Internet Evangelism Day is coming up in just two short weeks, and it's time to start thinking about how we can promote the use of the Internet in evangelism.

Granted, the best and most effective way to evangelize is to create strong personal relationships that can be used as a basis for discussing God and our faith.  However, the development of the social elements on the web have made it easier for us to harness the technology of the Internet and build these relationships, sometimes with people we've never met in real life.

I'd encourage you to work with your church to either add an announcement in your service, or put a flyer (PDF) in your bulletin, highlighting the different ways the Internet can be used to spread the love of God throughout cyberspace.

Wow, it's almost been three weeks since I've done anything with the site. It feels like the time has passed very quickly, and I'm trying to get everything back in order in my life.

With that, let's do a little roundup of what's going on in the Christian webmaster world:

• Internet Evangelism Day: April 29th, 2007 - Yes, it's coming up quickly. Have you and/or your church planned to do anything special for this year's event? For more information about last year's IED, check out here and here.

• Heal Your Church Web Site Returns - Dean Peters returns after an almost 6 month hiatus. I, for one, gladly welcome the insight and experience which his blog provides.

• Rockin Chruch Website Tips - James Dalman of Branding Shed contribures this excellent assessment of some of the places where church web sites go wrong and how to correct them over at Church Communications Pro. Take a minute to look over them and figure out how to strengthen your own church's website.

Also, I'll be getting back to my AJAX series in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back for that. In the meantime, it already feels good to be getting back to blogging...

Well, this year's Internet Evangelism Day (IED) has come and gone, and I'd like to get a sense of how it went overall.

1. What did you or your church do for IED?
2. Did you make any special changes or post information on your website about IED?
3. Did you think it made any difference?

For the recap at my church:

1. Unfortunately, a large portion of our congregation is not web savvy, so we simply included a brief announcement about IED and what it was all about as a part of our service. We also already had a Spring Brunch planned for the day, so IED was definately not a focus.
2. As for our website, I rolled out a new layout for the site that is much more professional than our last version. It's also easier for our pastor to use, so I have been trying to encourage him to make it more of a focus for our announcments and scheduling. As far as anything specific on the site about IED, we did not post anything. However, here at IJHAW, I've kept the IED banner flying for the better part of the last few months in anticipation.
3. It's always hard to judge the impact of the little things we do, but I did notice some eyes opening up when we mentioned different ways to use the internet for evangelism during our IED announcement. So many times we use the internet for useless things, it was nice to see some people respond to getting that first thought of it as an evangelism tool.

It may not have been a momentus change, but I'm more than happy enough to plant the seed. After all, if we don't at least plant the seed, then nothing can ever grow.