cyber-samaria

in John 4, Jesus does the unthinkable in Jewish culture--He leads His disciples through Samaria rather than around it. those unclean, half breed Samaritans weren't worth associating with as far Israel was concerned; but God loved the Samaritans and sent His Son for them as well. so Jesus goes in and visits the local watering hole while the disciples go on to get food. you know the story, He not only sits in Samaria, but visits with a Samaritan woman of questionable character. not only is she convinced, but also through her testimony, "Many more Samaritans put their faith in Jesus because of what they heard Him say" (v.41, CEV)

Jesus teaches His followers that we are to go to the least of these, even in environments that are questionable, with the Gospel for the sake of the Kingdom

fast forward to our time, and there are places, environments that churches and believers will not dare go. not because there aren't people there worth sharing the Gospel with, but for the sake of our reputations, our "purity"

for quite a while i've listened to our young people interacting through MySpace. i was still trying to figure out this blog thing at the time, and didn't pursue the topic much. but as we began our new Sun p.m. outreach service called Sleepyheads, we were targeting these same young, burned-out-on-church young people. so we thought that it would be great to have a MySpace account where we could have audio files of the dialogue, message and responses so that people could continue to participate in the discussion through the week. so we reserved a couple of sites to begin laying the groundwork for such an avenue.

i shared the idea with leaders and other pastors and you could see the red flags go up. some people even shared strong concerns about such a step.

i've just gotten the audio editing software so we haven't gotten to upload anything yet -- but do you know what's happened in the last week? we've seen people in our area find us through the unique networking set up through MySpace. a mom in the area has sent questions about our church and ministries to youth because she's looking for a church; another young lady who attends a church in town came across our listing and came last night because her church doesn't have a Sunday night service right now. Now we're not changing whole communities yet, but in a week, without the site being yet operational to our goal, we've seen searching people make a connection.

i'm not saying we're the only one trying to shine the Light into MySpace--but lets worry more about the people than our reputations. i heard this week that MySpace adds 230,000 new accounts EVERY DAY! that's a lot of people--isn't it worth wading through the garbage to reach even just 1?