Citizenship Confusion: Online Evangelism?

Every Monday in Citizenship Confusion, Alan Noble discusses how we confuse our heavenly citizenship with citizenship to the state, culture, and the world.

Due to some family medical problems (nothing “serious,” but plenty inconvenient), I did not have the time to write a column this weekend; so, rather than skip this week entirely, I’ve decided to feature an old CaPC article that I am proud of, an article that most of you would probably never find on the site otherwise. As I’ve said before, this is “my way of fighting the ephemerality of web content.”

On October the 24th, 2008, I published an article entitled, Proclaiming the Gospel, One Forum at a Time. In it, I started to work through the question of what it meant to proclaim the Gospel in online communities:

“If we are called to proclaim the Gospel to all nations, and if message boards, forums, and Internet groups allow us to easily reach people all over the world, how should we use these tools to fulfill the Great Commission?”

Many evangelicals feel called to evangelize online, but their methods suggest that little thought has been paid to what it ought to look like to be a witness in a digital public forum. Specifically, my concern is that the Internet invites poorly conceived, arrogant, trivial, ineffective witnessing because of how easy it is to enter dialogue with non-Christians online and to avoid the very real consequences of ungracious speech. The result of this technology has been a flourishing of absurd and ugly attempts at spreading the Gospel or “defending” the Faith:

“Go to nearly any predominate site on the Internet which allows the users to create groups or start discussion forums, and you will find groups devoted to proving the existence of God, threads dealing with the problem of evil, commenters declaring why the Jews need Christ, discussions explaining why atheism leads to immorality and anarchy, and why the Mormons are all going to hell.”

Despite being written nearly three and a half years ago, I think the article still offers something. Take a read:  Proclaiming the Gospel, One Forum at a Time.