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Today Elder Ballard spoke at the BYU-Hawaii graduation and urged graduates to use the Internet to share the Gospel. He mentioned blogging, podcasts, Facebook, video-sharing sites, and “people using … search engines to hunt for topics about the Church.” Here are selected portions:

The emergence of New Media is facilitating a world-wide conversation on almost every subject including religion, and nearly everyone can participate.
…
Conversations will continue whether or not we choose to participate in them. But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the Church teaches.
…
The challenge is that there are too many people participating in conversation about the Church for our Church personnel to converse with and respond to individually. We cannot answer every question, satisfy every inquiry, and respond to every inaccuracy that exists. …some who seek answers want them to come directly from a member of the Church, like each one of you.
…
May I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the Restoration. Most of you already know that if you have access to the Internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. You can download videos from Church and other appropriate sites, including Newsroom at LDS.org, and send them to your friends. You can write to media sites on the Internet that report on the Church, and voice your views as to the accuracy of the reports.
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Others have recorded and posted their testimonies of the Restoration, the teachings of the Book of Mormon, and other gospel subjects on popular video-sharing sites. You, too, can tell your story to nonmembers in this way.
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Use stories and words that they will understand.

Elder Ballard also cited the Indy Books blog, where Bookslinger chronicles his daily missionary work.

I think this will prove to be a landmark talk.

Full transcript: Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church

Press release: Apostle Urges Students to Use New Media

(Thanks to several people who sent me this.)

There were powerful ideas in the Church Newsroom’s recent podcast about the Truth Restored campaign. Elder Quentin L. Cook and Scott Swofford envision a future in which the Internet is used for finding, and missionaries teach and baptize.

The newly redesigned Mormon.org includes a chat feature which connects interested parties with “missionaries and trainers at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah.” Brother Swofford said, “A number of baptisms have resulted.”

We previously mentioned that a virtual world like Second Life could be an avenue for sharing the Gospel. Having had some success with the chat feature, it seems the Church may even consider a “virtual mission”:

“We hope to continue to expand both the hours and the scope of that [chat] program to include perhaps a virtual mission at some point where missionaries who might be disqualified for other health-related or other issues can continue to serve as a virtual missionary.” (Scott Swofford)

In a recent Church Newsroom podcast, Scott Swofford, Media Director of the Missionary Department, said new media and the Internet should be used to find people for the full-time missionaries to teach:

“There’s no way missionaries can do what they do now and shoulder the burden of finding. We’re going to have to do the finding using new media. And then, because new media can’t baptize, teach, convert, and testify, we’re going to have to feed that funnel, the product of that funnel, to the missionaries so they can do what they do best. Wouldn’t it be great if my grandson goes…on his mission…and gets to just teach nonstop because media and the Internet have finally picked up their rightful role and are funneling people who want to know.” (Emphasis added.)

Elder Quentin L. Cook said many people will prefer to learn about the Church through the Internet:

“There are a lot of people today who would like to know more about our faith but they are concerned about having their privacy invaded. They want to look at things in their own time and in their own way. They do not want to feel like they have any pressure…. We feel that the Internet and the privacy that it affords people is a wonderful way to do that…. There are a lot of people who are just not going to call a number…. But they will go to the Internet and look into it and we think that’s happening on a significant scale.” (Emphasis added.)

Faithful Church members who share their beliefs online accelerate the Internet’s “rightful role” in finding people for the missionaries to teach.

Source: “Truth Restored” Campaign [mp3]

Hi friends~

As Richard mentioned recently, The More Good Foundation is in the collaborative process of creating Christ.org–a new, comprehensive website about the ministry, life, and teachings of Jesus  Christ.  It’s magnificent to comtemplate. 

As part of the website, we’d like to create music videos related to various aspects of Christ’s life, teachings, and ministry.  We’re currently in the process of selecting the most loved songs and/or hymns about the Savior–including those by artists of other faiths.  We’re currently considering the following:

Amazing Grace
How Great Thou Art
I Believe in Christ
I Need Thee Every Hour
I Know That My Redeemer Lives
Abide with Me; ‘Tis Eventide
El Shaddai by Amy Grant
Never a Better Hero by Kenneth Cope
His Hands by Kenneth Cope
I Can Only Imagine by MercyMe
This is the Christ (lyrics by James E. Faust)

We value your input. What are your personal favorites?  What would you add to the list?  We invite you to send this out to friends and let us know their top selections as well.

Thank you, kindly, in advance, for your time. We look forward to hearing from you. 

Karen

Facebook now allows advertisers to discover the size of specific demographic audiences. By doing a few searches related to the Church, I was able to get an idea of the number of Mormons on Facebook. (See image below.)

The number of people in the U.S. who listed a Church-owned university as their college*:

• 20,660 - Brigham Young University
• 9,300 - Brigham Young University-Idaho
• 1,200 - Brigham Young University-Hawaii

*A small percentage of BYU students are not Mormons, and I think this figure only includes students. The BYU network, which includes alumni and faculty, has 37,395 people.

The number of people, by country, who listed “The Book of Mormon” as an interest:

• 11,880 - United States (1 in every 1,679 Americans on Facebook)
• 700 - Canada (1 in 10,516)
• 140 - United Kingdom (1 in 45,768)
• 40 - Australia (1 in 37,458)

These interests are, of course, self-selected and don’t reflect the actual number of Mormons on Facebook. I personally have several Mormon friends who do not list The Book of Mormon as an interest or did not attend a Church-owned university. Though Facebook users can specify a religion, Facebook does not allow advertisers to see demographics by religion.

Other interests listed by people in the U.S.:

• 696,120 - The Bible
• 281,380 - God
• 46,160 - Spending time with my family
• 38,940 - Religion
• 26,420 - Going to Church
• 18,000 - Jesus Christ

The More Good Foundation is pleased to announce a partnership with Dr. Richard Holzapfel to create the #1 website about Jesus Christ at Christ.org. (In the meantime, we are redirecting traffic to Mormon.org.)

Dr. Holzapfel is a BYU professor of Church History and Doctrine and a prolific author. We are very excited and honored to work with him.

Christ.org will include top articles, music, and videos on the life, death, resurrection, and mission of the Savior Jesus Christ. It will be well documented, well designed, and translated into over a dozen languages. We hope it will bring everyone who visits it closer to Christ.

Question for Commenters: What resources or features should the top website on Jesus Christ include?

The More Good Foundation is growing. We’re pleased to have two new people on our team:

• Karen is our new editor, the quality control expert for all the published content on our websites. She brings an extensive background in writing and editing, including writing for the Ensign and Meridian Magazine. She speaks a bit of German and French. She’s the mother of two daughters.
• Heather is our new community manager. She’ll work with and communicate our gratitude to all the participants on our forums, wikis, blogs, and social news sites. Heather is a native to the Web, publishing her first web page in 1996 and having created and built several websites and online communities since then. She has two sons.

We’re a small team, we each wear lots of hats, and we depend on the kind contributions of member missionaries all around the world, but we’re thankful to have two talented women join our staff.

Eight videos of Elder Ballard answering common questions about Mormonism are now available on YouTube. The videos were first posted on the Church’s own Newsroom site but are now available through the Church’s new YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/LDSPublicAffairs

(You can also subscribe to these videos by RSS.)

Elder Ballard answers questions like these:

• Are Mormons Christian?
• Why do people say Mormonism is a cult?
• How Do Mormon Beliefs Differ From Other Christians?

Very savvy of the Church to go where the traffic is.

Online missionary work can be like fishing or like hunting.

Sometimes we cast our line and then wait for someone to come along. For example, our website about Mormon beliefs sits idly until someone types “Mormon beliefs” into Google, and then it is found. Other fishermen are there too.

18 And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.
19 And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.
(Matthew 4:18-19)

Other times we hunt; we seek out people interested in learning more about the Church. If you want a missionary opportunity right now, visit Yahoo Answers and type in “Mormon” or join the forums at LDSForums.com. You’ll find plenty of people with questions about the Church.

16 Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.
(Jeremiah 16:16)

Among the most recurring themes in scripture is “seek and ye shall find“. We should make that true for people searching online.

Last week at the Utah Open Source Conference, Tom Welch, Technology Community Manager for the Church, spoke about his work as CTO of Linspire. While at Linspire, they created a tool called IRMA, by which volunteers could participate in the translation of their software. For example, a volunteer with a few minutes on her hands might visit IRMA to translate text like “Your file was not found” into Spanish, Arabic, or Swahili. The IRMA project resulted in the full or partial translation of their software into 59 languages. Instead of paying for the work, the company was able to harness the collective intelligence of the community to get the work done:

• 59 languages
• 3,246 translators
• 2.6 million translations
• top translator completed over 13,800 message translations

This is precisely the type of project that would be interesting for sharing the Gospel. The Church member might visit a website and be presented with a few options:

• Will you please translate the phrase “Joseph Smith is a prophet of God” into Portuguese?
• Will you please write a paragraph about what it’s like to visit a Mormon temple?
• Someone at Yahoo Answers has a question about the Book of Mormon. Please follow this link to answer his question.
• Will you please hit record and look into your web cam as you explain how you gained a testimony of the principle of tithing?

The work produced by volunteers would be published where persons of other faiths could find it. The site would have to be as accessible and easy to use as FamilySearchIndexing.org. There would be plenty of work, and this would make sharing the Gospel easier for Church members.