It's really a feeling of wanting to make my life count for something other than keeping track of vehicles through satellites, which I do during the day,'' says Haynes, now a Baptist. I look at it very much like a ministry,'' explains Maffin, who spends 10 hours a week updating his site, culling from the several hundred e-mail messages he gets. Some people have skills in prayer, some people have skills in administration. I tend to have skills on the Internet. I figure that this is one way I can give back to the church.'' Searching for Jesus in cyberspace may be widely practised, but don't write off going to church.
Most clergy view the Internet as an adjunct to personal interaction.
I see the Internet as a way for the church to reach out to people who might not otherwise want to relate to a church or choose to relate to a church,'' says Rev. David Shearman, a United Church minister in Blackstock, Ont., north of Oshawa. There is something intensely personal about religious faith that I think requires some sense of physical community gathering in a time and place - like Sunday morning for Christians, or a Sabbath worship for the Jewish faith or in the case of Islam going to a mosque. Nonetheless Quentin Schultze, author of Internet for Christians, now a book and an online newsletter, says 5,000 to 10,000 North American Christian groups alone are already on the Internet, and the number is growing by about 30 a week. Christians dominate, however, because it's a large faith that tends to be wealthier than others and evangelism is an essential part of its teachings. Haynes reminds people not to accept as gospel everything they read in cyberspace.