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Staying Connected: Worldwide Missionary Evangelism Uses Online Community Tools to Communicate Effectively

One of the greatest needs and challenges with all worldwide missions is the ability to communicate quickly, clearly, safely, and more recently, in real-time. While social networks dominate the internet landscape and provide ways to contact people online, private online networks are smaller, secure, intimate communities of people who already know one another and want to extend their relationships. Providing a tool to allow people to communicate with one another any time they want and to share photos and calendars and participate in group chat can be an extremely powerful tool in building relationships within an organization or mission.

Web 2.0 technology is allowing for more community to be experienced where people can login and extend their physical communities that already exist to the online world through personalized profile pages, individual blogs, photo sharing, conversation forums (similar to chat rooms), and online prayer. Small groups can easily set up their own forums and have a safe place to stay connected in real time without the dangers of MySpace and other open social community sites.

After several months of using this technology, it occurred to me that the same application might be able to meet our needs within WME. I recommended it to WME chair Dale Yerton and we soon implemented our own private, online, social network (or intranet) called Oikos to enable deep connections all over the world via the internet. There were at least six factors we needed to consider when creating Oikos.

1. Ease of use. For WME, one of the biggest impediments to utilizing available technology was the fact that most of WME's members are over the age of forty. We were looking for a communication tool that would serve a dual purpose—attract the younger generation, but also be simple enough for missionaries who may not be quite as technically savvy.

Oikos made it possible for WME to communicate in new ways and has allowed missionaries to break down walls of time and space to share struggles, praises, joys, and prayer requests. Oikos now connects many of WME’s more than 460 members. To see what the WME intranet looks like, go to our site and login as a guest: http://wme.oikosconsole.com.

2. Updates on current happenings. WME was looking for a tool that could link its people together and enable them to read and participate in current happenings within the organization.