In Depth:  Stephen Doggett

This column has been going for a few years now, time enough for your reviewer to have figured out a few personal pros and cons about the internet. Here are a few observations.

Sometimes cyberspace can be a real frustration. Logging on can be a disappointing experience. It’s too easy to waste time online.

This August the World Wide Web was 15 years old.

Britain’s Observer newspaper, commemorating this event, likened the influence the web has had on the world with that of Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of movable-type printing, which enabled the Bible to be mass-produced (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1843263,00.html).

There are similarities. Both inventions have brought about massive cultural and social revolutions by taking knowledge and power away from an elite and giving it to the masses. But whereas the former empowered people by opening their eyes and teaching them how they should live, the latter is arguably less impressive, governed as it is by the user’s own whims.

Regular readers of this column may recall the inaugural International Evangelism Day (IED) launched last year by the Internet Evangelism Coalition (IEC), an umbrella group of Christian ministries based at the Billy Graham Center in Illinois, to promote the internet as a tool for evangelism.

The second IED is scheduled to take place this year on Sunday May 7. So the IEC hopes that the day will serve to encourage churches worldwide to consider how they can develop or support web-based ministries. The organisers have created http://ied.gospelcom.net/publicity.php#news with various resources to inform churches about the potential of the internet and includes specific material which can be incorporated into church services or notice sheets on or around May 7.

When was the last time you came across a website all about aircraft? Chances are that you never have, unless you have specifically searched for one. And that’s despite the fact that there are five million sites dedicated to flying machines.

This is the type of question that a group of internet evangelists hope to raise in churches across the world during a special focus day on April 24. Only the problems with which they are concerned are not those of the aviation enthusiast but how to get the non-believer to view Christian websites? And, even if they did, how to get them to stay long enough to learn something of the gospel?

A survey of the Open Brethren, conducted in 1998 but published last year, reveals a movement increasingly unsure of its past and much less sure of its future.

A precipice has appeared before them. Those churches, typically the smallest, seeking to maintain the traditions of the last 170 years are rapidly falling off the edge. The larger churches, casting off much of what they once were, have arrested their fall only by grasping hold of the wider evangelical world.