Discipling a million
From a podcast by Heaven in Business
Marilyn Adamson was an argumentative atheist. Now she has built a website that had over 50M visitors last year, all seeking answers to hard questions about life and God. And 1M of them managed to find a follow-on link saying they made a decision to invite Jesus Christ into their life and wanted more information to get discipled.
This is the abridged story of how Marilyn uses social media to lead millions to her website tackling the hard questions about life and God.
I was raised somewhat religiously but found that people believed but they didn't know why. So I concluded that God wasn't real. But when I was 18, I became friends with a Christian and she really walked with God - trusting Him with things going on in her life. And so I began to wonder and spent a year and a half debating her, trying to win the argument. She was patient and out of love researched answers for me. Well, long story short, I became convinced of God's existence.
The night that I asked God into my life, I spent a good three or four hours reviewing all the evidence and then prayed. I had no expectations. The next morning I woke up and I asked, "Are you still there?" And I just sensed he was. Then I had a whole new list of questions. So I loved reading the Bible. I just couldn't get enough of it. I was amazed. And I grew quickly.
I was so focused on my relationship with God that I was very uninterested in what I did career wise and I ended up majoring in advertising and PR. That fed into what I wound up doing, which was building this evangelistic website.
I saw a lot of people come to Christ in college. I talked with anybody and everybody and then God called me on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ and I shared with and led many students to Christ.
I then had a strong desire to use media to reach as many people as possible. So I worked in print media for a while and then in 1999, feeling behind the times, I was connecting with a person in graphic design and media who also knew how to build websites. So he and I started building the website and launched it in 2000. It is called EveryStudent.com
I thought this would be a great way to lead students to Christ. I wound up being on a couple of global leadership teams that would take me to conferences in around the world. And when I would be there and talking about the site, people would ask me, "Can we have this in our language?" and so now it's in 48 languages.
So many people were coming to Christ through the site and then our staff were saying, "We want to be able to use an older term for non-students." So we built EveryPerson.com for people searching with faith questions.
On both sites, everything is worded to the non-believer and the goal of the site is not to inform or educate but to persuade them to begin a relationship with God by giving them reasons to know God. Intellectual and emotional reasons to show why wouldn't you want a relationship with God given the opportunity to do so?
Last year there were over 50 million people that came to the site and a little over 1 million people asked Jesus into their life.
The internet enables us to throw a wide net out to the whole world, to those who are interested. They come to us and we're very quiet about offers on the site. We don't have a big red button that says, "Pray this prayer". We have pretty long articles on topics like, 'Is there a God?' The gospel is presented in about 20% of the articles and at the end of those, there are three links at the bottom. One says, 'I just asked Jesus into my life', another one says, 'I may want to ask Jesus in my life, can you explain this more fully?' And then we take them to a whole different presentation of the gospel. And then there's a third link where they can ask a question.
When they click on that first link, they land on a page that becomes your 'measured conversion' page. That's what they call it in marketing. In the end, we invite them to another site we built called StartingWithGod.com to help them immediately start growing. They don't have to wait weeks and wonder what did I do? What was I thinking? But they can instead immediately begin to learn that Jesus did come into their life and what that means for them. That God's love is unconditional and He'll never leave them, etc. They can continue growing - really for years.
The discipleship site is StartingWithGod.com, which leads to a series of emails that walks them through being discipled. The site is not just an English, it's in 48 languages all over the world.
I can get into conversations with people so comfortably because I'll have the conversation as God leads and I can focus on loving them and listening to them.
A story. I was in a hotel lobby and this woman just turns to me and says, "Are you with our convention?" I said, "No, I'm with a site that takes on the hard questions about life and God. Like, 'Why is life so hard even though God exists?'" She said, "I'm an atheist, but I'm searching." I said, "You will love this website" and gave my card. It was that simple.
Nobody's offended being given a website and they're grateful that you're not cornering them. You're not bringing them into a long conversation that can get awkward, but you're just resourcing them.
Ryan Collins, CEO of Bethel School of Technology, calls Christians doing this, 'digital missionaries' using Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.
We are running ads using Google AdWords. The average cost was three cents per visit for the 50M that came to the site. This means we have been seeing people come to Christ for under $3 a person. There are stats from Barna that traditional church outreach methods in the USA cost $60-$80,000 per person baptised.
Listen to the 37 min podcast here.
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From a podcast by Heaven in Business, 25/06/2024