Internet
presence
grows
By Michael Morrison
The WCG has maintained an Internet site since 1995.
Since the Internet itself is doubling in size and activity every four months or so, the church wants to make effective use of what is essentially a new publishing medium. This is done on the worldwide web, the fastest-growing portion of the Internet.
Here's what the church's site offers:
* Information about the church --designed to answer questions from journalists, researchers and potential members.
* A list of cities in which WCG congregations meet, and pastors' phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
* Links to our international web sites. Australia, Canada and England have separate web sites with local publications and information in several languages.
* Links to the dozens of congregations that have their own web sites, most with meeting times and locations, some with complete sermons, updated every week.
* The Worldwide News, including issues back to September 1995.
* Literature, including study papers and several booklets. We plan to add more literature each week--mostly articles from the WN, organized by subject. Thus it becomes a permanent archive accessible from anywhere in the world.
* Festival information and on-line registration.
* Women's ministry support information.
* Youth ministry. Teens are among the heaviest Internet users. Here they can find out what other teens in the church are doing, and they can chat through their keyboards.
The Internet is a worldwide network of millions of computers that can communicate with each other. Users can send e-mail to one another or request data from another computer, which responds by sending text, graphics, audio, video or other computer files.
One computer will often contain hyperlinks to another computer in a different part of the world. A user in Alabama can easily access an Internet site in South Africa, select a hyperlink there and within seconds be rerouted to Sweden, or with a click of a button begin to watch New Zealand television--all without long-distance charges.
Commercial use of the Internet is growing rapidly. Consumers can find information about products, shop for the best prices and place orders from their home computers. Discount prices are offered on books, automobiles and thousands of other products.
Many public libraries in the United States have computers linked to the Internet, and almost anyone can use these computers. Somewhere along the way, drop by www.wcg.org and explore our site.
Another way to explore the Internet is through a friend. Almost every church area has someone connected to the net.
The volume of material is mind-boggling--huge libraries of information accessible from almost anywhere in the world. How can you wade through the data? The first web site you visit may well be a search engine--a site that specializes in organizing the topics.
At a search engine, such as www.yahoo.com or www.infoseek.com, type in the subject you're looking for and you'll get hyperlinks to sites that may have this information.
It can be a lot of fun, it can be frustrating, and it can be so interesting that it's a big waste of time. All waiting for you, in the electronic world called cyberspace.
Copyright © Worldwide Church of God, 1998