Back in 1996, as an unpaid servant, I was blessed to start the Internet ministry at Ginghamsburg Church, in Tipp City, Ohio, USA. When I began, I had not built a website before and knew little about how it might be used at a church. I started the ministry because I felt in my heart that God wanted me to do this and that the web was going to be an incredibly powerful tool for ministry. Plus, I love computers. What could be more fun than doing computer stuff for the Kingdom? It is a “match made in heaven.”
Working evenings and weekends I spent much of the next year learning about building websites. I found a church brochure and typed it into my computer. I used one of those old hand operated scanners to scan in the church logo from the brochure. I then spent hours trying to fix it so it did not look like I scanned it in. Somehow I was able to create the first pages of the website by typing the HTML in a text editor and mostly messing up a lot. For that time and my skill level, I guess the initial website looked sort of okay. At least it was colorful at a time when some websites were still black text on a gray background. However, I’d be embarrassed to show it to you now.
Growing Team
As the ministry grew, we added many other unpaid servants to the team. They brought additional skills, passions, and available time. We added online communities. We recorded our sermons on VHS tape, digitized them, and put them online in streaming video and also in text format. Before I knew it, we had about 30 unpaid servants and our website had over 1000 pages. It was fairly well visited for a church website. According to the website statistics, people were coming to the website from around the world from over 30 different countries. As time went on, the website continued to grow by over one page per day and the number of visitors increased.
In March of 1999, I came on staff one day per week as the Director of CyberMinistry. Around that time, I also began speaking at conferences on what I call “CyberMinistry” and I became known as the “Church CyberGuy.” Newspapers including the Wall Street Journal and the Dallas Morning Sun featured our website. A local television station in Columbus, Ohio did a news story about our video sermons, and we were even mentioned on Fox News. Technology was evolving. Visitors were using faster modems and some had broadband connections. We used Microsoft FrontPage to edit pages mostly because it was inexpensive, but some of the team used Dreamweaver.
Growing Impact
Today, our main church website has over 4000 pages. We have sermons in text, Flash video and audio MP3 podcasts. We also have Bible studies and a weekly poll question. We now record video on DV tape and provide high-bandwidth sermon video. The streaming video makes disk space requirements grow by over 50 Megabytes per week. The website occupies over 40 Gigabytes of disk space. We have migrated from using tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver to a powerful Content Management System called TYPO3.
And we have added many active features such as the Prayer Exchange for prayer requests, and the E-Candle which was originally created as a response to the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States. The staff and a team of unpaid servants produce a daily devotional called the Transformation Journal (TJ) that includes a personal journal, and online community. The TJ is free and people all over the world use it. We have a youth version too called Fuel. We also have other websites to promote special ministry initiatives like the Sudan Project.
As a result, the website receives over 70,000 visits each month. About 50 unpaid servants now help in its production along with two other paid staff. But far more important than raw statistics and growth, through these many different online features we are seeing lives transformed. Through the teaching and the people-to-people connections made, people are introduced to Jesus and saved, and Christians are developing a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. That is our mission.
Web-Empowered Church
In February 2004, the excitement and the calling was too great so I left my job as a senior engineer at a large technology company and went into full-time ministry as Director or CyberMinistry and Technology at Ginghamsburg Church. Shortly after, with the sponsorship of the Foundation for Evangelism I was blessed to start a new ministry called Web-Empowered Church (WEC). The mission of WEC is to innovatively apply WEB technology to EMPOWER the worldwide CHURCH for ministry. WEC is developing powerful web software that you can use on your church or ministry website to enhance evangelism, discipleship, and care. Through WEC, just about all the active features on the Ginghamsburg Church website are available for all churches to use, and many more features are in planned. And the WEC software is open source and costs you nothing. Yes, it is free!
The WEC software runs on a web server on the public Internet. It allows you to create and maintain your website, and to add powerful ministry features. The software has special web pages that allow you to do all this from a standard web browser. No additional software is required on your computer. With a proper username and password, you can make updates to your website from any computer connected to the Internet. The WEC software uses a powerful Content Management System (CMS) called TYPO3, which is also open source and free to use. TYPO3 is developed by a community led by a Christian from Denmark named Kasper Skårhøj. TYPO3 also supports multiple different languages and installation of WEC ministry extensions as well as many other TYPO3 extensions. An extension is an active feature like a prayer system or a calendar. Ginghamsburg and other churches around the world use WEC-TYPO3 software.
I believe ministries like the Internet Evangelism Coalition and Web-Empowered Church are a part of a large worldwide movement of the Holy Spirit that is prompting us all to use technology to share Jesus with the world.
