sustain:if:able kiwi

online segregation

Challenging article in Sojourners about the Digital Divide – how people link to people like them, and how that harms ministry among the poorer.

So what can we do about online segregation? It’s actually very simple compared to segregation in the physical world. It is very easy to put links on your MySpace profile, blog, or Web site to ministries such as Christian Volunteering.org, UrbanMinistry.org, the Salvation Army, and Rescue Missions. Each link not only refers people to those sites, but it also boosts their popularity in search engines. It may not seem like much, but it quickly adds up.

This is not yet happening enough in the Christian community. In fact, secular commercial companies such as MySpace have driven much more traffic to our Web sites than Christian sites have, because these companies realize the value of corporate philanthropy.