May, 2008
Several years ago, under the direction of Pastor Mike Hoover, I setup a website for our church in hopes
that the church family would be able to use it to find out about upcoming events. We added a calendar, and began posting
birthdays, anniversaries, preaching meetings, outings and anything that the church would be doing. It started off slowly, and
probably went several months before anyone realized we had a web site for the church. We decided to archive our messages in
a digital format and make them available on the web for anyone who missed a service, or wanted to hear it again. This also took
off very slowly, but we continued.
At that time, Pastor Hoover was hosting a regular Monday night radio show called Covenanter's Call, an internet broadcast run by the American Voice Radio. Pastor Hoover thought it would be fun to have some forums available to allow people to ask questions and get them answered on the website, so another website was born, www.covenanterscall.net.
As time went on, the web sites began to grow and get more and more traffic. Then a little over a year ago, Pastor Hoover felt the Lord calling him on to Indiana, and Anthony Garrisi took over as Pastor or Payson First Baptist Church. Pastor Garrisi understood the importance of reaching people in a medium they understand and immediately wanted to update the web site and give it a friendlier look. We added a blog so Pastor could write his own articles and tell anyone who wanted to know what was happening in the church, or how the Lord was working in his life. Soon after, it became apparent to us that many other churches would like to have a similar setup. The Lord gave us some new equipment capable of handling many more sites than we were running and has allowed us to aquire a high-speed internet connection, giving us the ability to host websites for any church or ministry that we chose to help. BibleBased WebSites was founded as the backbone to handle this ministry, and before we could advertise we had several churches show interest in having their own sites.
I have a rather long background of working on computers, everything from custom building to programming. I grew very tired of fixing broken computers and attempting to keep them safe from viruses as well as disgusted with how wicked the internet was becoming. No doubt, it is satan's play ground. I struggled a bit with whether or not the Lord wanted me to continue this ministry, or give it up. I kept wondering if my being a part of the internet was a stumbling block to someone else, or if I was helping someone else justify having the wicked internet in their home. The Lord worked to show me that it is our responsibility to reach the lost world, and we have been given certain tools to do so. Magazines can be wicked, the television can be wicked, the radio can be wicked, but why give it all to satan? This generation requires the internet, and would probably be lost without it! If there is a single lost soul on the internet, who is sincerely searching for the truth, we have opportunity to reach them and share with them the Lord Jesus Christ, we must turn that opportunity into a responsibility and take advantage of it.
Fast Forward one year. The Lord has truly blessed this ministry as we are seeing new faces show up at church stating they found us on the internet and wanted to visit. We have hundreds of archived messages available for listening and all the services are live streamed so anyone is now able to listen to a service. We are currently hosting 12 websites on our and have several more in the works, and just completed our first upgrade to handle more websites in the future. We have actually outgrown some of the services we were using in the past, and now host everything ourselves. A couple months back we were excited because our church website was about to break 40,000 views, and before we could announce that, it doubled! Our server is now handling approximately 20,000 hits a month across all of our websites! Praise the Lord! We're about to break 300,000 total hits.
This ministry is not free how ever. We never charge for the domain registration, all web hosting, email services, design of the web site, and all maintenance are done without charge to anyone who asks, as long as they meet our requirements. Obviously we cannot support a ministry that is not biblical, but to those who ask, we work with them to design a website that meets their needs. We have electrical costs, ISP costs, Qwest phone costs, and lots of other behind the scenes costs. When Pastor Garrisi and I sat down and discussed this, we chose to allow the Lord to bless this ministry and support it by faith and love offerings, rather than charging those we were wishing to help. Our current costs are averaging $200.00 a month to handle all that we do. The Lord has blessed it and paid all the bills so far, but this ministry is love offering based only. We will continue until the Lord sees fit to stop paying the bills! If you would like to help out in any way, you may send gifts to Pastor Garrisi or myself at the church address. I also have pay-pal on the website so you can help out directly over the internet, securely using a debit card or check.
BibleBased WebSites has truly been a blessing to my life as I've been able to meet new churches and Pastors, as well as allow the Lord to work in yet another way through my life. I praise the Lord for the ability to be a blessing to other churches and ministries.
Until His Return,
Nathan Aubrey
nathan.aubrey@biblebasedwebsites.com
http://www.biblebasedwebsites.com