The site below was developed by a Christian but sadly the site has cults listed in it. I do not support listing cults in any directory as a place of worship. I support most of this idea, but listing cults as part of any directory is not a good idea.
It would be better to list anti-cult organizations. If you e-mail me, I will send to you a list of anti-cult organizations to put in any community web site. (Ken@missionresources.com)
COMMUNITY WIRE is a remarkable example of creating a resource page based on a locality. Many may even use it as their start page. The concept: to offer a genuinely useful range of secular resource pages, many of them relating to the locality. In among them are relevant links to Christian materials.
Founder Robert Marston writes:
I now get over 1,000 visitors/day to CWIRE without advertising. I just offer "stuff" and people come by and grab it.
I cannot possibly keep-up with all of the email that I get - I have been looking for other Christians to volunteer to correspond with neighbors. And I have been looking for people in my local area to help write articles which steer readers to the Gospel.
I have been linking to a list of organizations in my area http://cwire.com/orgs/faith.html and to a community calendar http://cwire.com/events/ .
A community calendar is a great tool for reaching-out to the secular public. Through CWIRE, Christians can meet their neighbors online, invite them to church, or actually meet face-to-face at local events.
What's more, CWIRE is a model which can be replicated in almost any community at little or no cost. In the hands of the right people, I believe that CWIRE will become a powerful evangelical tool.
It certainly has commercial potential. Each community web-site could be operated as an independent small business. Or it could be operated as a non-profit agency and underwritten by grants/donations (and supported with advertising).
I would love to hear from other Christians who are doing the same sort of thing in their local communities! I'm interested in finding other "secular community web-sites" which are run by Christians. I am happy to share with anyone/everyone that visits, but there's an even bigger opportunity for all of us in sharing tools/methods and linking our regional sites together. CWIRE has lots to share, and there are lots of new things we will be able to offer when we are networked with other community web-sites.
Also, I am looking for a group of Christians to serve as advisors to CWIRE and to help us expand geographically. Perhaps some W-E-B readers would help us establish CWIRE in other U.S. cities?
CWIRE is going to need a lot more infrastructure before we'll be ready to expand to other communities. Meanwhile, however, people who already publish large web-sites - or those who like to write articles - will find a lot of opportunities and ideas at CWIRE that they can use right away (either right here at CWIRE.COM, or on their own web-sites targeting their own local communities).
Thanks, and God bless you."
This whole concept is very exciting. A community site could be a stand alone portal page as Robert has done, or could be a valuable section of a church site which would serve the community and bring in visitors to the rest of the site. Take time to visit CWIRE and consider if you could use or adapt this approach elsewhere.
Here's a variation on this valuable approach - a start page in English and Greek for Greece - PROTOSELIDA. Suggestions for suitable page additions are invited. Greece is a very needy country in which Christian outreach is often restricted.
There are already so many "worldwide listings" -- no need for any more of them. But in your local area -- in any particular local area -- there might not be *any* good church listings. There's a big opportunity for all of us: building a church listing for a *particular* community. That way, when people use the directory (and they surely will, if it's a good one), they'll all be *local people* (or visitors to the local area, anyway).
Also, I suggest that we should tap-into existing websites whenever possible/practical -- in effect, to *go where the people are.* I suspect that there are local secular "community websites" and websites operated by local newspapers that would welcome anyone who is willing to build/expand/maintain a church listing on their website.
In my area, a local Kiwanis Club has printed and distributed a church directory year after year. It's was an effective marketing tool for the club, but expensive to reprint each year. Now my Kiwanis Club is putting the directory onto the WWW (which of course is very easy to maintain, and equally effective). Kiwanis is not a Christian organization, but many of its members are, of course, Christians.
Years ago, I created a "regional portal site" for my local area, and focused on helping hundreds of nonprofit organizations, churches, schools, service clubs, etc. get onto the WWW and get their messages out to the local community. Along the way, I have benefited from the help of hundreds of volunteers, dozens of business sponsors and entrepreneurs, and countless other "netizens" who have linked to our site and have registered us in major search engines. Community Wire (CWIRE.COM) now has over 25,000 different people coming through the website (multiple times) each month, and over 40 "WWWolunteers" (see http://www.egroups.com/group/WWWolunteers/).
A regional portal site is a great tool for evangelism! And anyone can replicate the concept in their own community.
People come to CWIRE to check our calendar for local events. They find services that they need in our listing of local agencies (counseling, health, day care, whatever...). Just like a printed yellow pages, all the listings are local. Large employers refer job candidates to our website to introduce them and attract them to this area. Realtors point to CWIRE to show prospect buyers what our community is like. Legislators point to the site to help their constituents to "network" and to get involved. Local businesses use our site for research -- and for finding places to meet for lunch, stuff to do after work. More parents and grandparents will be using the site to find "family activities." Local nonprofits and publicists use CWIRE to publish press releases. Reporters use the site to find leads on new stories and to "network" in the community.
Consequently, CWIRE has a *very* diverse audience/readership. It involves dozens (potentially hundreds) of people in the *publishing* process, and tens-of-thousands of local readers.
I would LOVE to have help from ie-discuss folks to reach CWIRE readers for Christ! Furthermore, I'm sure that there are *thousands* of webmasters like me out there -- operators of "regional portal" websites or "community networks" -- who feel the same way. I suggest that members of this eGroup should find the local "regional portal" in their area, and offer to pitch-in and help. I'm looking for columnists, researchers, librarians, eGroup moderators, "guestbook attendants" & tech-support folks (i.e. to create FAQ pages), tutors/mentors, etc. You will reach thousands of readers quickly, and you will be warmly received :-)
Note: Be careful to retain *full publishing rights* to anything that you create and publish on someone else's website! Otherwise, they could simply kick you out and retain your webpages -- and your audience -- hindering your evangelistic effort. If you're going to create a church directory, I recommend offering to publish your directory on *all* the local community websites in your area ASAP (i.e. including Realtors, schools, chambers of commerce, etc.). Offer it to them in a friendly way before they are tempted to steal it from you. :-) This is "syndication on a handshake." When syndicating your directory, insist on a partnership arrangement in which *you* update and maintain the listing. This is in everyone's mutual interest. They should have no problem with it, since you'll be helping them to create more webpages that will enhance their community website. And it won't cost them any time or money to keep-up with all the other local websites. In the end, you will retain control over the directory and will be able to use it for ministry/outreach. By the way, you can't *stop* other websites from stealing your directory, but you can *deter* them from stealing it, and you can entice them to collaborate rather than compete with you for readers.
Incidentally, if you don't find a community network in your area, I would be happy to help you build one from scratch. I am continuing to build the community website for my area (with the help of my Kiwanis Club and others), and we're serving more and more readers each month (faster and faster). As a business venture, it was a "miserable failure" -- but as an education, it was a bargain compared to my four years of college. Not many of *my* glorious plans worked out :-) But along the way I stumbled upon other ideas that worked. You can check out the results (http://cwire.com) and borrow whatever you like.
I can help you to use the tools that I've built (the calendar, ad banners, etc.) or you can join-in and use CWIRE. Perhaps one of you will be able to use what I've learned to reach more people for Christ. And perhaps in the process you'll figure out how to convert "local web traffic" into sustainable revenue. That'd be nice :-)
I am particularly interested in expanding CWIRE throughout Southern California, and eventually into Northern California, Nevada, and Hawaii. We've already received a good boost through Kiwanis (http://cwire.com/Kiwanis/CVTech/) and the California Parks Ministry (http://cwire.com/CaliforniaParksMinistry/).
It would be great to link-up a whole bunch of *community websites*. I know many "techie" community-service-oriented Kiwanians throughout California, for example, who would be interested in replicating CWIRE in their town. And I'm sure they would welcome your help. If your ministry is focused anywhere in California, Nevada, or Hawaii, let's talk!
All glory to Christ Jesus!
Robert Marston, Director mailto:editor@cwire.com
Other categories for which evangelistic papers also exist - such as women, teens, music, online radio, and health - will carry links to these pages, along with links to the best secular resources for those categories.
A community site can also include an email newsletter based around community interests and happenings. (A community newsletter can also be used as a standalone concept - see Lois Turley's new RiverValleyWeb http://www.rivervalleyweb.com )
The concept will be time-consuming to do well. But it is the sort of ministry which can be shared out among a team. As well as a webmaster, a team might include someone to research and find new sites to add, someone to run regular checks for out-of-date URLs, an editor for a community newsletter, someone to reply to emails, etc. This is the sort of project that several churches in a community can co-operate on.
Brent Purves, a web evangelist with Campus Crusade, has produced in his sparetime a community site for his Canadian town: KamloopsLife. This is so well-designed from every viewpoint that it is a showcase for this approach.
Check the attactive design, the current news links, and the Christian content. Note that wisely, there are no preachy-sounding links or banners this would be counter-productive. Visitors will use the site precisely because it is not obviously preachy. Yet the links are there for anyone who wants them and they are offered in a perfectly natural way - there is no attempt to pull people across to a Christian link by anything sneaky. Maybe a visitor will not even check out a Christian site until their tenth or twentieth visit. This doesn't matter - a site like this has the potential in a large city or area to pull in thousands of visitors a week. If even 2% end up at a Christian site, the approach is working well.
Brent has written a page to explain the concept. He highlights ways in which community portals could be multiplied across the world. A page template system is an option which would help others to develop similar sites. Read more at http://www.kamloopslife.com/evangelism/ To go straight into the KamloopsLife main site: http://www.kamloopslife.com
The same concept can be applied to an area, even a small country. Visit our new page on this concept, with links to community-type sites for Indonesia and Greece: http://www.web-evangelism.com/community.html This page will shortly be offered as an RTF file for royalty-free print publishing.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough the potential that there is in this approach. It is so easy to adapt to any town or area - and so many non local sites (both Christian and secular) are already listed in Kamloops Life ready to use. It would be wonderful to see 1000s of similar sites operating around the world. With ready-made templates and an online email forum to keep community-webbers in touch with each other, it becomes easy to reproduce anywhere. This concept is dynamite. Please email this article (or the whole Bulletin) on to anyone who could be interested, publish it in print, add it to online newsletters, translate it, link to http://www.web-evangelism.com/community.html or just share the concept any way you can. And watch this space - we'll be bringing you more news of the>community portal concept.
Blessings
Tony
I also operate a community portal, and am looking for folks to "export" the concept to their home towns. By sharing content with other towns (i.e. tracts, family-oriented content, wholesome "current events" articles, etc.), each community portal gets a "boost" from being part of a network. It will become better-and-better as more towns join the network.
Community Wire (http://cwire.com) is built on a different model than Kamloops - 'much less outreach-oriented. CWIRE is essentially a community calendar and directory of clubs and organizations, with a "PSA archive" for newsletter editors. Each club (or ministry) can submit articles to the archive which can be picked-up by editors and shared with their respective auidences.
CWIRE is designed to be a *tool* used by the community (by service clubs, nonprofits, schools, business associations, etc. -- as well as by churches, ministries, etc.). The *outreach* happens through opt-in email subscriptions and banner ads on the site, but always in connection with a *group of people*. It is built to be expanded through the efforts of *everyone* (including secular groups).
The idea is to grow slowly and keep the site LOCAL so that there's always a "live Christian" within 5 or 10 miles with whom a reader can meet face-to-face (i.e. at a civic event, a carnival, a church picnic, a business mixer, etc.). But it can be easily "transplanted" out-of-state if anyone's interested.
God bless you all. In His service,
--Robert
An ingenious but under-utilized approach to online evangelism is the notion of a community portal. Web Evangelism Guide author Tony Whittaker spells out some of the benefits of this approach, and highlights a few of the examples, in his Web resource titled "Community Portal Pages: A Wonderful Under-used Outreach Strategy" ( http://www.brigada.org/today/articles/community.html ).
The idea behind this outreach is to create a site that provides a virtual entryway into a community, be it a city, town, county, region, state, or even a small country. "The site must offer the best secular links for the community in a range of categories," Whittaker writes. "It must be a genuinely useful resource at this level. But it also contains appropriate Christian links in various categories. The more comprehensive it is, the more that people in the area will use it as their one-stop local neighborhood site, maybe setting it as a 'start page' in their browsers."
We love the idea as an outreach, and applaud those who are already developing such sites. And we thank Tony Whittaker for advocating this approach, and that's why we award this site the designation as our E-vangelism Site of the Week for the week of November 20, 2000.
Also, a must-bookmark resource for any e-vangelist is Whittaker's Web Evangelism Guide ( ).
This low-key approach to Net evangelism combines ministry with useful information about a community. What a great approach for reaching a geographic community for Christ -- by using the global Internetworking of cyberspace.
This site is the creation of Lois Turley, an R.N. in Arkansas whose other e-vangelistic sites include Care-Nurse.com ( http://www.care- nurse.com/ ), an outreach to the nursing profession. We're pleased to award River Valley Web the designation as our E-vangelism Site of the Week for the week of December 4, 2000.
The significance of the concept is its easy expansion. A first stage could be to create a ready-made 'turnkey' community site similar to http://www.kamloopslife.com which Christians could customize for their own towns or communities with very little work and without even knowing HTML! Instantly, there is the opportunity for thousands of different local sites - it is quite mind-blowing. The concept would also easily adapt to other languages.
An extension of the concept would expand each set of secular subject links into a larger page handled by a volunteer editor. At the same time, a new homepage interface would link into the subject areas - this would not a community-focus entry page, but a general informational-help page such as About.com or Suite101. The final and exciting end result could be:
This could be incredibly powerful because it is going 'with the grain' of the way the Internet works. Please pray for me and the team investigating the concept. It has the potential to be so effective that I feel sure it will be contested by the enemy. (And please pray for our youngest daughter Jeni (14) who is suddenly in the last couple of weeks going through a very hard time.) How to pray: stick a 'post-it' note above your monitor saying 'about.com' or something as a reminder! (Same as people do to remind themselves of various secret passwords.)
And of course, if you know any benefactor interested in giving financial support, I can pass their interest on to the group.
This is an important concept. Maybe it would be appropriate for your city? http://www.christiancities.net/christiancitieswhy.htm There is an associated email list.
Design for Community ( http://designforcommunity.com/ )is an excellent site. Related to that site and its purpose is this article from MSNBC about how researchers are studying how online communities for on the Internet ("Internet navigators think small," by Alan Boyle, at http://www.msnbc.com/news/750507.asp ).
Comunity Strategy for Tennessee There's a new community page for the Tri-Cities area of Tennessee (US) Tri-Cities Directory: http://www.tri-citiesdirectory.com/
It uses the various techniques described at http://www.gospelcom.net/guide/resources/community.php to reach the local community by offering a really useful portal.
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