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The Internet: The New Missionary Challenge of the Twenty-first Century

By Eric Célérier

While composing these few lines, like anyone writing for Lausanne World Pulse, my fingers are dancing over the keyboard of my computer. Indeed, the personal laptop has brought a dramatic change to our daily lives. Who could have foreseen the impact of this revolution just a few years ago?

As I write, Google Earth lights up a portion of my screen. Within the last two years, Google Earth has become one of the most popular software products. Free access allows anyone to catch an aerial view of his or her own home or to sneak a peek at his or her next vacation spot.

However, I am looking at Google Earth for a different reason. An international team with whom I work linked Google Earth to an evangelistic website that we currently have translated into seven languages. Each time a person indicates that he or she prayed to receive Christ as his or her Savior, I see in real time where that person is located. The image of the earth keeps spinning as one person after another becomes a Christian.

Witnessing this, I rejoice, minute by minute, as one person after another comes to know Jesus Christ somewhere in the world. During the last few moments, while I gathered my ideas for this article, people from Morocco, China, France, Egypt, Algeria, Canada, the United States, and England came to Jesus!

The Lord predicted that the good news of the kingdom would be preached all around the world, serving as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end would come.

It has been ten years since I started using the Internet to share the gospel. In the beginning, the site was used to promote our local church. It was very likely one of the first websites used in France for that purpose. A few years ago, the site expanded in order to meet the needs of French-speaking Christians. From that broader concept, and more recently, I decided to launch multiple evangelistic websites aimed at reaching all the major languages of the Internet. We want to help millions of people come to know Christ, one by one.