Using the Internet to Promote Missions in Tibet

Our missionary guest blogger this week is Brother Eugene who serves in an area of western China which is closed to Christian missionaries.  The region of Tibet has been in the news lately as the Chinese government appears to be cracking down on dissent among the people of this area in advance of the Olympics.  As isolated as Tibet may seem, both the Internet and the Gospel are making inroads there.  (For security reasons, he has provided the obscured photo to the left and is vague about his location.)

Brother Eugene writes:

I had already been a missionary for nearly two years before someone talked me into starting a website to promote our work among the minority people in the foothills of Tibet. I agreed with my friend that this would be a good idea, because we were at that time praying and asking God to raise up more laborers to take the Gospel to the unreached mission field of Tibet. So I decided to give it a go.

I had spent a lot of time on the internet during my high school years, but it was primarily for personal use. The only internet ministry I had done at that time was one-on-one evangelism in teen chatrooms. So I had no experience whatsoever in designing a website, and I had no money to pay someone else to do it professionally.

I started from scratch, looking for interesting templates online and trying to figure out how to design something without having to learn how to write code. I got lucky (the Lord helped me!) and I was able to get a decent site off the ground within just a couple weeks. I posted tons of pictures and wrote about the unreached people groups that we were working among at that time. I now had a way to keep our prayer and financial supporters back home updated on what we were doing, and to share with others about the ministry that was taking place and how they could get involved. We were able to raise more financial and prayer support through our simple website than I was ever able to do by visiting home for short periods of time. Many ministry contacts were made and life-long friendships started, all as a result of us using the internet to get our vision (God’s vision!) for ministry in Tibet out there for people to see.

All that got started about 4 years ago, in late summer of 2004. Today, our website is still up and running, although it is in need of an overhaul sometime soon! But today my primary focus is on our family/ministry blog. I have had the blog for over 2 years now, but I have just recently began to put more effort into it. A blog is more interesting for many people to read than a regular website, because the information changes and grows daily. A static website is nice, but it is not usually something that people will come back again and again to read. A blog, however, if interesting and captivating enough, will attract people on a daily basis. We want to use our blog for the advancement of the Christ’s Kingdom to the glory of God!

I feel that we are in a unique situation where we can share with the Church in the West about the extreme spiritual needs of the unreached people groups where we live in the foothills of Tibet. We also want to take advantage of our position outside of the rampant materialism and subjectivism that is attacking so many in the United States and other nations in the West, in order to encourage and exhort believers to stand firm in their faith and to press forward in the work of the Lord, knowing that our labor is not in vain in Him (1 Cor. 15:58). We plan to use the internet as way to promote the sharing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for many years as God allows us on the mission field here in the foothills of Tibet.

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Brother Eugene lives with his family in western China.  You can learn more about his ministry on his website and blog.

If you are/were a Christian missionary and would like to write a guest blog article about how the Internet impacted your ministry, please contact us through our help desk.  For more information about other Christian missionaries see OurChurch.Com’s Missions Mashup.

BrotherEugene