can shelter us from the conventional thoughts of everyday people, and this website helps us to get back in touch.

www.FollowTheRabbi.com is a spectacular website with faith lessons, datafiles, and visually attractive information about Jesus Christ, the Hebrew culture, and the land of Israel. The link labeled "How to Navigate This Site" gives a nice overview to using that website; a great idea!

Church Business article titled Ministry Websites That Work: Today's content management technology makes it easy to keep up with the Joneses opens with "the Web is often the first impression a congregation gives to newcomers and the communicative bond that ties parishioners together".

Compare this article with the excellent white paper by Frank Johnson titled "Effective Church Websites For Emerging Generations" over at Strategic Digital Outreach.

These articles explore the issues around defining and serving a website's audience. Also, GreatChurchWebsites Forum, there's been a great discussion going on this very topic: Does every church need two websites.

www.faithteen.com is a monthly e-zine for Catholic teens, based on Faith Magazine. Both are produced by the Diocese of Lansing (Michigan) with great looking visuals and contemporary graphic design. (However, the magazines haven't been updated since October.)

Compare and contrast with: By Faith Online (web magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America), Sight Magazine (a church-based magazine by a cell-based church in Australia), Next Wave www.the-next-wave.org, United Church Observer, and The Living Church archives at www.livingchurch.org/archiveframed.asp.

Faith and Wisdom is a cooperative project of seven North American Christian denominations. Its purpose is to serve leaders in church and society by assembing information about the best learning opportunities available at seminaries, colleges, lifelong learning centers, retreat centers and para-church organizations throughout the world.

Denominations that are a part of this cooperative project: The Episcopal Church (USA), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), The Presbyterian Church in Canada, United Church of Canada United Church of Canada, United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church.

What could happen if churches and Christians in your area worked together?

Since May 2004, eQuip blog has highlighted ideas and examples of online ministry, and also trends and statistics about Internet use. Many links are offered with minimal commentary in order to present the data, allow it to speak for itself, and to allow you to draw your own insights. Once in a while, I'll take a moment to offer my personal commentary.

When I use the term "online ministry", it refers to any spiritual activity faciliated over the Internet, primarily the World Wide Web. This means most of the links refer to websites, with an occasional reference to mailing lists and listservs, and a rare reference to web apps (web-based applications). Often times, this activity is the distribution of content, sometimes it is the interactive dialogue of conversations.

Online ministry can serve many different audiences (cf. Peter Drucker's great question, "Who is your customer?") -- the range can be any or several of these: non-Christians, seekers, new Christians, growing Christians, Christian ministry leaders & pastors, theologians, and/or Christian organizational leaders. All this is to say that while there may be strong interest in Internet evangelism among many, there is also a important role for Web strategies that serve a local church or a specific group of Christians.

Here are some of Leonard Sweet's favorite "INTERNET CHURCHES" in the United States, who are "pioneering Web ministries" rather than Web pages:

Covenant Community Church - www.touchandchange.com
Bethel Temple, Evansville, IN - www.zchurch.com
Calvary Chapel, Albuquerque, NM - www.calvaryabq.org
Church of the Servant, Oklahoma City, OK - www.umcservant.org
Fellowship Church, Grapevine, TX - www.FellowshipChurch.org
Fellowship of the Woodlands, The Woodlands, TX - www.fotw.org
Ginghamsburg Church, Tipp City, OH - www.ginghamsburg.org
Granger Community Church, Granger, IL - www.gccwired.com
Horizon Christian Fellowship, San Deigo, CA - www.horizonsd.org
Kensington Community Church, Tory MI - www.kensingtoncc.org
Jesus Fellowship, Miami, FL - www.jf.org
Lakewood Church, Houston, TX - www.lakewood.cc
Life Church, Edmond, OK - www.lifechurch.tv
Mariners South Coast Chruch, Irvine, CA - www.marinerschurch.org
North Coast Church, Vista, CA - www.northcoastchurch.com
New Hope Christian Fellowship, Honolulu, HI - www.eNewHope.org
North Point Community Church, Alpharetta, GA - www.northpoint.org
Potter's House Church, Dallas, TX - www.thepottershouse.org
Saddleback Community Church, Lake Forest, CA - www.saddleback.com
Salem Baptist Church, Chicago, IL - www.sbcoc.org
Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, KY - www.southeastchristian.org
Vineyard Church of Columbus, Columbus, OH - www.vineyardcolumbus.org
Vineyard Community Church, Cincinnati, OH - www.cincyvineyard.com
Willow Creek Community, South Barrington, IL - www.willowcreek.com
World Changers Church, College Park, GA - www.worldchangers.org

SermonCentral.com currently has about 10,000 subscribers interested in finding help with 50,000 sermons accessible on-line, 10,000 illustrations ready to fit into a text, and 500 dramas. Would you believe the site averages 200,000 users a week?

Another way to share sermons is to do it freely -- 2 fundamentalist Christian websites diligently preach the word, literally: www.sermonaudio.com hosts over 50,000 MP3 audio sermons and www.sermonindex.net has over 6,000 audio/video sermons.

This National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) magazine article, The 21st Century Church: Ministry Through Media by Ginny McCabe [PDF format] features 5 churches using both online (Internet) and offline (multimedia) technologies for ministry:

• Fellowship Church (Grapevine, TX)
• Eastern Star Church (Indianapolis, IN)
• Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church (Dayton, OH)
• United Methodist Church of The Resurrection (Leawood, KS)
• NorthStar Church (Kennesaw, GA)

The article also offers some great tips in a section titled "Resource 411: Tips for Smaller Churches from ChurchMedia.Net". A good thing to consider is to have visual communications for the website and the on-site & in-person presentations match consistently.

www.cmug.org is the website for the Christian Macintosh Users Group, for the 7% of visitors here who are using the Mac. While, in many respects, the Mac is an easier-to-use computer and nicer looking, Apple (company behind the Mac) has had a difficult time increasing their "market share" in the personal computer market. 2 big things to keep in mind when doing online ministry and building websites: be careful to be inclusive of various computer platforms (PC and Mac) and Web browsers (MSIE and Firefox). Granted, it's easier to check for browser compatibility (a free download) than to check for computer compatibility. :)

The Evangelism Toolbox is a deep, vertical portal site that's becoming one of the premier Internet websites for locating evangelistically-related materials in many formats & languages. It is often a top search result using keywords like "evangelism" or "evangelism resources" on popular search engines like www.Google.com. The website provides believers with 'just-in-time' delivery of text to use in sharing their faith, as well as other resources that can help them fulfill their part in the Great Commission.

Here's a different way of doing an online dialogue by Pastor Mark Roberts of Irvine Presbyterian Church (Irvine, California). Back and Forth: An Interactive Web-based Conversation posts a topic periodically to invite discussion via email, with the discussion posted as comments on that page after review. The first topic up for discussion is based on Pastor Roberts' article "A Biblical Vision: Partners in Ministry," published in Worship Leader. Many other resources are available at his website, www.markdroberts.com, including articles, books, sermons, and his blog.

David Gillaspey continues to come up with great ideas at Great Church Websites (www.greatchurchwebsites.org) and has recently launched a web-based discussion forum, the Great Church Websites E-Ministry Forum. Now we have a place to talk and dialogue about building church websites and doing online ministry!

eQuip interviewed David Gillaspey back in August 2004, and since that time, he's made steady progress in reviewing more church websites and adding new features. My favorite new feature is Extreme Makeovers, showing a before & after snapshot along with a description of a church website redesign.

www.congregationalresources.org was created by the Alban Institute and the Indianapolis Center for Congregations to help congregational leaders connect with resources they need to gain insight into problems and to encourage transformation in their communities of faith.

The Congregational Resource Guide offers hundreds of free annotated resource recommendations: articles, Web sites, news sources, organizations, books, periodicals, special reports, online topical explorations, learning pathways and more. Chosen by resource experts with the specific needs of congregations and their leaders in mind, the site contains more than 800 annotated resources organized into 10 major categories. (The website is a free gift funded by Lilly Endowment Inc.)

Christianity Today magazine's cover article, "New York's New Hope", describes notable efforts by street-smart churches towards making a spiritual impact in America's largest city.

Serving such a large city can be done better through a coordinated effort by churches and ministries working together. A website describing some of the efforts of such partnerships is www.newhopenewyork.com, a website that is multi-lingual and interactive. Linked prominently with www.praynewyork.com to mobilize Christians to pray, it's a wonderful integration of the Internet with on-the-ground efforts.

Another notable city-wide ministry effort coordinated with a website is www.indychristian.com for Indianapolis, and a great resource for implementing coordinated efforts to reach a city is www.cityreaching.com.

This article titled, "LifeWay survey explores ‘Top 10 Issues Facing Today’s Church’" describes an online research project launched in November by the e-business department of LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention. Thousands of Christian ministry leaders of various denominations across the United States and around the world are being queried by e-mail to cite the most important issues affecting their ministries. Ministry leaders can submit their responses via an online survey form at http://www.LifeWay.com/Top10survey/ .

A great example of using the Internet to learn how better to serve and address important issues for an audience. ForMinistry Web Builder has custom forms to enable its websites to survey and to learn about its audience. A custom form titled "Ask a Question" is used here on the eQuip blog in the right column.