Keith Seabourn

Weng Kong in Japan has launched an internet ministry plan with partner evangelical ministries to use the Narnia movie, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe which will be released next year. They expect it to be very popular in Japan.

Andrey in Ukraine is working with Alex in Ukraine, Eric in France, and Tom and Jerry in Hungary to produce a Russian language evangelistic website.

Kxxxxx in a country in the Middle East is encouraging every staff member build a personal evangelistic website. When they share their faith with someone, they will give them a card with their personal website address and encourage the person to visit the site.

Oumar in Mali has taught his campus director to use email to followup females he cannot meet with personally.

Hans in Germany has launched a project to create an evangelistic website for university students. See the English U.S. version at EveryStudent.com.

What do all these have in common?

Read our May newsletter online about MinistryNet: Budapest 2005. Sixty seven people from 27 countries came to Budapest, Hungary in April to interact with fellow web ministers as we explored how use the internet to engage people so we can help them with their relationship with God.

Soon after the conference, someone asked me, “Was MinistryNet a success?” I told them that the conference was a successful event, but to ask me again in a year if we had succeeded in mobilizing more internet missionaries who embrace timely communication tools to share the timeless message of John 3:16.

However, I don’t think the Lord intends for us to wait a year. In the past few weeks, I’ve heard these amazing stories from Oumar, Hans, Andrew, Weng Kong, and others. In the 12 weeks since MinistryNet, evangelistic outreach projects based on MinistryNet principles of internet ministry are exploding around the world. Amazing. God is so faithful in mobilizing laborers for the harvest.

I read this recently and thought it had some good practical advice for us all.

• Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.
• Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
• A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
• Remind yourself that birthdays are good for you: The more you have, the longer you live.
• Drive carefully. It’s not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
• If you can’t be kind, at least have the decency to be vague or silent.
• If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
• Never buy a car you can’t push.
• Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won’t have a leg to stand on.
• When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
• You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
• Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
• Don’t cry because it’s over: Smile because it happened.
• We could learn a lot from crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull; some have weird names, some have ragged wrappers, and all are different from each other but they all have to live in the same box together.
• Happiness often comes through doors you didn’t even know you left open.

Thanks to Sermon Fodder for these insights!
Keith

I read an interesting quote this morning.

American missionary and martyr Jim Elliot reflected in his journal: “When it comes time to die, make sure that all you have to do is die.” Source: WitandWisdom.

It’s an interesting thought. I remember reading biographies of early American heroes during my teen years. I was surprised that some would come to the end of their life and say something like, “If I could only life my life again, I would do it differently.”

I think this may be what Jim Elliot was reflecting on. When it comes time to die, there should be no regrets, nothing we wish we had said, nothing we truly wish we had done.

That’s my prayer today. That I’ll live my life so that when it’s time to die, all I have left to do is to die.

MinistryNet has begun. We launched last night. We have 67 people from 26 countries. Yesterday Kay and I went to church with Oumar from Mali, Jeengul from Kyrgyzstan and Richard from Singapore. We walked to the conference meeting last night with Kamel from Jordan and Eric from France. We ate breakfast this morning with Andrey and Ella from Ukraine, and talked about their 6 and 3 year old children.

Some of the MinistryNet participants are blogging several times throughout the day. You can check
http://ministrynet.blogspot.com/
regularly throughout the day to see what is happening, get summaries of what each speaker is saying, and pray for our time together.

Kay and I are so blessed to meet people from around the world, who are bound together by a commitment to spend their lives helping make sure everyone knows someone who truly follows Jesus.

This item on the history and future of the internet came out in today in Tony Whittaker’s Web Evangelism Guide. It’s an 8 minute presentation. The facts from 1994 to 2005 are accurate. The projections for the next 10 years (2005 to 2014) are based on directions from the internet of the past 10 years.

It’s a very amazing, thought-provoking presentation. I encourage everyone to watch it. Pay special attention to the growing role of social networks and personalization. I thought the ending thoughts of “It’s what we wanted. It’s what we chose.” is very powerful.

What if this perspective plays out fairly accurately? The issue is not whether it’s right or wrong (personalized, use of private info, somewhat invasive use of info from your social network to further personalize your experience, etc.). The issue is what if it does work out this way? What can we do to make sure there is spiritual truth included in the powerful information engines that drive content at people. What if the world’s population decides that giving up personal privacy is worth it for the quality of information we can receive?

I remember watching a Francis Schaeffer film series How Should We Then Live? in the 1980’s. The series was a similar thing, taking the past and using it to project the future world and asking Christians how should we then live to be ready. In it, Shaeffer said that people will give up all rights as long as they are guaranteed two things — personal peace and affluence. People will submit to authoritarian police states to guarantee safety (personal peace). Personal peace and affluence. Sounds much like personalized information and easy life through access to info, even if it’s not accurate. Personalized is more important than accurate, more important than free.

What should we be doing today to make sure the gospel is accessable to people through these powerful information engines that we see developing?