Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's Internet Evangelism Day (IED)! By way of report, visits to the IED website (www.internetevangelismday.com) have continued at a similar level to that reported several weeks ago - i.e. 600-900 unique visitors a day, with 4000-6000 pages viewed each day. In the few days surrounding IE Day, visitors were over 1000 a day.

In the week before IE Day, several online and radio news outlets covered it. Thanks to Craig von Buseck for several pages within CBN covering web evangelism as a topic, including: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/146258.aspx.

We are also grateful to Christianity Today for running the IED advertisement in a number of their enewsletters in March April; to Gospelcom for a front-page feature all through May; to Campus Crusade for Christ for exposure in a variety of ways; to TriMedia for a feature in their high circulation news promo; to ATS Tracts for site promotion; to Naomi with Lausanne and IEC enewsletters; Moody Broadcasting and Northwestern College Radio and many others who helped promoted IED.

To see just how many people blogged about IED, visit http://www.technorati.com/ and search for "internet evangelism day" within quote marks. You'll find well over 100 blogs which covered this year's IED and the IED church site self-assessment tool. If you search instead for our root URL ied.gospelcom.net you will find even more references - some 545!

A number of groups have taken up the partnership idea suggested by Dave Hackett and placed a button graphic on their websites, which creates a link back to them permanently for their visitors. Around 50 sites have asked to do this, the majority being smaller sites, but a few are bigger - e.g. Zondervan, and the UK-based Deo Gloria Trust and Contact for Christ ministries. These and other links resulted in about 500 impressions a day of the button graphic.

Other sites continue to use the diagonal graphic option and that is producing 2000+ impressions a day.

I have received a very few reports of people doing specific meetings on 29 April itself. I can only hope that far more will have done something than ever tell us! My guess is that a number of churches, even if they did not choose to put on a specific program during a service, will nevertheless have run a short item in their newsletters on IED, and thereby encouraged members to consider web evangelism and look at the site that way instead. (I know this is what my home church in south-west UK did this time.)

Here are several of those that did report:

"We used the clip of Kevin and Cathy during worship with a brief introduction about IEDay. It was very powerful on many levels. I don't know if it had as much impact on the congregation's feelings about IE as on evangelism in general. I heard reports of many teary eyes, and the congregation was absolutely silent during the film (not normal for us). The person speaking next (to introduce the offering) commented on the difficulty of following on from that clip." From a church in Pennsylvania, USA.

"I just want to express publicly my thanks to you for all you've done to publicize IED and make resources available for people to use for their IED events. Seems like news of IED is starting to break through into 'mainstream' Christian circles." Paul Steinbeck of Ourchurch.com.

Paul also blogged about IE Day here: http://blog.ourchurch.com/2007/04/19/what-are-you-doing-for-internet-evangelism-day/

"I put IE Day posters up in several locations of the church, in the announcements for the preceding couple of weeks and talked about it on our church website at http://cadurham.org/beta/?p=336 as well as on my MyChurch site at http://www.mychurch.org/blog/13373/Internet-Evangelism-Day-is-April-29th" Tom Minton, Deacon - Technical & Media Ministries, Christian Assembly Church, Durham, North Carolina, USA.

"As God arranged it, I was in Wallingford, England on April 29th. As part of an evening praise and worship service at Wallingford Baptist, I was asked to pray and speak about the importance of IED. It was a blessing to be sure, and one that only God could have ordained. My time followed a sharing time by missionaries who spoke of translating God's Word into one of the Togo dialects. God led me to share some statistics on how the Internet is being used by people seeking faith-based experiences and a short overview on PhotoMission was given." Connie Wragge, PhotoMission.

Please continue to do all you can to promote Internet Evangelism and Internet Evangelism Day.

Next year's Internet Evangelism Day is 27 April 2008.

Virtual reality is here to stay and will most certainly progress to places we can only dream about today. Just as the early church needed to form and create structure and process, this is of tremendous strategic importance in these early and formative stages of virtual reality. The virtual reality world "Second Life" (www.secondlife.com) is an online world of over 5½ million people that grows by hundreds of thousands of residents each month. Consider it this way - the population of Second Life is larger than the city of Los Angeles, California by more than 1½ million people!

Second Life is but the beginning of a whole new wave of communication.

A coalition of leaders of the Christian Community in "Second Life" have come together in order to ensure a foundational, biblical presence of the church in virtual reality into the future - in fact to "plant" the "church" in virtual reality. In many ways, this new coalition of leaders is like the first group of disciples planting the early church.

The coalition is still new but it is strong and growing. In many ways building coalitions and collaborative partnerships is easier in virtual reality - while in some ways it is much harder. Easier, because people are quick to jump on board to new ideas - they readily become involved. Harder because communication is more challenging - it is mostly written and cryptic and because inhibitions are lowered in an online environment.

The Second Life Christian Leaders Association (SLCLA) has been in existence since January of this year and they have already agreed on a statement of faith, criteria for membership and a number of other foundational issues regarding who they are, why they exist, what they do and do not do. And, one of the things they have agreed to do is to hold joint, special occasion events.

The refreshing side of this coalition has been the willingness of the leaders of the dozen or so churches (representing a variety of denominations) to work collaboratively in cooperative evangelism. Over the recent Easter week, the churches on Second Life, sponsored a major joint event - The Redemption Week Tour - which prompted USA Today and The LA Times (among others) to cover it.

At each stop along the tour the "traveler" found a billboard for the event. From each billboard they were able to play a message from the host, receive note cards of information about Jesus Christ, and learn about the church/location, suggested Christian groups and locations in Second Life, and obtain other items (such as a tour t-shirt and other "souvenir" objects).

The aim of the tour was three-fold. First, the tour told the story of the life and death of Jesus. Secondly, the tour helped bring to life the most important days of our Lord's ministry on earth. And thirdly, it drew attention to all of the wonderful Christian venues in Second Life that they might not already know about.

Seven churches took part, each taking a particular focus. The stops on the tour highlighted:

If you aren't already among the 5½ million residents, and you want to come see this massive mission field - you can join Second Life (there is no fee, but you will need to choose a name and body first!) at www.secondlife.com.

We all saw it on the news - thirty-two students shot and killed on the campus of Virginia Tech. As everyone tried to deal with the crisis, it helped to talk about it.

TruthMedia responded to this need by creating a safe place where people can come and talk about their pain. We adapted thelife.com (www.thelife.com) to focus on the tragedy providing a place where people could chat, talk with a mentor or comment on the blog. Articles on grieving and questions like, "Why does God allow evil and suffering?" were added to the homepage.

We adapted one of our existing articles on finding peace in troubled times to specifically address the shooting at Virginia Tech and then linked to it from all of our sites. New mentoring buttons featuring a black background and a maroon and orange ribbon let visitors know we were available to pray with them or discuss any questions arising from the tragedy.

When a crisis like this happens people are often consumed by fear and anxiety. It is our desire to meet people in their time of need and come alongside them. Email mentoring is one way to do this. Fear so often isolates. Through mentoring we can assure people that they are not alone and point them to the One - Jesus Christ - who will never leave them.

In ages past, religious seekers might have gathered in caves, public squares or cloisters to talk about faith. Their theology developed in upper rooms, sanctuaries, meetinghouses, restaurants and cafés.

Add the Internet to that list of "holy places."

Some websites are intentional about creating a space for faithful conversation. Other sites, not specifically Christian, are being used to create virtual communities where believers can connect to others who can support and challenge them in their faith.

Blogs and forums can provide support, challenge ways of thinking, worship God and offer inspiration - the same things found in most physical communities. Which leads to a question: Can virtual communities be a substitute for the physical world?

The answer, according to many active bloggers and online denizens, is no.

Joshua Project has announced the availability of an "Unreached People of the Day" website feed.

Each day a different unreached people group photo and basic statistics can be displayed on your website for visitors to pray for and learn more about. With a few simple steps, this daily changing feed can be displayed on most any website. Already dozens of individuals, churches and agencies are using this free feed on their websites to encourage prayer for unreached peoples.

For instructions on how to display the "Unreached People of the Day" on your website and samples of sites using the feed see: http://www.joshuaproject.net/upgotdfeed.php

Joshua Project is an unreached peoples research initiative and a ministry of the U.S. Center for World Mission. The purpose of Joshua Project is to help bring definition to the unfinished task of the Great Commission by identifying and highlighting the people groups of the world that have the least exposure to the Gospel and the least Christian presence in their midst. Joshua Project shares this information with the global Church to encourage pioneer church-planting movements among every ethnic people group.

For more information, email info@joshuaproject.net or go to http://www.joshuaproject.net/.

BBC: Web Counting Tools "Need Change" 

Pew: US Latinos and Religion

BBC: Global Net Use Makes Rapid Rise 

CNet: Wireless Security 

BBC: Bloggers Search for Anonymity