Matt Rich

Chat rooms, bulletin boards and email

Matt Rich lives in Cumbria, UK, and leads The Internet Mission. He encourages and trains part-time volunteers to use the Web for evangelism, with a particular emphasis on sharing in chat rooms and bulletin boards. Chat room ministry requires certain gifts, but technical expertise is not one of them!

I first became involved in using the Internet for evangelism whilst working as a missionary to school children. The Internet gave me a way to be able to be in contact with the young people when they were alone and weren’t feeling under pressure from their friends. One day when I was praying about whether to continue with this work I became aware that the Lord was giving me a new missionary vision – to reach out to people using the Internet. Four years ago The Internet Mission was launched and I have been working full time as an Internet Missionary since then.

As a mission our aim is to use all aspects of the Internet for evangelism and to encourage others to do the same. It is our desire that through this work many people around the world would hear the gospel and be added to God’s Kingdom.

A number of people are associate e-vangelists with the mission and they use the Internet for evangelism in many different ways – websites, email, discussion boards etc. Most of my work is either speaking to people in the chat rooms of the Internet or answering questions that people ask me through our website Why Believe [www.whybelieve.com] or through email.

As a mission our aim is to expand the work so that we can become more effective in reaching out to more people. One of our latest projects is Letter to You. [www.lettertoyou.com] which is a flash movie gospel presentation in the form of a letter from Jesus to the viewer. At the end of the presentaion the viewer is given an opportunity to write to us the letter they would like to write back to Jesus. We have had some very good responses from this online evangelistic project.

One of the things that we have discovered is that people may feel too inhibited to talk face to face, but they are often happy to talk about their thoughts and feelings online. I personally have had long in-depth conversations about Jesus with people in many countries including Egypt, Iran, China, India and the USA. It is particularly exciting when you can see that God is at work in someone’s life causing them to want to be in contact to ask more and more questions.

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