Monday, June 11, 2007

What to look for in Evangelistic Websites

As stated in my previous posts, I'm hoping to review various evangelistic websites.
But before I start out with any reviews, I'm going to lay out the criteria by which I will be assessing them.

1) Faithfulness of the gospel.

In any site for Non-Christians this is the most important thing. It could succeed at everything else, but if the gospel is not clearly and faithfully presented it has failed.

There are four main things that I'd look for:
  1. God: is it clear that God is the Holy, Loving Creator?
  2. Man: that we are made in God's image to worship him, but have rebelled against him and are therefore subject to his good and just but terrible anger.
  3. Christ: that he is the perfect God-man who died on the cross to take the punishment that sinners deserve, and was raised from the dead, and is now the risen Lord.
  4. Response: that Jesus calls us now to turn from our sin, submit to his Lordship, and trust him for our salvation.
2) Clarity
If the gospel is presented faithfully, how clear is it? Is it presented in a way that someone with no knowledge of biblical language might understand.

3) Applicability
How well has the gospel been applied to people's lives in various ways, so that people might see it's implications clearly? Are the implications of the gospel confused with the gospel?

4) Responsibility
Does the site take the responsibility to help people to know how they might find out more about the gospel?

5) Usability
Is it easy to navigate the site. Does it look good?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

sounds pretty critical of other websites...why not just point out what is good about the ones you like

Mike Gilbart-Smith said...

Thanks, anonymous, for your interesting (and somewhat ironic) comment(ironic, for in your post you are being critical of what my website is saying - the very thing that you are trying to encourage me not to do!)

Having said that, I think that you have every right to ask such a question. Why would I eveer want to review (both positively and negatively) other websites?

The reason I would want to do so, is that by only mentioning the positives about things, I might give the impression that I am totally endorsing everything that they say. there might be 90% positive things which means that I want people to be aware of the site. But I would also want people to be aware of the 10% negative, so that people might go in with their eyes open.

Do you think this is a good idea?

Mike

Mop said...

Mike: We have just found a really useful course for post-moderns: Glad You Asked has been devised for Western Europeans by a group from Oxford. Daphne and I have used it with students, teens and two groups of adults. We review it in Evangelicals Now, prob out in Sept. Look at www.gladyouasked.org

Warmly

John Ross

Mike Gilbart-Smith said...

Thanks John,

Good to hear from you

Mike