Seeking spiritual guidance through search engines is so popular these days that a legion of online missionaries is being assembled in Orlando to answer the cyber-prayers.
Global Media Outreach — a ministry of Orlando-based Campus Crusade for Christ International — has formed a partnership with Northland, A Church Distributed, in Longwood to recruit and train 5,000 online missionaries by 2010.
“We are overwhelmed. We don’t have enough online missionaries to handle what we are getting now — which is a wonderful problem,” said the Rev. Allan Beeber, Orlando director of Global Media.
Global Media has more than 90 Web sites aimed at search-engine seekers of God. Type in a query about Jesus, and WhoIsJesus-Re ally.com shows up in the results. Type in a question about God’s existence and Jesus2020.com shows up as a sponsored link. There are religion-based Web sites for teenagers, Marines, soccer players, Boston Red Sox fans, and The DaVinci Code.
At the bottom of each Web site is a feedback form that asks for names, e-mail addresses and a space for comments and questions. About 30,000 people a day fill out that form and press the send button, Beeber said.
Those contacts and comments are forwarded to one of the Global Media’s 2,900 online missionaries trained to answer questions of faith — or refer to someone who can.
What I cut and pasted above is actually from two different sections of the article, so it might not read well together, but then again, it might. Either way, I just wanted to provide you with what I considered the meatiest part of the article.
On second thought, Carolyn from Boston is an avid reader who is a vegetarian, so that comment could be taken the wrong way. Sorry, Carolyn.