For years, the Evangelism Response Center (ERC), a ministry of the North American Mission Board (NAMB), has reached out to people seeking spiritual encouragement through phone calls. As of September, however, there is a new channel of communication available: an online chat.
Elbert Charpie, pastor of First Baptist Church, Citronelle, has been instrumental in bringing this feature to fruition.
Charpie took the phone training course about two and a half years ago and felt ERC was missing an opportunity by not offering a chat feature. Since then, he’s been working with developers and server companies to help bring the concept to life.
“With the chat option, you’re going to be talking to people that are very different from you and probably more so than with the telephone evangelism,” Charpie said. “So far, I’ve chatted with people from India and London. The phone has limited us to the U.S., but that’s not an issue with chat.”
For Thomas Wright, executive director of missions for Mobile Baptist Association, the chat feature builds upon something he put into place a few years ago.
“As director of materials development for the evangelism section of the Home Mission Board (now NAMB), we created the first website, outreach chat rooms, online training for online evangelists and the first edition of www.thegoodnews.org,” Wright said. “The technology limitations at that time have been resolved through the excellent system Dr. Charpie has designed.”
Since the chat feature was formally rolled out in September, 42 operators have been trained to chat and the feature has been included on a handful of websites. Whenever someone logs onto a website containing the chat feature, any operator logged into the system is notified by a knocking sound. At that point, the operator can either wait to see if the website visitor will initiate a chat or send a message to gauge the visitor’s interest in a conversation.
One website that includes the chat feature is mobilebaptists.org, and Wright described its placement as “self-explanatory and unobtrusive.” An invitation to chat appears when a visitor first logs on to the website’s home page.
“It’s important for people to note that the ERC chat button does not interfere with your personal website or the information posted,” said Beau Brewer, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary ERC intern. “It only gives the viewer the opportunity to click and begin chatting with a caring follower of Jesus.”
For those interested in adding the chat feature to their websites, the HTML code is available via nambercchat.com. In addition to the code, the site contains a news page with relevant updates as well as elements to help with the training process.
According to Brewer, who was trained as a telephone encourager a few years ago and has since become a chat operator as well, the feature is a natural next step for ERC.
“I believe that there are a growing number of Christian men and women that are making more use of the Internet,” he said. “This is seen by the scores of people using smart phones and Facebook alike. I believe that, in time, chat evangelism is going to draw many more people into conversations that eternally impact people.”
Looking forward, Charpie has high hopes for the chat feature and would like to see it embedded on at least 50 to 75 sites within a year. Recruiting more operators will be essential as the feature grows, and Brewer said his experience as an operator has been a fulfilling one, even in just a few short weeks.
“Sharing our faith in Jesus is a Christian essential. Every believer has a testimony, and every believer has a basic responsibility to share with others,” he said. “With that in mind, the Evangelism Response Center is such an easy ministry.”
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