World Wide Web

Loaves and Fishes and the World Wide Web

By Darrell Laurant of the Lynchburg, Virginia - News and Advance

Dear Pastor Davies: You won’t believe how I stumbled on your site. I did a Google.com search for the “best mulch” and your experience about buying a bag of mulch and witnessing to the clerk came up. Since I’m here, I would appreciate a prayer for my sister-in-law’s husband. He goes for major surgery at the University of Maryland tomorrow. – Esther Sue

It is indeed, a brave new world, and the Rev. Larry Davies of Timberlake United Methodist Church is taking full advantage of it.

Of course, Davies has never been your average pastor. For one thing, he used to sell Honda automobiles in Tidewater, Virginia. For anther, his first marriage ended in divorce. Recently, he planned a service in which congregation members were encouraged to dress in beach wear and the choir filled the sanctuary with Beach Boys tunes.

“I really think too many ministers worry way too much about their dignity.” Davies said on a recent morning at the Koffee Kup restaurant, his “alternate Sunday school.”

Dignity never sold Hondas, he discovered, and it doesn’t do a very good job of selling the gospel. Nor does Davies agree with the religious point of view that regards “the world” as something to be avoided at all costs.

There are bad things out in that world, he knows. He’s experienced some of them. But there are also good things.

So while others may fear the Internet as a seething Sodom and Gomorrah, filled with porn sites and rip-off schemes and lurking child molesters, Davies and an increasing number of other ministers prefer to embrace it as an opportunity.

Just as an obscure Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell fell in love with television in the late 1950’s, Davies has found clear links to Jesus on the Internet.

The advantages are obvious. If you preach a sermon on Sunday, your audience is limited to the members in the pews. Put it on television and that audience increases exponentially but it’s still dependent upon people switching on their sets at the time of your program. With the Internet, a sermon can be e-mailed to thousands and they can experience it any time they choose.

Put another way, the Web is to words what the miracle on the Mount was to loaves and fishes.

“It (the Internet) scared me a little bit at first,” Davies said of the new medium, “but I’m getting more and more comfortable with it.”

His Web site, www.SowingSeedsofFaith.com offers a literal helping hand. The first thing you see when you click on it is an almost-as-large-as-life hand reaching onto the screen and dropping a seed. The seed disappears, only to explode upward into a flower with a family of three cupped in its petals. Another seed brings forth an older man standing all alone, still another a mother and child. This symbolizes Davies’ belief that a church has to reach people in all sorts of situations, not just the hallowed “nuclear family.”

Once you get past the special effects, you find a weekly devotional, some of Davies’ thoughts (he is an excellent writer), some “hot issues” and “Biblical turning points,” and a link to prayer requests.

This, of course, has transcended Timberlake United Methodist and turned Sowing Seeds Ministry into a nationwide – and maybe even world wide --- ministry.

“The last time I checked, we had a list of 5,100 Sowing Seeds subscribers,” Davies said, “and over 1,500 people on our prayer team.”

He’s also accumulating a list of success stories. There was, for example, a woman named Janice who sent Davies an e-mail about her impending suicide. She sounded definite about taking her life, but concerned about the effect it might have on her family.

“That sent chills down me,” said Davies, who had experienced the suicide of a close family member.

He tried offering Janice some pastoral wisdom. It didn’t take.

“I’m not afraid to die,” she wrote back. “I’m afraid to live.”

He was stumped, he recalled. And scared.

“So I finally slowed down and began to pray… and listen,” he later wrote. “During those quiet peaceful moments, I finally realized God’s answer. Share Janice’s story and allow a community of faith to pray and be used by God to reach out to her.

“Within minutes, copies of Janice’s letter were forwarded over the Internet to hundreds of people who had promised to pray for anyone in need. The response was rapid and incredible. Many began to pray immediately. Soon, Janice received dozens of e-mail letters and a few phone calls from people who shared their own struggle with pain and depression and how God guided their recovery.”

In this case, the ‘success story was not Janice – not yet, anyway. She e-mailed Davies that she felt depressed, but was encouraged by the outpouring of support “to try and remain alive one minute at a time, day by day.”

What stunned and energized Davies was the speed at which his unseen “cyber-congregation leaped to a stranger’s aid.

Ministers, like all authority figures are stalked by their egos. It’s so tempting to believe that you have all the answers, or that you can produce them by simply turning to an appropriate page in the Bible.

“A lot of times, though,” said Davies, “other people who have had the same experience are far more effective in helping than any minister. Your greatest pain, in many cases, is your greatest ministry.”

And there’s always more to learn. In Davies’ case, he soon realized that the Internet was useless to him unless he could find out how to negotiate the labyrinth of search engines.

“I was so naļve, I though all the sites on search engines were ranked in order of importance,” he said. “I soon found out that a lot of it involves money.”

Armed with that knowledge, he hooked the “Sowing Seeds Ministry” up with some entrepreneurs who promised to give it good placement in return for a small fee per “hit.”

“One of them charged five cents a hit,” Davies said with a chuckle, “and I got so many responses that I had to quit using them. It was too expensive.”