I am a soldier in a war that is diametrically opposed to all that is cool. By cool, I’m not talking about your gel-quaffed hair and fond memories of being in a boy band or my obsession with anyone that mentions the atari 2600. My mission is simply to help people reach their audience on the web.

While dorking around the web, I run across ideas like Meetup.com. Tell them what you are interested in and find immediately everyone in your area to a particular mile radius that is also interested, and organize  meetings. The site even comes with pictures and a creepy ability to add comments to just about anyone’s profile. It’s place for people with all kinds of random interests where they simply never would have met people back in the day without working out the six degrees of separation on their entire metro area.

This service can also provide ministry experiences I never really though of before. Let’s look at one more in-depth, but we’ll keep it fairly anonymous to protect the innocent.

I live in an area that that rhymes with Farleston, Mouth Farolina. Where it actually is in the US doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that there are people there that are hurting and the goal here is to do some serving. And I don’t mean this way.

• Starting a church? – Toss it out on Meetup.com. You’ll get all kinds of crackpots responding to your profile, but isn’t that what you were looking for, anyway? My church didn’t do an effective job of screening me at the door, and I’m still there 4 years later.
• People new to a town – Every church I talk to swears the only way people end up at their church is by personal invitation from a current member. What about the people that don’t know their church members?
• Wanting to minster to the hurting? The hurting have groups. They’re not usually grouped by the struggle itself, so they’re a little more challenging to find. Let’s say I have a chronic illness – our town has a group dedicated to people with chronic illnesses supporting each other. Great place to build friendships of those in similar circumstance. Naturally there may be some opportunities to share Christ with your friends.
• Wanting to start a pagan parenting group? 17 Pagan Parents in just the small suburb of where I live signed up to meet when the moon is right and Pan the goat God requires our worship for a good oyster season.

Plenty of reasons the Lord gave us the Internet – it’s great to see people using it instead of just calling it an evil porn factory or 100% filled with lies. From what I remember in history classes, “the church” hasn’t been all that hot on people reading the Bible for themselves at times. Serious thanks to the Lord for the Web, Martin Luther and every other person in every other denomination of the body of Christ who has worked to remove human idols from the equation of God + man.

Categories: Step 12
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