Reaching Out Online

Last week I met with Kristen Glass, the director of young adult ministry for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Kristen runs a great website for ELCA young adults, and we talked at length about how to use the Internet to reach out to this generation. 

Kristen recognized that her church needed to have a strong presence online in order to reach young people from the "Google generation." But she didn't want to have just another "nameless, faceless" website. So Kristen enlisted a handful of young adults who were living out their faith commitments in different ways  - teaching, studying, serving - to blog about their experiences. The real stories of their blogs have provided a very successful way to reach both young adults and those who minister to them.

Kristen and I talked about the fact that church leaders have often been hesitant to embrace the Internet as a tool for ministry - because it is difficult to monitor or control, and because there is real fear about what can be found online. But evangelization - preaching the Gospel wherever it needs to be proclaimed, to the ends of the earth - has always involved going to where people are. Jesus never hesitated to go out and get his hands dirty among the real people of his time. So too are we called to meet people where they are today (which increasingly is online) and invite them into our communities of faith.

Kristen has a great perspective on the question of using the Internet in ministry. She wisely noted that the Internet itself is not dangerous or something to be feared; instead, it is people without appropriate boundaries who cause problems online, and such people have been a problem (for our societies and our churches) for thousands of years! So we cannot let such people dictate our work to the extent that we would shy away from an important tool for ministry - especially for reaching young adults who go immediately to the Internet as their first source for answering questions and connecting with others. 

What do you think? 

Should our churches be online? How should this be monitored? What can come - good and bad - of having a presence on the Internet?