c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) For kids these days, Internet security is hard to come by.

But for kids concerned about eternal security, the Net’s precisely the place to be.

Dozens of Christian groups are rethinking flannel graphs and 10 a.m. Sunday school classes, finding that there may be a bigger, better way to fulfill the Great Commission _ just add wireless.

Children of non-religious parents who may be discouraged from attending church can often connect with church ministries on the Web, said Emily Trotter,who manages the Web site for Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF). The organization’s own WonderZone.com invites kids to take video game adventures with cute, digital animal characters _ and get a full-fledged Bible lesson on the side.

One recent WonderZone visitor from Alaska e-mailed the site, telling CEF that it was the first place he learned about the Bible.

“His dad forbids him to learn (about Jesus), but his dad will let him play online,” Trotter said.

Online kids ministry is still in the experimental phase, but it may be an effective way to spark the interest of increasingly tech-savvy tots. The last time the U.S. Census Bureau checked in on national child computer use in 2003, 50 percent of first- through fifth-graders used the Web and 91 percent used computers. Those numbers are on a steep climb.

Sites like WonderZone are part of a larger effort among Christian groups to turn the information superhighway into a superhighway to heaven. With broadband connections and increased access overseas, religious organizations have progressed from posting a plain-text plan of salvation to streaming gospel-oriented films in hundreds of languages.

For Eden Productions, which began in 1959 as an evangelistic film company and expanded online in 1995, the Web is breaching physical barriers. The gospel message is finding its way to places that executive director Paul Taylor says were “pretty much unreachable by film.”

The anonymity provided by such evangelistic Web sites can be both a blessing and a curse. Gone is the walk-up altar call and face-to-face contact. But gone too are nervous inhibitions.

Taylor says the online phenomenon has opened the door for countless candid conversations on deeply personal spiritual issues.

“We get a huge number of e-mails each month, and volunteers interact with them,” Taylor said.

To keep kids’ identities private, WonderZone uses only screen names and urges children to ask their parents before using the site. Counselors _ whom CEF pre-screens _ never know a child’s real name, location or even age.

A perpetual challenge is ascertaining whether or not a child understands what a spiritual commitment means. And what happens when a kid “falls off the face of the planet”?

There are certainly kinks and confusion. Things can seem gimmicky. But some strategists say it’s working.

“I think you need to use the relevant means to reach kids,” said Donna Van Nortwick, marketing director at the American Tract Society (ATS), which hosts the kids evangelism site ATS Kids. “We need to be where they’re at, meet them where they’re at.”

But some experts say there are a lot of missing components in Internet evangelism.

Theologians have been grappling with the complexities of the Christian faith for millennia. Is it realistic to expect that kids can genuinely learn from a two-minute slideshow or a flashy video game on the Internet?

“Children are starving for relationships, and online isn’t going to cut it,” said Janice Haywood, a preschool and children’s ministry specialist with the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.

Haywood has worked with children for 37 years and authored a book on designing a children’s ministry. She believes that when it comes to spiritual and moral lessons, kids learn through relationships, which Christian Web sites cannot replicate.

“That’s good supplementary material, but the relationship doesn’t happen there,” she said.

According to Jeff Childers, associate professor of Bible, ministry and missions at Abilene Christian University, human interaction is critical to learning spiritual lessons.

“Though a human teacher generally cannot hold as much data as digital media, they have infinitely more wisdom,” he explained. “People are being bombarded with loads of data these days, but not always being trained in how to make judgments about the information.”

And while some evangelistic organizations believe they have to keep up with the technological Joneses, Haywood disagrees. She said that even in a generation with a microscopic attention span, entertaining kids should not be the focus of children’s ministry _ online or otherwise.

“Kids can get entertainment online or at home,” she said. But when it comes to relationships, “they eat it up. We think we have to be big entertainers, but I think that this too shall cease.”

Childers agrees.

“Essential growth occurs within human relationships,” he said, “for which digital media are no substitute.”

DSB/PH END RINDELS