How God Can Use Cunning and Google to Share the Gospel
I’m passionate about the topic of recovery from addictions and the underlying spiritual issues that distance us from God and distract us from his eternal purpose. Yet this is a hard message to get out at times. This battle is fought one life at a time, one day at a time.
But wouldn’t it be great to get a few more people into the light and accompanying freedom in Christ?
- Some are out there looking for answers and have a hard time believing it could happen anywhere having to do with Christianity. I was there so I know where they are at.
- Others are in church right now and have no idea they’re sick. Or they do but aren’t doing anything about it. I go to a rockin’ church full of sinners where 99% of the membership could be in Celebrate Recovery according to the pastors, yet only 1% go. 1/4 of our Celebrate Recovery members are actually from other churches because they are too embarassed to ask for help there. If I was a swearing man, I’d be throwing in a choice adjective to ask what the ___ is up with this story?
So you’re tracking with me here – removing pride and being willing to dive into a sea of pain so Christ can rescue us is a difficult message. It won’t be a church-wide small group study like a purpose-driven. You probably won’t see it on “1000 churches day of prayer,” or whatever. This is a message that is apparently even more difficult than what we’ve deemed to be the fullness of the gospel, because people believe Jesus lived but still want to keep their bag ‘o vomit. I do, at least.
The experiment will be this.
I’ve done a few posts on this blog with popular subject matter. They are of marginal value and I’m not one of those charismatic types but they do have an ability to get ranked in search engines for people looking for that subject matter. In fact, about 1/3 of the monthly traffic to this blog comes looking for sermons by “x” pastor or info about “x” ministry. Most leave in under 30 seconds. Some stay…
I’ll be posting about recovery-related themes and will not relent on the schedule for this, but you may see some posts that are a bit off-topic. This is my “Christian bait”. I’m hoping to catch us a couple Christians with some problems. My lures will consist of popular Christian pastors, ministries, bands, whatever is biting.
Should be an interesting experiment. Right now the blog gets about 4,000 visitors a month. Not saying that to brag because the site ranks as the 1,194,000th most visited site in the Alexa rankings. Just picking a random target, but I’d like to see this get to 10,000 visitors/month. You know what happens then?
- suppose 1% of the extra visitors read other posts and thought about where God is wanting to bring them and what he wants to free them from.
- Let’s then say 10% of that 1% pursues it right now (God’ll corral the rest of them later)
That would be 6 people every month whose lives and future generations’ would be forever touched by the love of Christ by seeking him through Christ-centered recovery. I’m thinking this number could be higher because there are a good amount of readers from countries where they have not become fat and happy (jaded?) in their faith like us Americans. People actually being persecuted like the Chinese (#2 on my web stats), and those in Muslim nations where even viewing this site could be dangerous.
I’ll update the progress now and then. God can do cool things with even the seemingly most mundane skills – just wanted to throw out what is on my heart and let you know my ADD-ish tendencies aren’t distracting us from following this road of recovery with Christ.
If you own a blog, I’d love to hear from you – don’t worry, I’m not asking you to do any work whatsoever. I may ask if you would link to a post on my blog. I’ll explain as we go along. Just contact me through the contact form and let me know you’re interested in using craftiness and guile to spread the gospel (disclaimer: I’m using dangerously heavy levels of sarcasm so consider before wasting a good email to the editor)
be blessed!
So, Matt. What has happened with this? I very would very much like to have a blog/website, but just thinking about putting it together makes my brain explode. I have had a computer since MAC was a 128, but I just want them to WORK and when things get even the slightest bit complicated, I drop it. This is a great site and I responded to your Bob Newhart video. CR is the greatest vehicle for healing people – we find the same thing – most of our participants are from treatment centers or other churches. The folks at our own church all know someone who could use CR, but it apparently has no appeal for our own congretation. Shame is such a killer. Thank you for your work.
Hey, V. White – blogs are a breeze these days. You can start one at wordpress or blogger for free and get the hang of it. They’re very simple systems. If you have a mac, I think they have some kind of built in blog, don’t they? Have a friend blogging about his lung transplant and he uses the Mac service.
re: the blog baiting – It worked, thought as you can tell I really blew off the blog for a good part of 2008 so I didn’t get near the 10k. The problem was…. it worked.
What happened was I used poor judgement in writing about some topics in the past which managed to find their way to #2 or 3 in google/yahoo/wherever for some big questions people have.
Problem was I didn’t care about the topics.
Example of this was “what does the bible say about ghosts”. Kid you not, this became by far the most popular post on my recovery blog. Did they stick around for the recovery aspect? I don’t know but it was a colossal pain – every single person griping and whining about how I wanted to take their ghosts away from them, etc. Many reported being Christians…
There are some people in the church who have struggled with spiritual aspects like this and I am definitely not one of them. Thus I did a lousy job not so much explaining some of the Biblical references, but it’s just my compassion wasn’t there. Hence, I auto-forwarded the page to a website that does better dealing with those questions.
Guess God was showing me some things about how I need to be very careful with the knowledge he has given me about the Internet and this isn’t a toy – we’re talking about people’s lives and if I am going to be ministering to people, this isn’t quite some grand experiment and I need to be prepared for that next step of the process. I can’t even imagine the garbage pastors put up with every day – no wonder they tend to burn out.
That being said, I’ll probably still do some of the (insert name of pastor) sermons because that could be a wide variety of people.
Plans for 09 are to breath a little life back into the blog and probably take it in a new direction. Want to make sure it’s the right one so I finish what I start so I’d appreciate the prayers on that one.
thanks for stopping by & hope for the best with CR for you