Forty Seventh-day Adventist Church members and leaders at the front lines of Internet evangelism met in Las Vegas April 4 to 6 to recap the church’s history on the Web and where future outreach should go. Representing divisions, unions, local churches and supporting ministries, as well as the world church, conferees agreed that the World Wide Web, now accessed by hundreds of millions of people daily, is a vital frontier for the message of hope the Church is promoting.

It was appropriate for members to meet in Las Vegas, notes world church vice president Ted N.C. Wilson, because the desert city was noted as a place of escapism and entertainment; many who surf the Internet are also looking for an antidote to the harsh realities of today’s world.

Attendees included officials from the church’s Inter-American, Euro-Africa and North American divisions, as well as media ministries and Adventist-laymen’s Services and Industries, an organization of Seventh-day Adventist lay men and women devoted to sharing Christ in the marketplace. Topics discussed included updates on various Internet projects, the relationship of the Church’s “Sow 1 Billion” and Year of Evangelism 2004 initiatives to the Web, the need to contextualize Internet evangelistic content for a world of diverse cultures and creeds, future trends in Internet usage, as well as reports from individual Internet ministry efforts.

While the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been active online for nearly 20 years, and officially on the Internet for the better part of a decade, local church and lay member outreaches have captured a great deal of interest and attention recently. Will Barron, a church member in Norwalk, California, a Los Angeles suburb, has worked tirelessly to help local churches develop Web sites as well as specific outreaches to people based on their backgrounds and interests. Heidi Arms, a former missionary and English teacher, uses her Web site, www.wordsight.org, to present a condensed edition of the Bible in chronological order. And STAonline e.V. is a lay-sponsored association in Germany dedicated to supporting Adventist evangelism and communications efforts, said Martin Haase, communication director for the church in Euro-Africa.

“We’ve been confronted by the Internet as a communications medium as individuals, ministries and Christians,” Arms says. “Now we are realizing we need to work together on this, create a common front.”

Adds Wilson, “This isn’t simply a technical matter. It focuses on an evangelistic initiative with a large technical side, but isn’t just technical.”

Toward that end, the group voted to ask the Church’s Committee on Evangelism and Witness to create an office of Internet evangelism to help promote and facilitate such efforts; help with content initiatives; create a means to deal with technology issues and standards coordination; foster cross platform synergies between the Internet and other media; marketing strategies and pooling of resources to make individual efforts more effective as well as address contextualization sensitivities and issues. Several of these efforts will be directed toward the follow-on to “Sow 1 Billion” and other global evangelism initiatives.

According to Dan Houghton, president of Hart Research Center in Fallbrook, California, and a longtime ASI member with interest in technology, the Internet seminar could be the start of something big.

“We’re beginning to see the development of a community of people who are committed to a new culture of evangelism through the Internet around the world,” Houghton says. “It’s exciting to be a part of it.”