This Internet thing is not going away. All media—television, telephone, email, web—is converging and it’s showing up everywhere. God never commanded us to go hide in a corner and block the door. God commanded us to go into all the world. The whole *point* of the Internet is to strengthen our bonds to each other and make the planet a bit smaller. One day, God’s going to ask us for an accounting of our time, of our choices. Of the opportunities He has gifted us with. I’m wondering what half-baked excuse we’ll come up with for letting people perish because we’re too lazy to take possession of the territory God has not only promised, but has delivered to us.

It was the first time

I’d ever communicated with the man. “I don’t know who you are or who gave you permission to put us on your website.” A terse, single sentence from a pastor who, apparently, just became aware that his church was listed on the PraiseNet. We’d been supporting and promoting his ministry for four years. When we set up their profile, we'd emailed his church without response (which is typical among black churches), but we liked the church’s goals and mission, and wanted to tell people about it. And we did, for four years. Until last week. No greeting, no giving honor to God, no wishing God’s blessing on our work. Talking to me like he’s the only pastor in the country and I’m, I guess, lint caught in the laundry dryer. It was a self-absorption typical of someone who may certainly have begun his work with the very best of motives but who has, apparently, become way too impressed with himself. That’s the problem with ministry. In early work, there is struggle. Later in life, there is another struggle: to keep that man in the mirror in check. To remember who you are and, more important, Whose you are. This pastor demeaned himself and his ministry by launching into a rude, ignorant rebuke of a ministry that has supported him for four years. That has charged him nothing, not one dime. A ministry that has not made any money—the PraiseNet does not make money, has never made money. The PraiseNet is paid for out of the pockets of the individuals involved and by the support of a very few loyal supporters. Not one dime from this guy, and five years of red ink says we’ve never profited in any way from simply mentioning his ministry and driving traffic to his website.

The problem with success is the danger inherent in surrounding yourself with people who worship you. Worship you more than they worship God. Worship you past your faults, past your mistakes, past behavior that is inconsistent with the personal example of Jesus Christ. Most successful pastors ultimately become insulated from the people they’re trying to minister to, and certainly from the world beyond their doors. I don’t know this man and don’t know what his testimony is. All I know are his actions and what scripture has to say about them. Jesus said the world would know who we are by the love we show to one another. Success in ministry is never an excuse for any of us to start deeming ourselves more important than anyone else. But when you’ve got so many people in your circle telling you your farts don’t stink, after while it’s easy to start believing that. It’s easy to start becoming arrogant and dismissive and acting selfishly and stupidly, violating the loving design of the Christian experience.

People will know who you are by what you do. Not by what you claim. By your actions, by your choices. By your tone. By your patience, by your love. Jesus wasn’t pushy. Jesus wasn’t nasty. Jesus wasn’t full of Himself—though He had every right to be.

Jesus would never have written me some snotty sentence, without a greeting, without love, without even wondering what The PraiseNet is. All of which requires me to question who this man who wrote me is, if he is even a Christian. Silly as it sounds, I promise you, there are many—perhaps shockingly so—pastors out there who are not Christians. Or, again, best case scenario, who have forgotten what being a Christian actually looks like.

Many other pastors I work with don’t seem to understand how the Internet works. The very word “Internet” suggests an “Inter” connection of resources. There’s a reason they call it the world-wide web. A web is an inter-connected latticework of resources. The more resources, the stronger the web. The stronger the web, the more efficient it is. The whole *point* of the Internet is to strengthen our bonds to each other and make the planet a bit smaller. To connect this group of believers with that group of believers, to let people in Chicago know about the wonderful ministry going forth in Florida and Texas. To get pastors in Louisiana working with pastors in Minnesota. We’re not thousands of groups of believers, we are one body. This pastor and his wonderful ministry is part of that body. The purpose of this online ministry is to tell everyone about this pastor, about his ministry, about what’s going on there, and to pray one for another, to support each other.

Most pastors I work with are a lot friendlier, to be sure, but still have this annoying practice of being insular and isolated, demanding I take this link off and that link off their site because “We don’t fellowship with them,” or “We don’t believe in their doctrine,” or “We don’t want to be associated with them because of [insert your trivial nonsense here].” I’m sure you have cousins and so forth in your family that you don’t agree with. You might have relatives you don’t particularly like. But, bottom line: they’re still your family. Push them away all you want, but they’re still family. As Christians, as believers in Jesus Christ, we are all family. Do I subscribe to the Russian Orthodox doctrine? No. Are they welcome here? Certainly. But I resist putting up walls between the ministries profiled here because putting up walls is totally anathema to the PraiseNet’s purpose.

It’s a Praise Net. A Network of Praise. A net comprised of churches, from all over the country, knitted together and communicating, rejoicing, supporting one another. Instead, I get this insane “I, my, me, ours,” stuff. Well, please write this down someplace, pastor: you don’t “have” anything. Everything we own, everything we do, belongs to God. These are God’s resources, intended to be shared among the body according to our needs (Acts 2). This is God’s website. It is designed to communicate, to draw us together. To make us aware of one another. To be transparent—not to just celebrate you and make you the center of the universe.

There’s a reason it’s called a “Web.” There’s a reason this ministry is called a “Net.” It’s a “Network.” Most pastors I know simply miss this concept. They want their little corner of the universe and they want it cut off from everyone else. Pastors: the way the Internet works is not about proprietary content or exclusive rights: it’s about networking. You *want* your web ministry listed on every site you can possibly have it listed on. You *want* people talking about your church, you *want* your church site to be promoted, traffic flowing from one site to another to another and to yours.

The last thing you want is for your online ministry to be isolated, off on its own, huddled in a corner somewhere in the dark. You can’t communicate with anybody that way, and it’s totally opposite to what the INTER-net is all about. Isolationist thinking is anti-biblical and antichrist. It’s Jim Jones thinking. If your ministry is so weak that it can’t stand scrutiny from others, then you have a much bigger problem than me. God never commanded us to go hide in a corner and block the door. God commanded us to go into all the world, to give to one another as we have need. To be one body, united in His love and for His purpose.

Lastly, to my observation, the overwhelming majority of black Christian websites are still-born. Some are quite well done, most are not, but the majority of them are not implemented properly because they are the work of a handful of zealots who embrace and understand this new frontier of the Internet. Most church websites are not embraced by the church pastor. They are supported in a kind of hand-waving dismissive way, but the pastor is not typically engaged with the church’s web ministry, which is why most black online ministries are, frankly, still-born and soulless. The pastor is simply missing in action. His smile, in posed studio photos, seems shallow and insincere because we don’t “feel” him there. He doesn’t show up. He doesn’t post to it. He doesn’t hold any online meetings or even record any video to at least pretend to show up there. Many of these sites post the pastor’s sermons, but Jesus *fed* the people *before* He preached to them. Jesus spent time with the people and got to know the people.

Most black churches refuse to invest either time or money in a web ministry, the majority of shot-callers being older people to whom the Internet is just a big waste of time. A more accurate and truthful cause is these people are simply frightened of the Internet. The Internet is not from their generation. They themselves are not online, many are not even computer literate. It’s like not being able to read. Rather than admit they can’t read, many illiterates go to elaborate extremes to avoid situations where they are publicly forced to read. And, like children, many church folk become hostile to things they do not understand, mainly because they are simply afraid.

Which brings us to the point of the story of Joshua:

When Israel reached the southern border of the land of Canaan, Moses sent twelve men out to spy out the promised land. Joshua and the other eleven spied out the land for forty days. When they returned they all told a glowing story of a land of great fertility and beauty. But ten of them gave an evil report of the land. The people of Israel were very upset at this and voiced their regrets that they had left Egypt and talked about choosing a leader to take them back there.

Joshua and Caleb tore their clothes, a sign of great distress, and said, “Don't fear the people who live in the land, for they are bread for us! The LORD is with us, don't fear them!"

But the people didn't want to hear this, their minds were made up and they didn't want the truth. They prepared to stone Joshua and Caleb and they would have if God had not intervened, suddenly appearing as a glory in the tabernacle of meeting.

Hand-in-hand with Internet fear is Internet laziness. More than simply being afraid of the unknown, many of us are simply too lazy to learn how to use it. Particularly our church leaders, many of them brimming with advanced degrees and calling themselves “Dr.” and so forth, are simply too lazy to go back to school. Most of us are done with school and glad about it. I, personally, hate the fact that, every time Bill Gates gets an itch and starts monkeying around with Internet Explorer, I have to go back to school to learn how to code for it. The truth is, like a doctor, I’ll never be done with school. I have to keep learning, keep growing, keep up with the technology.

But that requires investment. Time, energy, money. I have to be motivated to want to learn this stuff. Most of our church leaders are completely satisfied with the black church’s Monday/Wednesday experience. With the square feet of dirt in front of their buildings. The Internet offers no new horizons to these folks, many of whom have never been on it and know nothing about the Internet other than that there is, apparently, porn out there. A handful of these folks may have tried logging onto a website somewhere but, having misspelled the URL, gotten a 404 error page and threw up their hands, giving up. Barely a month ago, I took a brother into the computer room at a local church here to show him how to use Microsoft Outlook. This brother didn’t know how to turn the PC on.

This is shameful. Computer literacy is now as vital as, well, literacy itself. But, now that I think about it, I’ve seen precious few literacy movements within the black church. With one—count ‘em—one exception, in 46 years I’ve never seen a black church encourage its congregation to read. Not just the Bible, but to read, period. Read books, read newspapers, stay informed, know what’s going on out there. In my personal experience, these are not major concerns of the black church.

Many of our churches talk a good game about community and empowerment and all of that, but in practice, only a fraction of our churches are really invested in the communities in which they are located. A look at the books will show most of the money going to the facility and staff, not to these various efforts, and to generous and often disproportionate packages for the pastors. Intellectual pursuits, arts and sciences are simply not stressed. Reading is rarely even mentioned. 90% of the sermons I hear are not terribly relevant to what’s going on in the world, and current events are rarely discussed from the pulpit. It’s all sing-song hollering about David and Goliath, wonderful homilies to be certain, but many of our pastors receive low marks for speaking truth into our lives because they themselves are simply not dealing with reality on a major level. They are insulated, walled inside safe, comfortable worlds where everyone around them agrees with them—even when they are flatly and obviously wrong—and where everybody turns a blind eye and deaf ear to conduct inconsistent with the personal example of Jesus Christ. These guys are usually well-fed, bills paid, pockets full of cash, increasingly so as the ministry prospers. Which causes the pastors to become increasingly isolated from the real world. In a world made up of this ridiculous bubble of yes-men and free lunch, the pastor becomes increasingly de-sensitized to important matters and challenges his flock faces every day. As the pastor becomes well-fed he ultimately becomes satisfied with the status quo, certainly indifferent and often hostile to much of life outside of the bubble, and completely unmotivated to involve himself in something so oddly exotic as an online ministry.

There is nothing more tragic than a satisfied pastor. This likely accounts for the gross falling away the local church is experiencing, with more and more people flocking to the white mega-churches where they sit in the dark and watch a show. The Watch A Show churches are busting at the seams because, through them, we can emotionally and spiritually check out, abandoning our commitment and responsibility. The things many of these bloated churches are doing right, however, are obvious. In many if not most cases, they are speaking directly to the issues of the day, therefore seeming better informed and more relevant to our daily struggle. And, many if not most of these mega churches have well-designed and active web ministries.

By contrast, most black pastors are simply not online or, if they are, are inexplicably not going to their own websites. If they have a website at all, it’s either a cheesy “free” web page (“free” stuff usually looks it), or a really childish-looking mess some well-meaning do-it-yourselfer put together because the church would not finance the project. The vast majority of black church websites I’ve seen are online scrapbooks: stillborn, sedentary mausoleums of glories past.

Nobody goes to CNN's website to admire the design. Nobody logs onto YouTube to marvel at the aesthetics. Sure, it's important to have an engaging and professional look for your site, but a web ministry is designed to be *used.* To be worn out like an old paperback. Of the church sites I've designed, none of them, not one, is being used adequately. The pastor, in every case, is missing in action from the web site. If the pastor is not there, I guarantee you the congregation will not log on. Some may log on once, out of curiosity, but don't expect to build traffic with a handful of occasional looky-loos.

But, if the pastor were to post there regularly— blog messages, video messages, bible study outlines, random thoughts, notes, whatever—the people would follow. If the pastor made the website the fulcrum of communication within the ministry, doing away with those useless church bulletins and inefficient phone calls, then your church's web site would become a lot more like MySpace. Nobody logs onto MySpace to look at the page layout and then go away. People spend hours and hours on MySpace communicating, discovering, exploring. That's what online ministry is for. The potential is simply unimaginable. But, without exception, the sites I've built and 99% of black church sites I've visited are dusty mausoleums. Once a visitor has seen it, they never come back because nothing ever changes: they have no *reason* to come back. There's nothing to do, nobody to talk to or debate or argue with, there's no video or audio feeds from the services, there's no buttons to push, links to click, there's nothing but Look At Us and some posed, static studio picture of your pastor and his bling-bling. This is a shameful waste of an enormous opportunity to teach, to disciple, to reinforce the ministry of the church. The fact that this is the norm rather than the exception is a sad testimony to how out of touch the black church is with the world it alleges to minister to.

Pastors: if you were working your websites, you'd be preaching in my pocket right now. These days, most everybody's got the Internet, got MP3 players, in their pocket. On their cell phones. Everywhere they go. Why isn't the church there? Why don't you have a web ministry? And, those of you who do, why aren't you actually *using* it for anything?

What I find odd is, most successful ministries have very active websites. Ministries experiencing real growth and real moves forward tend to have more dynamic and energized web ministries. Certainly most successful white ministries have invested heavily in an online ministry. Why don’t we?

Pastors (and, boy, do I feel silly even writing this since, to my knowledge, no black pastors actually read this site): you’ve got to stop thinking of your web ministry as an extension of your church ministry or as some addition to your church ministry. You’ve got to stop thinking of it as some exotic “thing” out there, somewhere, way out on the world-wide web. You’ve got to stop leaving this wonderful tool out on the lawn to get rained on. You’ve got to bring it into the house.

Your church website isn’t a nuisance, more work for the pastor to have to deal with. Your web ministry IS your church. IS your ministry. Your web ministry is having service 24-hours a day, 7-days a week. And you, the pastor, keep leaving your pulpit empty. People show up, get in the pews, wait patiently, but there’s nothing going on and nobody there. Even pastors with fairly decent websites are failing because they refuse to show up on their own websites. Then I hear complaints, “Well, nobody’s going up there to our site.” It’s not about me building it, pastor, it’s about you using it. You working it. I can build you the prettiest Porsche you’ve ever seen, but there’s nothing I can do for you if you refuse to get in it and drive.

This Internet thing is not going away. It’s not exotic. It’s not some out-there, over-there idea. All media—television, telephone, email, web—is converging into this thing, and it’s showing up everywhere. It’s in your pocket, on cell phones and Blackberry’s. Heck, these days, it’s in your refrigerator (I’m not joking, they make fridges that require Internet connections now), in your kids’ video games. This is not the technology of the future, this is the way we communicate today.

Black churches clinging to the old model, to the square feet of dirt in front of their building, are going to be swept away, lost in this new move of God. God has made these resources available to you, and you dismiss them, mock them, ignore them. Which is a very foolish thing to do. Some day you’ll have to explain to God why, when He made available to you all the resources you need to *literally* preach the Gospel to every creature, you chose not to. Blowing off the potential of online resources is like turning down your own slot on The Word Network—something no black pastor I know would ever do. But, every day, you blow off an opportunity to reach more people than The Word Network ever will.

Even more important, your website can galvanize and motivate your own church family, drawing them together and keeping everybody in touch with everybody else. The church pastor who can hardly keep up with his many appointments and phone calls can maintain a fairly steady online presence for just a couple hours’ investment every week. Through blogs and message boards, the pastor can be within easy access of his congregation and in regular touch with ministry leaders. He can easily and effortlessly and, most of all, conveniently communicate with guests, with visitors.

In over five years of building websites for churches, I have never known a pastor to make even one blog post or to show up on a message board. The pastors simply are not engaged in their own websites and tend to get annoyed when I lean on them about it.

The Sunday/Wednesday black church model is changing, evolving. Church attendance is way off, likely because more and more of us have moved church out of the center of our lives and communities. More and more people are simply not coming to church, perhaps finding church to be out of touch with the world and with their lives. But, more and more people are going online. Billions of them. Out there. Waiting for you to show up. Many of them are the very same people who have drifted away from your Sunday/Wednesday traditional model.

Pastors, you can speak to these people. You can show them your heart, you can win those souls to Christ and you can win your flock back to Sunday morning. You can speak directly to them and, better than television, they can speak directly to you. But none of this can happen if all you do is let your website sit there. If you don’t get in and drive.

You need to be willing to invest, serious time, serious money, in your web ministry. To take it seriously as an important resource, and integrate it into your church program. Don’t leave it out there, adrift, as a mausoleum or perhaps as some boring report about what happened at church twenty years ago.

Your website *is* your church.
Get involved. Get active. Get online.

One day, God’s going to ask us for an accounting of our time, of our choices. Of the opportunities He has gifted us with. I’m wondering what half-baked excuse we’ll come up with for letting people perish because we’re too lazy to take possession of the territory God has not only promised, but has delivered to us.

Christopher J. Priest
7 October 2007
editor@praisenet.org
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