"The Occult Roots of Abortion" audio sermons on-line

This is from a pastor, Scott Johnson of North Fort Myers, Florida, who found my (co-written with Eric Holmberg) website article: The Occult Roots of Abortion. He preached a three part sermon reading the articles and expounding on the text relating it to scripture throughout.

http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=1119072034224

I am amazed. I posted the .mp3 audio sermons on my website. Here are the links:

http://www.forerunner.com/audio/wicca1.mp3

http://www.forerunner.com/audio/wicca2.mp3

http://www.forerunner.com/audio/wicca3.mp3

It is ironic. I sat down today to capture the audio for a video I have started on "Witchcraft and Abortion." I was searching to see if there were any photos of these Wiccan abortionists on the Internet. I found these .mp3 files by chance. I wrote and edited the articles in 1993 and later combined this with Eric Holmberg's Massacre of Innocence video script. There was a period of time in 1996 when I first posted my website that I would get up to 30 emails a day from enraged Wiccans who protested these articles. It was at that time that Forerunner.com was "discovered" by a mass audience of Wiccans and Pagans. Ironically their attention helped the fledgling website's overall popularity in the search engines.

To think I spent several hours doing the audio for a video (that will later have to be redone by Eric Holmberg anyway) and I found a pastor on the Internet who had already done the same thing! I'll be posting the video in segments on YouTube prior to the production of the final DVD.

Stay tuned.

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to get updates via email.

http://www.youtube.com/jcr4runner

I Invented the Internet (Ep. 4: Kill and Destroy)

link: I Invented the Internet (Ep. 4: Kill and Destroy)

You may or may not have seen the Baby Rowan video I made last year on a baby that was born alive and left to die in an Orlando, Florida abortion clinic. I've embedded it below.

Recently, I was told about a viral video that has over half a million views in a short period of time. It has Jill Stanek talking about how she often held babies that were born alive in abortion clinics until they died -- sometimes for close to an hour.

The video above was made by Jason Mitchell in order to expose Barack Obama's opposition to a bill that made it illegal to leave these babies born alive to die without medical care.

I was contacted by Jason Mitchell after I linked my Baby Rowan video to his powerful piece above. Jason mentioned that he knew The Forerunner and that his dad had been part of Maranatha Ministries. Jason didn't remember me, but I knew him quite well when he was a teenager. His father, Wayne Mitchell, now a pastor in Boston, and I produced The Mandate, a version of The Foreunner for Chinese students, for three years in the mid-1990s.

I am glad to see that Jason has turned out to be even more radical than his father. God is truly a sovereign God!

A few of Jason's videos have been featured on major news networks as an example of how the viral video phenomenon is changing politics in America. Watch all Jason's videos on YouTube if you get a chance. They are a hoot!

Forerunner Vision

The following is my from my newsletter which is sent out via snail mail to our ministry project supporter every so often. The rest is self-explanatory! - JCR

Dear Friend of The Forerunner International,

Greetings in the victorious name of Jesus Christ, the King of all nations!

As you might know, the name “The Forerunner” comes from the ancient church’s title for John the Baptist. I have always thought of The Forerunner as a ministry that has both a prophetic and evangelistic calling. Like John, we are to be a “bright and shining light” that will go into the whole world “in the spirit and power of Elijah” to preach the Gospel.

When I first started in media ministry in 1987, I published a little newsletter that went out to about 100 people in our church and elsewhere. I used to dream about the day when publications and videos I produced would be used of God to reach millions of people around the world. I had many encouraging words from pastors and church members about my calling. Of course, this was before desktop computers, the world-wide-web and non-linear video editing platforms were available to me.

Reflecting on the providential events that have occurred since that time, I spent a few hours recently reading newsletters from the 1990s that reported on my short-term missionary trips to Russia, Ukraine and Tatarstan. I was struck and encouraged by the impact we had on young people in this huge region of the world where the Gospel was virtually unknown at the time.

I wrote in the summer of 1995:

When I arrived in Nizhny Novgorod, a city several hundred miles east of Moscow on the Volga River, I was surprised to find that Predvestnik is well-known in the churches. I was immediately invited to preach in three churches on the basis of what I had accomplished with Predvestnik. One pastor, named Vladislav, told me that it was his favorite Christian publication. When I was introduced his church, I saw through a show of hands that many people had read Predvestnik.

Further away from the big cities, such as Moscow, people are more open to the gospel and Christians are more open to receiving and distributing literature. It's not as though we have become famous, but Predvestnik is having a great impact in cities where we distribute more than a few hundred copies. We receive testimonies from remote areas telling us that the newspaper is received "like a great treasure" and that it is passed from hand to hand. We have made a small explosion in the former USSR with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

While many ministries are doing similar work, what makes The Forerunner unique is that we have always sought to teach Christians to use biblical principles to transform society while retaining an evangelistic focus. We have always tried to hit topics that are vital yet neglected by the church in our post-modern age. I’ve been encouraged to see that the most popular articles on our website are those that I feel most strongly about, and I yet wondered at the time of their writing if people had “ears to hear.”

I thank God that these articles and videos are now being translated into the languages of nations where such Christian media is rare. The most encouraging aspect is that I did not have to recruit most of the translators, but several helpers have contacted me to volunteer their service or ask permission to use our materials. I believe that eventually The Forerunner will not even depend on me to continue, but will be run by freelancers all over the world who will take on designated assignments as part of their ministry. I believe it is God’s plan to raise up young people from strategic areas of the world who will work together to promote the vision and purpose of The Forerunner.

A Brief History of The Forerunner

The Forerunner was originally a newspaper founded in 1981 four years prior to my conversion to Christ. It was published and distributed through Maranatha Campus Ministries. The vision for the publication was campus evangelism, but it became more focused on the ideal of the Reformation and teaching young people and Christian leaders to have a total biblical worldview. I became a Christian in 1985 and soon started to pursue my dream of publishing Christian media. I began working as an associate with editor Lee Grady in 1989. Then I worked directly with Bob and Rose Weiner to continue the publication until January 1994.

Around that time, I moved to Melbourne, Florida and founded Media House International, a non-profit Christian foundation with the purpose of publishing foreign language edition newspapers and newsletters: Predvestnik, The Mandate, The Champion, El Campeón, and so on. In the 1990s, I spent much of my time raising necessary support for Predvestnik and similar projects. Our main project was the Russian language newspaper.

1999 to Present

In 1999 and 2000, we concentrated on publishing books and producing several videos in the Russian language, one of which, Hollywood, won “best documentary” at the Christian Broadcasters Awards in Moscow in 2000.

In 2001, I was married for the first time (“to one wife”) and my life changed drastically. For seven years, I have been working full-time as an English teacher. I like this pace of this life in that teaching pays the bills without any worries or surprises. As a teacher, I have 180 non-work days each year in which to be involved in missionary projects. Recently, I have concentrated on video production ministry, finishing an apologetics DVD called The Real Jesus. In 2007, I also took a three-week trip to Ukraine to attend a Christian teachers’ conference.

One of the reasons why I haven’t written as much recently is that video projects are now funding themselves through sales and I have little need for extra personal support. However, if you want to help with the plan to expand The Forerunner’s missionary projects you can purchase DVDs from our website or you can give a tax-deductible donation. That is the purpose of this prospectus.

Prospectus: The Forerunner in 2008 and 2009

Here I want to outline what I’d like to accomplish in the next two years.

Funding

Last year, our income came from three main sources.

1. Generous donations from people like you who supported my three-week trip to Ukraine in the summer of 2007.
2. Sales of DVDs through our website — especially several titles I produced with Eric Holmberg, The Real Jesus, God’s Law and Society, The Beast of Revelation: Identified, and a book I co-authored called, Four Keys to the Millennium.
3. The Google Adsense program at on our website and YouTube channel.

Although it’s not a huge amount of money, this is residual income that is consistent from month-to-month made from publications and videos I’ve produced over the years. The website now has over 2000 articles and the plan is to make continual improvements that will facilitate changes and growth.

Widening Our Scope through Internet Media and New Technologies

In the one of the editions of The Forerunner in 1992, I wrote an article called “The Fiber-Optics Revolution” that described the coming popularity of the world-wide-web. At the time, I thought that we would soon get 100 percent of our media through the Internet. This would come to pass in what I predicted would be “five to ten years.” We have finally started to turn the corner of this “revolution.” Streaming video sites such as YouTube have only taken off in the past two years and there is a new wireless technology looming on the horizon that will replace high-speed cable modems.

The coupling of high-speed wireless with new video technologies will have its greatest impact for the Gospel in third world countries, many of which are vital mission fields. An important factor in the fulfillment of the Great Commission is that it will be possible for us to develop face-to-face relationships with foreign nationals while training them to be evangelists in their own culture.

While several people have volunteered to help us out of their own burden to do the work of the Lord, I’ve also discovered that many media projects I have envisioned can be “outsourced” over the Internet to students in foreign countries. I’ve already employed a few people who are happy to do work for just a few dollars an hour. For a ministry that depends on a small budget to finance this work, the appearance of many “freelancing” websites employing third world workers is a providential answer to prayer.

As an example, I was recently faced with the daunting task of converting the entire Forerunner.com site to a content management system (CMS). The Forerunner site was first constructed in 1996 and I have since put up about 2000 articles in an antiquated format. I saw that the CMS conversion could be accomplished with just a little knowledge of website formatting. However, I estimated that it would have taken me at least 50 hours of work. I wasn’t too excited about the spending a few hours a week here and there until it was finished.

In the meantime, conversion to CMS was a must in order to streamline and modernize what had become an unwieldy website. The older format was holding us back from making needed changes to the site. After praying for an answer, I found one of the many “freelancing” sites run by Asian workers who bid on these types of projects. In a short time, the CMS conversion was finished. This method of outsourcing tasks has a virtually unlimited application and I am excited about some of the possibilities.

Video – The advance of video production technology in the last 10 years ago is nothing short of astounding. For a fraction of what it cost just a few years ago, we are able to produce professional quality DVD productions. From 1998 to 2000, I worked on several video projects with Eric Holmberg and Reel to Real Ministries. I also took two trips to Russia to work with Loza (The “Vine” Church) to help found one of the first Christian video ministries in that country. Reel to Real is now known as The Apologetics Group (TAG) and the ministry’s influence is greater than ever before. I recently became a board member of TAG and I am acting as a script writer, video editor and producer. We recently completed the DVD, The Real Jesus, with Eric as host and narrator. We now have several more productions in the works.

I have been pleased at the response to the apologetics, pro-life and teaching videos I’ve posted on Forerunner.com, YouTube, Facebook and elsewhere. I’ve received many comments from people we have been impacted. In fact, I wanted to share one comment I received recently:

You guys are awesome. These YouTube videos helped change my mind from pro-choice to pro-life … I like to keep a pretty low online profile. But I really enjoy your videos. Your videos … are what did it for me, as well as watching the March for Life on TV. I will be walking in next year's March for Life in San Francisco.

From: “Ajax,” a viewer who asked to remain anonymous

Foreign Language Internet Projects – The Internet has opened up a much wider audience than ever before possible through print publications. Forerunner articles that would long ago have been discarded now have daily readers in almost all countries of the world. At one time, I hoped to print foreign language editions in many countries. We were able to see this with Russian, Spanish and Chinese versions, as well as a few issues in Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa. At present I am beginning to outsource the translation work of our most highly read articles, the ones that have proven to have the highest impact.

The Pakistani Forerunner – Urdu is the most widely spoken language among Muslims with 270 million speakers. It is the national language of Pakistan as well as among people in Bahrain, India, Oman, United Arab Emirates and even in Guyana. Although Urdu is widely spoken there are very few Urdu language sites on the Internet. Our first project is Why Creeds and Confessions? Foundations in Biblical Orthodoxy, a book that has already appeared in the English and Russian languages. We are working with an Urdu woman from Pakistan, Nosheet Gloria, who has a burden to translate the best articles from The Forerunner.

The Turkish Forerunner — Yuce Kabakci is a young minister from Turkey – a nation of 70 million people with only about 3500 church-going Christians. He is in fact, the only the third pastor from Turkey who has received seminary training. He has also translated a number of Reformed classics as well as some recent works into Turkish. We are working together to build a Turkish language section of The Forerunner website. This will become significant in the coming years since Christian literature in this “gateway” nation to the Muslim world is rare.

Russian Forerunner – The goal is to get the remaining articles from 20 issues of Predvestnik, the Russian language Forerunner, on-line. There is some work to do in converting the Cyrillic text of our earlier issues to universal fonts. We also have two book translations that will soon appear on the Russian section of our site. Then I hope to constantly post fresh content on this site by working with a Russian editor and translator who will share our vision. The number of people with Internet access in the 15 nations where Russian is spoken is growing daily. This exciting prospect means that we can reach more people than ever before for relatively little money.

Brazilian Forerunner – A young man from Brazil, Felipe Neto, contacted me to ask permission to translate several of my articles into Portuguese. We will use these articles at the Forerunner.com site and work to get more articles into Portuguese. Many people are surprised to learn that Portuguese ranks as the eighth most spoken language in the world, and the third among western nations (behind English and Spanish) with close to 200 million native speakers. It is the national language of seven countries in four continents around the world including Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe islands. Although there are different spoken dialects, proper Portuguese as a written language is identical in all these countries.

Spanish Forerunner – A few years ago we published a single edition newspaper called, El Campeón that was distributed in Peru, Costa Rica, even Cuba. A Baptist ministry from Chile has also published some of my articles in Spanish. They produce a beautiful magazine called La Verdad (Word of Truth). I was greatly encouraged to see some of my content in their Spanish magazine. We want to translate hundreds of articles and find a Spanish freelancer who will work to build a Spanish section of The Forerunner.

Chinese Forerunner – The Mandate was a newspaper that we helped publish in English for Chinese international students studying in the United States in five editions. There were also two Chinese editions. Now we want to translate all of the articles from The Mandate into Chinese.

America, Return to God was a 128-page magazine/book edited by Thomas Wang (who is known as the “Chinese Billy Graham”). The publishers asked permission to reprint five articles from The Forerunner. I was blessed to see our ministry featured alongside ministers I look up to such as D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Gary DeMar. This book was distributed to 400,000 people in an English language edition in the United States. Now their plan is to publish the magazine in China and Christians will be encouraged to pray for revival in America! Of course, we'd like to include this material at our website.

Increased Cooperation with Ministry Partners

While using an “outsourcing strategy” to cost-effectively jumpstart several projects, I also hope to find many like-minded Christians in foreign countries who share our vision to preach the Gospel worldwide through the media. I believe that there are many Christian students and young pastors around the world who just need encouragement and networking opportunities.

Instead just one “Forerunner” ministry, there will be many.

Our focus is now to encourage the development of the following strategies:

• Cooperating foreign language websites who are translating our materials
• Foreign language Internet articles and videos hosted at www.Forerunner.com
• Dubbing of our DVDs into several foreign languages
• Training foreign nationals to produce videos relevant to their own culture

I believe it is God’s will for us to advance the kingdom of God by cooperating with like-minded Christians and ministries. I hope that you will prayerfully consider supporting the following opportunities. God has opened a door for us that is already resulting in greater fruitfulness and effectiveness than ever before.

Yours for Christ’s victorious kingdom,

Jay Rogers

R.J. Rushdoony video with Portuguese subtitles!

I recently wrote a prospectus on The Forerunner and what I hope to accomplish with media within the next year or two. Beginning to get much of our material into Spanish and Portuguese is part of the plan.

An Internet friend in Brazil has been translating some of the articles from our site which you can read at Monergismo.com.

His plan is to get all of God's Law and Society and The Beast of Revelation: Identified dubbed into Portuguese.

I am impressed and excited about this since this is someone who I did not have to recruit to fulfill a dream of mine. I thank God for sovereignly orchestrating His plan.

"But the path of the just is like the shining sun,
That shines ever brighter unto the perfect day."

- Proverbs 4:18

How to add your website or blog to Google

The first step is to go to Google's "add URL" page here:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

This alone won't get you indexed. You'll immediately get a submission confirmation page from Google telling you so.

The second step is to create some reciprocal links to your site to and from websites that are already well-indexed.

A friend of mine started a blog at http://americanconservatism.blogspot.com/

He was immediately concerned when he didn't get noticed by Google on day two. So I told him about reciprocal links and a few other tricks to getting noticed by Google.

Google has always used the number of links from websites, and especially sites that have a lot of traffic, to determine a website's ranking in their index. The principle is similar to credible citations. For instance, you know if a book has good credibility if it is quoted and cited in a lot of other literature. If a book is quoted in the Encyclopedia Britannica, then it probably has more credibility than if it is quoted in a book published only on Lulu.com.

You can create your own reciprocal links on pages you create on community user sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. If you don't have accounts on these pages, you can easily create them, put up some good content and then use your blog URL as your listed homepage.

In fact, doing a blog on Facebook or MySpace is a shortcut to being indexed. The problem is that you won't be able to customize as much it or make money from ad links. It's not really a blog that you own, but a content generator that makes advertising money for these sites. But if you want readers to come to your own blog, you should do something like the following.

1. Create a YouTube V-Log.
2. Upload some good videos you made.
3. Put a link with the "http://" prefix in the description. (YouTube will automatically read it as a live link.)
4. You can embed your YouTube videos in your blog and also publish links to specific blog entries in your video descriptions on YouTube.
5. You can do the same thing with Facebook, MySpace and dozens of other sites.

That's just step one and two. Once I press "publish post" (today is 2/10/2008) we should see how fast Adam's American Conservatism blog gets indexed by Google.

My next post in the series, I'll explain again how I've occassionally broken into the top 100,000 websites and stayed fairly consistent over the past ten years.

Fulfilling the Great Commission: What about the fruit?

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post is that you can broadcast to the entire world and not make a single convert unless the Holy Spirit is in your efforts. It is important to have a sound Gospel message. So much of the Christian material on the Internet is deficient. I am not saying that I am perfect, but I strive to publish only things that glorify God, while I realize that Christians of different theological persuasions might disagree with me. But I am always amazed and gratified whenever a new believer or a seeker after God contacts me via email.

Sometimes I’ve made a theological convert – recently there have been several people who began studying the postmillennial eschatology on my web site. I was pleased to find out that I inadvertently made a convert to postmillennialism last summer through the on-line version of my book: The Four Keys to the Millennium. Or at least I influenced someone who was by the grace of God heading in that direction. I encouraged him to post his ideas on my discussion board, which you can see here and here. From what I can see, I predict that this guy will become prolific in his new passion: refuting dispensationalism! Here is another one of the messages he posted that I liked.

Of course, one can be a good Christian and hold to almost any version of eschatology – even dispensationalism. But has The Forerunner website made any converts to Christ? Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss some difficult Bible questions with a Buddhist and another person who is either a new convert or is seeking. I get encouraged when I get any response to an article at the website – positive or negative – but it is especially gratifying to answer questions for new believers who are reading and getting something out of the materials that we offered. For instance, here is a message from Frank Kellam regarding our Second American Revolution website and DVD God’s Law and Society:

Thanks to Jay Rogers, Eric Holmberg and colleagues for this excellent teaching medium with new on-line study guide. We have used it for seven years with abundant fruit, especially among young disciples, both domestic and overseas.

I am not blowing my own horn here as much as trying to show that someone with just a few computer skills can consistently put out ministry materials that can eventually be used of God as much as larger missionary organizations of past years. The computer revolution has changed everything. The point here again is that anyone can use the Internet and reach thousands and even millions of people with the Gospel. Who knows if God will use it? We can only be faithful with the talents we’ve been given – to invest them in the Kingdom of God without hiding them.

Fulfilling the Great Commission through the Media

In the 21st century, every Christian has a duty to use the new media technologies available to them to preach the Gospel on a daily basis. In the past, the Great Commission, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations ...” (Mat. 28:19,20) meant literally to physically go into all areas of the world, establish churches and make disciples. Of course, not everyone could be a missionary, but the church was commanded to raise up ministers and send missionaries to the ends of the earth. Each of us is commanded to go. If we are not called to be a missionary in our own country and our own city, then our job is to go to the nations and preach. The Great Commission isn’t only for apostles or “super-Christians,” it’s for every Christian.

With the advent of the printing press in the 1400s, we saw an explosion of missionary work and reformation of doctrine and culture. It became the duty of the Christian to learn to read so that the Gospel could be studied and understood without a mediator. This “Puritan hope” that the Kingdom of God would fill the whole world led to a universal literacy in colonial America, when less than one-third of Europeans were literate only a few decades before.

The availability of inexpensive personal computers in the 1990s then brought the power of publishing the printed word to the average person. The editor of Predvestnik, Alexei Salapatov, often spoke of how the Russian language Forerunner went into regions of the former USSR where no missionary had yet been. People devoured the message of this publication. It passed from hand to hand and copies were kept until they were literally “read into dust.” If you haven’t seen the new videos I posted on the Russian Forerunner, you should check them out.

But think of how the Internet has changed all this. While not every person in the world has a computer and high speed internet access, it is becoming more common even in third world countries. Within a short period of time, a simple hand held computer with wireless phone and Internet access will become as common and inexpensive as a cell phone. Apple will introduce the iPhone this summer and it will likely revolutionize the world of media once again.

Every American Christian who has been given great wealth compared to the rest of the world needs to be computer savvy and painstakingly learn to publish web pages, blogs and edit digital video. Again this technology has been put to greatest use in America. Christians need to realize that the reason we are the wealthiest nation in the world is not because of the industry of Bill Gates, but the fact that we are living off the accrued capital made from the resources given to the Puritans about 400 years ago. God has made us rich for a reason – not merely to give our children the latest version of Play Station – but to use these new computer resources to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

If you have a computer, a camcorder and live in an area where high speed internet access is available, God expects you to use it to His glory and not merely for your own edification and entertainment. If you don’t already do this, consider using Blogger.com or Myspace.com to start your own blog. If you own a camcorder, you can easily create a short Bible teaching and upload it to YouTube.com. The cool thing about these secondary publishing services is that you no longer need to know too much about web publishing or even have your own domain name or server. But I encourage Christians to maintain their own websites as well. For some it is a big learning curve, but I liken it to the Puritans who had to learn to read and teach their children in the 1600s.

As in the parable of the talents, God is going to reward or punish us in the ratio to whom “much was given.” And we American Christians have been given very much.

The Second American Revolution

I recently uploaded most of my God’s Law and Society videos to YouTube. This is otherwise known as the Second American Revolution website.

At YouTube the same content is on the God’s Law and Society Channel.

I had all of these in RealPlayer streaming format for many years. But it was low bandwidth dial-up quality. With the higher bandwidth videos, it would likely cost hundreds of dollars per month to store and stream files of this size. The purpose of using YouTube was to take advantage of free server space and expose the many people who just mindlessly surf YouTube to the tenets of Reformed theology and Christian Reconstruction (otherwise known as Neo-Puritan social theory). I also hope to get a larger audience and sell a few more DVDs by advertising some of the content.

It was an incredibly time consuming task. I still have to upload about twenty more. The main problem of course will be that once I start getting tens of thousands of views per month, it will be hard to keep up with the comments. It will be a good problem to have. I set each video podcast up for me to approve comments before they are posted. Some of the comments can be extremely profane and blasphemous. I am somewhat liberal though in allowing for free expression of thought and even some mild profanity. My thinking is that it exposes the true spirit of my opponents.

I now have a total of about 50 short videos on YouTube all with a Christian theme. The videos I uploaded over a month ago have anywhere from 1000 to 2000 views. So I am expecting to have a larger audience of tens of thousands of people within a few months.

I have a few video projects in the works that are absolutely sensational. I’ll write more on that in upcoming blog entries. It will be interesting to see where the tally will be in a few months. I think I’ll have anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 total views by the next two months. And the amazing thing to me is that this is free. Google actually makes money off me through advertising.

YouTube comments are a great way of getting feedback from an audience. Of course, my videos are a little bit esoteric and designed for a specific audience. I wrote in an earlier blog entry that I was interested to find out that my YouTube videos are extremely polarizing. They love me and they hate me. But what amazes me is the low level thinking of the average skeptic. Just to give an example, here is one response to a George Grant interview on Grace vs. The Law. This person obviously thinks he is clever, but is mistaken:

"Paul" was Shaul". All the rest written there is based on a bad translation of a man who spoke Hewbrew and his words were more or less correctly translated and viola, the Christian religon which has changed forms until its not, and never was. How did you expect a bunch of Gauls and Celts to stop tearing bites out of an uncooked rabbit? Not only could they not sit and learn the Law, but they would not follow it either. Christianity is all based on bad translations. Ask King James.

Let alone the fact that this is a syntactical train wreck, it shows that the average non-Christian has been fed objections based on false knowledge. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament tells us that "Saul" was born in Tarsus in Asia Minor and was a Greek speaking Jew. As a Roman citizen he also bore the Latin name of Paul. It was usual for the Jews of that time to have two names, one Hebrew, the other Latin or Greek. All of Paul’s letters were written to Greek speaking people.

But if you read your Bible, you already know that. The point is that the average person has no knowledge of scripture and rejects Christ based on foolish lies as in the example above. It is amazing how ignorant people are. (One of my blog friends tells me that I need to be more gracious and stop calling these people “stupid.” I’ll admit it’s a hard habit to break.)

I had another comment to the Abortion 911 Emergency Calls videos that claimed that an unborn child was no different than a mass of cancerous cells. I get frequent comments from people who have been fed the lies of Planned Parenthood that abortion is "ten times safer than childbirth and seven times safer than having your tonsils removed." That we show statistics to the otherwise infuriates them. These just have to be lies. Having owned a house and lived across the street from an abortion clinic for seven years, I saw the injured women being taken out in ambulances.

See the video Abortion Clinic 911 Emergency Calls (1 of 4). You can always argue with our statistics, but seeing is believing. It's interesting that I haven't had anyone try to refute this video, because it is just 911 Calls overlaid with video footage of the ambulances arriving at the abortion clinic to take away the injured women.

Perhaps people are so stupid (Oops! There I go again!) because the television media has been controlled by the liberal elite for the past 50 years. The good news is that Christians have it within their power to take it back. Let truth contend with the lies hand to hand on the battlefield of ideas. If God is truly God in a short time we will win.

How should Christians use Google to preach the Gospel?

Have you seen Current TV yet? Although not on all cable and satellite networks just yet, Current TV represents a paradigm shift in how we will see television. Viewers upload their short less-than-ten-minute-long documentaries to the Current TV website. Viewers then vote on what "pods" should be broadcast on cable television.

You can see where this is headed when you realize that Google just bought YouTube.com and it soon vaulted to one of the top ten ranked websites. The way we will view television in a few years may be based on RSS "feeds" rather than a schedule of programs on certain channels. TiVo and other DVR cable and satellite services are part of this shift. In a short time, you will be able to view a channel that has both video on demand and scheduled programming.

A friend of mine recently responded to my gushing over the ability to create a Forerunner TV channel using YouTube as a host.

"How should Christians use Google to preach the Gospel?" he asked.

I first assumed he meant that Google is evil and I shouldn't publish my videos there. Later I found out it was a sincere question. Most likely I took a defensive posture because I know all too well that most media conglomerates don't promote anything like a Christian agenda. I've had similar comments about the recent monetization of the Forerunner.com website. Since 1996, I had just plain text on most pages. Now Google ads, DVD ads, and embedded YouTube videos abound. Some claim to be offended by the overt commercialization of the site. Google also pays me a few hundred dollars a month for the Google Ads you see on nearly every page on the Forerunner.com website.

It does cost money to do all this and after all is said and done, I'd like to do much better than break even. My goal is to have a great impact for the Gospel through the media and to do that, I need to increase our budget.

Why should I use the Internet? Why should I use video at all? Should Christians not use the media? In my view, not using Google's new services would be like having a Christian TV station that doesn't broadcast. Podcasts and feeds are the direction in which all media is headed. I would be foolish not to go that way too.

Since 1993, I've had a dream to produce a weekly web-based television program. The technology to do this has been available for years. However, in the last year or so we have turned the corner. Already the number of people viewing video blogs and web based TV channels is in the tens of millions.

The reasons I decided to use YouTube to take advantage of this phenomenon:

1. YouTube is free. You can register and start podcasting your videos in just a few minutes.
2. It is one of the highest ranked websites on the Internet.
3. So many people are viewing videos on YouTube that it has created V-log stars overnight.
4. Some Podcasts are viewed by more people than most successful television shows.
5. Google is exploding right now and I intend to ride the Google bubble until it bursts.
6. It takes a lot of server space and extra money to stream large video files from my own site.
7. The traffic I get on YouTube is tremendous compared to the same videos posted on my own web pages.

If you decide to do your own Podcast in audio or video format, you will want to use a service that publishes and promotes your Podcast. You will get a larger, more immediate audience.

I began to realize the obvious only within the last few months. I was stuck in the 1996 Internet paradigm and I've just now begun to make the shift.

I publish my own RSS feeds, but I would have to do an incredible amount of advertising in order to equal what I get just by being on YouTube. In fact, my plan is to publish everything both at my website and through secondary RSS feed sites.

I use Google to publish my Blog at Blogger.com. The RSS feed is served from my website, but gets indexed faster and ranked higher if I publish it via Google.

I am looking at publishing my Podcasts to Apple ITunes as well -- for all the same reasons. The idea is to take advantage of all media that is available to reach the most people.

MTV pro-life video

Here is the link for the "new and improved" version of the MTV Unfiltered program on pro-life activists Joel and Ariel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8a3m5kEuPw

Look also for the embedded video at our website.

http://forerunner.com/prolife.html

MTV's pro-life video featuring Joel and Ariel

Back in 1995, I owned a house across the street from an abortion clinic in Melbourne, Florida where a lot of pro-life activism was making the news -- sometimes even worldwide. Two Bible college students -- Joel and Ariel -- who were pro-life activists and members of my church had convinced MTV to feature them on their Unfiltered program. This was a series of reality-style shorts about young people with interesting real life stories.

Joel asked me if I would shoot some of the video since I lived across the street from the clinic. At that time, I was thinking that God was about to expand my media ministry into video productions, so I was encouraged by the open door. I was extremely pleased with the program when it came out. MTV was surprisingly unbiased. At the time I thought that Joel and Ariel had a gift for presenting on camera. That was over ten years ago. I still have a low-bandwidth RealPlayer streaming video posted at my pro-life videos site.

Last weekend, we spent several hours taping the stand-up narration for The Real Jesus DVD with Joel and Ariel discussing the segments. Some of it came out great. I plan to begin releasing all ten parts as a YouTube Podcast beginning next week.

One of the warm up exercises they did was to talk about the MTV Unfiltered program and what they think of it now over ten years later. I redid the MTV segment as a medium bandwidth streaming video with Joel and Ariel critiquing it at the end. I will upload the entire video to YouTube tonight. It will also appear at The Forerunner.com website. I'll post the urls here later tonight.

Forerunner Blog Feed

After some months of publishing a blog, I thought I should write a brief explanation on how to subscribe to The Forerunner blog feed.

What is a blog feed?

Most blogs have a feed of their content, sometimes known as an RSS or an ATOM feed.

You can use a stand-alone program to subscribe to feeds of websites you are interested in and read them in the program when you have some free time. One advantage of subscribing to blog feeds is that you can know when new content is added to your favorite websites.

Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.0 now have this functionality within the browser itself.

You can also use a web-based feedreader. For instance, if you have a Yahoo! account, you can add http://forerunner.com/blog/atom.xml to your RSS content and you will see something like this:



If you don't have an RSS reader, go to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/forerunner and you'll see something like this:



Then you should choose one of those little icons (called "chicklets") under "subscribe now" and feedburner will add The Forerunner RSS feed to a personalized web page of your choice. You can add as many RSS feeds as you want to one web page, that way you can keep track new content on your favorrite web sites by just looking at one page.

You have already seen RSS feeds everywhere whether you realize it or not. This is how most news services add fresh content to their web sites on a daily basis. But did you know that you can easily publish your own blog for free and publish the content?

A QUICK PRIMER ON BLOGGING AND CREATING RSS FEEDS --

Do you want to set up a blog in just a few minutes:

Go to: blogger.com and follow the directions. These are really easy!

Do you have a blog and need help adding RSS feeds to your blog?

That's also easy and here is how you can do it:

Log into your blogger account

Go to "settings"

Go to "site feed"

Copy the "site feed url"

Then go to www.feedburner.com

Scroll down to where it says: "Ready to burn your feed? Type your feed or blog URL here" and paste your "site feed url" and then click "next." You'll be at "select services." There are lots of options on that page and you can look through them all, but to get to the feeds you need to go to the bottom of that page and click on "next."

Then you can log in or sign up. It's free to sign up. After you fill in your info then click and that page will allow you to "activate your feed". Click on that and then click on "launch your publicity tools" and then click on "chicklet chooser." Then you have many options. I always choose "My Yahoo" and "XML." Click on each one and you'll see the code you need to copy and paste. You'll have to do it for each one.

Then just go back to your blog template and paste it in the links section. You're set. As you can see there are other different things you can do at feedburner.com. So look around and check them all out.

That is just the basics of getting a feed up. Now, when you get that feed added let me know so I can add you to my personal My.Yahoo page!

The Forerunner Manifesto (part six)

Kronos vs. Kairos

If you are familiar with the biblical “time” teaching of the kronos vs. the kairos, then what I have written makes sense. In God’s providence, during times of revival (kairos), time is compressed and the Kingdom advances in an exponential manner. Kairos is the appointed time in the purpose of God. These times of revival occur between other times (kronos) when we are confined by the daily schedule of clock time that supports and creates our ego structure. The longer our faithfulness in the time of kronos, the greater the succeeding intensity of the kairos time of revival.

In writing this, I have made some further sense out of everything that has happened with churches and ministries I have been involved with. For instance, there has been a continual cycle of death and rebirth of vision. Every time I started out fresh with new energy, there were offers along the way that meshed with the vision, and opportunities presented themselves without any expectation. There have been periods of time when I seemed to do more than humanly possible followed by periods of decline and frustration. These cycles have usually lasted about three years. There have been the sudden opportunities and open doors after the end of a church or ministry connection. There has often been relocation involved with the rebirthing of ministry. New Years’ Day has often been a significant time. Since I have been a believer, these birth-death cycles have been:

1985-1989

1990-1993

1994-1997

1998-2000

2001-2005

God has given me an extremely long (kronos) period since I got married. I haven’t really moved me in any particular direction as far as ministry goes. On the other hand, I see my marriage as the birth of my family, which is the most important ministry a man can have. So if the pattern holds, then 2006 may be the beginning of something big that will culminate in the next three or four years.

What does it all mean?

But let me explain this in practical terms. I don’t know what these new opportunities will be, but my feeling is that I ought to look for people to carry on this vision in strategic regions of the United States and at least two foreign countries. I’d like to go back to Europe and South America. I’d like to produce two or three DVD titles a year for the next few years and train a staff to carry on much of the work. At some point, I also think that doors are going to open for me to travel and present seminars on the topics covered in my books and DVDs. My hope is that The Forerunner will eventually become a ministry like R.C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries with me producing a series of books and DVDs and using the Internet and digital media as the main method of preaching the Gospel. I also plan to stay put in one place for the next few years and build a more solid financial base for my family.

The Forerunner Manifesto (part five)

Teaching High School (2001 to present)

I never joined a church the whole time I was in Pensacola because I saw my stay there as temporary. I attended several churches, but I wasn’t encouraged by what I saw there (including the Brownsville Revival). When the staff of Reel to Real moved to Nashville, I came back to Melbourne. I soon met a woman from Venezuela and got married three months later. I got a teaching job again, but once I moved to Kissimmee, Florida, most of my time and energy for ministry fell by the wayside. A bright spot has been the proximity of R.C. Sproul’s church. I don’t see this church as ever supporting my ministry, but the teaching of R.C. Sproul is an inspiration to me. He is a great preacher and it is the first church I have felt good about joining after a few years of uncertainty. Obviously, my views have become increasingly Reformed over the years and being a member of Sproul’s church has taken out of the loop of much of what is happening within the charismatic movement. I think that is a good trend and I hope more charismatics who are examining faith and doctrine will investigate Reformed theology. In fact, it is my goal to help people understand theology better through media productions.

The Future

As I already wrote, I have experienced a rebirthing of the vision for ministry in 2006. In the 1990s, I often operated under the presumption that “God told me to do this …” or “God gave me a vision to start media houses in all the nations of the world.” I haven’t received any “marching orders” like that in over six years. However, I believe more than ever that God is sovereign and directs our steps if we seek Him. I don’t blame anyone for hindering me because even those who worked against me and tried to destroy me only added to the victories God intended for me.

Today, I don’t have the same burning vision I once had. I just feel a necessity to take things one-step at a time until I can see where I am going. I also want to invite people to consider becoming to be part of the vision. I can see a time when there will be consistent support for part-time helpers. I am not looking for financial giving at this time for a ministry. I am rather looking for people of like vision who might feel called to produce Christian media or who may want to cooperate in some way. Right now, “we” at The Forerunner consist of a board of officers, a part-time website consultant and me.

The Forerunner Manifesto (part four)

Reel to Real Ministries (1997-2000)

Once the siege of Aware Woman began to wind down, I visited Eric Holmberg in Pensacola, Florida a few times. (My mother also lived in nearby Destin at that time.) He invited me to work with the Reel to Real staff. For the next two years, my life consisted of learning video production four to five days a week, spending lots of time at the beach or by the pool, and living rent free between Reel to Real’s studio and my mother’s house in Destin. I was miserable at times. A lot of this was loneliness and a God-given desire to seek a wife while being frustrated by the church scene, singles groups and so on.

But God did some remarkable things in my last year there. I produced two video presentations with Eric Holmberg, God’s Law and Society and The Beast of Revelation: Identified. However, I also produced and contributed to several video productions based out of a church ministry in Vladimir, Russia. One of the videos won an award from the Christian Broadcasters of Europe as the “Best Documentary” of 2000. There was a pastor who I had met in 1991 in Moscow, who came to Pensacola to experience the Brownsville Revival (of which I was not a big supporter). While he was there he arranged to stay with the Holmbergs. Since Eric was out of town, I became his chauffer. I immediately remembered him from 1991 at one of Bob Weiner’s Christian Youth International conferences. He amazed me because he told me that his church had been recently given an unsolicited $50,000 by an Australian missionary (a fortune in Russia) and that they had prayed and decided that God wanted them to start a television and video production ministry in Russia. He came to Pensacola partly to look for someone from Reel to Real to come and train their staff. A Finnish ministry had dubbed one of Reel to Real’s videos into Russian and it was well known among churches in the former USSR. His request was that we allow them to dub more recent material into Russian and help train their staff to produce a few projects.

1999 to 2000 became the most productive 18 months that I ever experienced in ministry. The Aware Woman abortion clinic closed; I produced three videos and contributed to several more; I published Why Creeds and Confessions? a book in the Russian language; I wrote another book on eschatology, Four Keys to the Millennium, which was published in South Africa; and took two missions trips to Russia and Ukraine. The amazing thing about this whole time period is that I operated on a budget that rarely reached over $40,000 per year. That included my support, operating expenses and funding for all missions projects.

The Forerunner Manifesto (part three)

Media House International (1993-1996)

In 1992, the president of a small missionary organization who was a friend of Bob Weiner’s, recruited me to be their international director in Lake Mary, Florida. The deal was that I would be on salary, but I could spend one-third of my time on The Forerunner while helping start publications in Russia and Ukraine. Although I had some reservations on how this would work, I decided to try it. To make a long story short, it did not work out well. This time was difficult for me personally, but the arrangement helped the ministry to prosper during that time. Today, I see it as the sovereignty of God in moving me out of Gainesville on to another place. Shortly after this, I took my third trip to Russia and Ukraine. I felt on my return that God had given me a vision to start Media House International and to begin Christian “Media Houses” in all the major continents of the world.

I already had been in contact with Keith Tucci, director of Operation Rescue National, first by writing about pro-life prayer events and finally landing in jail in April 1993 at a peaceful pro-life prayer event in Melbourne, Florida. As I wrote, I first got involved in Operation Rescue on December 31st, 1989. I had been invited to join The Forerunner on December 27th, receiving the letter on January 6th. The two events looked unrelated, but they were not coincidental. I saw Operation Rescue and pro-life activism as an integral event in my calling to ministry. I saw that the move to Melbourne made sense. Bob Weiner agreed with me that as soon as I joined Pastor Keith Tucci’s church, that the American version of The Forerunner would cease and I ought to concentrate for a time on international versions and missionary work.

There were a lot of providential circumstances that kept me going in the founding of Media House International. I once had a sum of money from several unexpected sources show up during a one-month period, which enabled me to buy a house directly across the street from the abortion clinic in Melbourne where a lot of pro-life activism was occurring at that time. There were a lot of other providential events like this too. I could see the hand of God in my venture even though I was working independently with some pastoral oversight.

Unfortunately, Melbourne was not the utopia I imagined it might be. When I moved into the “Green House” (as it was called) across the street from the Aware Woman abortion clinic in 1993, I was surrounded by people who thought only about pro-life ministry and not much beyond that. I felt that there was now a disparity between where I had been, where I wanted to go, and how other people saw me. I think most people saw me as an unemployed person who published a fundraising newsletter. I experienced a small identity crisis. I was used to being respected by well-known Christian leaders. Ironically, I became one of the most consistent pro-lifers in Melbourne. At least, that is how the owners of the abortion clinic across the street viewed me when they unsuccessfully sued me a few years later.

In fact, this was my most successful period of ministry up to that time. From 1994 to 1996, I took three missions trips to Russia and Ukraine and one to Costa Rica and Peru; I bought the Green House; I began the Forerunner.com website; I published one edition each of The Champion and The Forerunner International; I published six issues of The Mandate including one in the Chinese language; I published one issue of El Campeón that was distributed in Costa Rica, Peru and Cuba; I distributed over 400,000 copies of Predvestnik and other publications in the former USSR; I got arrested for the fifth time in a pro-life “Rescue-type” event; I helped lead a cell group with former Maranatha (UTK) student leader Jeff Dwiggins; and as they say, much, much more!

Then in 1997, everything began to wind down. I suddenly had less money and I started to work as a banquet server part-time at the Hilton at Melbourne Beach. This is also a time period when several of my friends began to leave our church citing the same problems that I had seen before in other churches. I met with my pastor and explained that although I did not personally have any problems with him, it was not God’s will to raise me up in a ministry as a member of that church. The split was amicable, although he disagreed. I didn’t plug into another church for the next year or so. Much of the activity at the Aware Woman abortion clinic began to taper off after the state of Florida announced plans to bulldoze the abortion clinic under eminent domain to widen U.S. Highway 1. I liked that outcome because no pro-lifer could take credit for the victory. Today no abortion clinic operates in that entire county.

I took one more missions trip to the Netherlands and Ukraine, but it was a low point for me as far as vision and energy. I began to think more about being married and having a family. But I had little material security except a run-down house to show for all my hard work. I have always been an independent person. I am a native Bostonian whose self-reliant philosophy deterred me from Christ for my entire youth even though I have always been aware of God’s calling on my life. Even today, I believe that we simply needs to be certain of God’s will and then throw ourselves into His purpose and destiny. I believe that everything that has happened with me is by God’s grace. All things work together for good and He is correcting me all along the way.

The Forerunner Manifesto (part two)

Beginnings (1986-1988)

There are actually two histories of The Forerunner. One involves Lee Grady who was the managing editor for almost nine years from 1981 through 1989. Our paths crossed only briefly for six months before he moved on in 1989 and I became the editor. I had published a newsletter in Boston called The Holiness Herald from 1987 to 1989 with my cousin. We published 20 issues in two-and-a-half years. We always wanted to expand the Holiness Herald to a magazine format and produce multi-media seminars on the history of Revival and Spiritual Awakening. Then a dramatic calling to ministry occurred on New Years’ Day 1989. I was arrested and spent three days in jail with Operation Rescue after having participated for the first time in a non-violent prayer event at an abortion clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts. This occurred after I had been in my first teaching job for six months. I was a typical burnt-out first year teacher questioning the choice of my career. To make a long story short, on the basis of my work with this little newsletter I was offered a position with The Forerunner.

Maranatha and Post-Maranatha (1989-1992)

I had been a member of Maranatha for less than two years (1987 to 1989) when the ministry broke up. For the last six months of 1989, I worked in the international office in Gainesville with Lee Grady and a copy editor/administrator. When I first met Lee Grady, he told me that I was the answer to many years of prayer. He wanted to train someone to take his place so he could move on and train young people in foreign countries to produce international versions of The Forerunner. I immediately took this vision to heart. I was also excited that Eric Holmberg of Reel to Real Ministries was part of the international office because I eventually wanted to do video productions.

Everything was like a dream for those brief six months until November 1989 when the board of Maranatha decided that the answer to problems the ministry had had since its foundation was to dissolve the corporate headquarters and give the local churches complete autonomy. Lee Grady found a job writing for Charisma and National and International Religion Report. I stayed in Gainesville and dialogued with three of the Maranatha board members in charge of the dissolution of the international office. I insisted that I was going to continue The Forerunner. They did not want me to do that because it was their job to dissolve the ministry corporation. Then Bob Weiner, the founder of Maranatha, asked me to continue the publication under the auspices of his evangelistic endeavor (today called simply: Weiner Ministries International). I produced the next issue without missing a beat. It wasn’t the best issue ever from a design standpoint, but the content was good and I steadily improved in coming months.

For the next year, Eric Holmberg graciously allowed me to operate out of his office in Gainesville, most of the time rent-free. I taught part-time in a Christian school until I was able to get my support to the level where I could work only on the newspaper full-time. Bob Weiner took a one-year sabbatical and his attitude toward The Forerunner was hands-off. I probably had more freedom to develop my writing and vision for ministry than the other editors before me. For the first year, our interaction was mainly in prayer meetings with Rose Weiner and Rusty Russell in which we prayed for our collective ministry endeavors and world events. Once a month, Bob would go over the newspaper articles with me on the phone and suggest about a dozen superficial changes. Mainly, the Weiners were an encouragement to me and stated from the outset that they wanted to release this ministry to me once I could stand on my own.

In 1991, I traveled to Russia and Ukraine two times. I founded the Russian language Forerunner, Predvestnik, through Bob Weiner’s new organization Christian Youth International. Predvestnik was an independent ministry birthed out of my own vision and fundraising efforts along with whatever Bob Weiner was able to contribute as a tireless organizer.

By 1992, I had become dissatisfied with my church experience in Gainesville. The local Maranatha Church had closed. I attended a Vineyard Church and made some good friends there. The Vineyard was mainly a pietistic church that ministered to people who had been burnt out in hyper-evangelistic churches. It was good for the first few months because I needed a change of pace. I felt that the focus on “inner healing” and “body ministry” was needed for a few months, but it became irrelevant to me after a while. Eric Holmberg needed extra space for his video production ministry and asked me to move out of his office space soon after my second trip to Russia and Ukraine. I was alone in my apartment for many hours out of the day working on The Forerunner. I began to want to be part of a church family or a larger ministry with a like vision again.

There was also a lot of controversy in Gainesville pertaining to the break-up of Maranatha. One pastor in town rebuked me for continuing to work with the Weiners. I think many people thought that the former leaders of Maranatha should have just dried up and blown away. There was a lack of grace and some accusations hurled at the Weiners, which I felt was unfair. Bob took a year long Sabbatical beginning in November 1989 in order to get some pastoral guidance and reassess the purpose of his ministry. This lasted until he began Christian Youth International in March of 1991. Since that time, Bob has not taken oversight of churches or any ministry that is not directly related to his own work.

The Weiners proved to be the most generous partners I’ve ever been involved with even though we did not agree on everything. In the past 17 years, I have not been overly concerned with the controversy surrounding Maranatha’s break-up because I always saw my ministry as something that was birthed out of the heart of God for reaching the world with a victorious Gospel message. Ministries come and go. God’s Kingdom is forever.

The Forerunner Manifesto (part one)

Preface

Some people have asked me to relate the story behind The Forerunner, how it came to be, what is my past and present involvement. I hope to relate a short biography of my life since I became a Christian in 1985. “The Forerunner Manifesto” is a history of my ministry work. I have tried to be as transparent as possible here. I focus mainly on the positive because this is really my perspective, but I also tell about some of my struggles. At the same time, I have tried not to present myself as a perfect person living in a perfect world. I will also try to answer any questions that you may have.

The Forerunner Manifesto

It’s been said: “If you don’t know where you are going, then any road will get you there. But if you know where you have been, you have an idea of the road you need to travel.”

Most people encountering The Forerunner see it as a website that was started in 1996. In fact, the website is a privately owned yet related component to a non-profit group I started in 1994 called Media House International. From 1990 to 1993, The Forerunner was a small newspaper published eight to ten times a year under the auspices of Bob Weiner Ministries. From 1981 to 1989, it was a nationally distributed monthly publication of Maranatha Ministries. Few people today make the connection between the current ministry of The Forerunner and Maranatha Ministries since that organization ceased to exist almost 17 years ago. I was part of Maranatha only briefly from 1987 to 1989 (about 18 months) and a member of three churches during that time: Amherst, Boston and Gainesville. I enjoyed the time I spent with my pastors who remain well-loved friends. In that short period of time, I made many friends and ministry associates who remain close to me even today. Even though this was a brief time, the association with Maranatha was foundational to everything I have done since.

Where I am at in July of 2006

I currently live in Kissimmee, Florida. I am proudly married to a Venezuelan woman and teach English in an urban populated public high school. I am a member of St Andrew’s Chapel, an independent Presbyterian Church pastored by R.C. Sproul. In my part-time, I am actively involved in Christian media projects, I manage a teacher’s softball team and I take an occasional graduate level English course.

I am sure you’ve heard the story of two men who were working construction and were asked what they were doing: One said, “I’m laying bricks.” The other, “I’m building a cathedral.” The point is that people often lose the glorious big picture by concentrating on the tough details.

A similar story might be told of one of The Forerunner’s former contributing editors, who laid aside his six-figure income in a major investment corporation to pursue ministry. After two years of frustration with church politics, he decided to pursue a seminary doctorate in biblical archaeology and languages. His ultimate goal is to teach at the seminary level in order to train ministers to preach the gospel. Last fall, I asked him how it was going. He said, “I don’t know because I haven’t learned much yet.” In the first stages, he is learning Greek and Hebrew and taking an Old Testament survey class. Many people lose their faith while squandering years in seminary because they get fed liberalism and never get an opportunity to participate in ministry and see lives changed. Having known this brilliant man for the past 20 years, I have great hope that he will rise above this “brick-layer” syndrome.

Similarly, I feel as though the last five years of my life have been wasted in this way as far as “Christian ministry” is concerned. In 2001, I was married for the first time and realized that I needed to teach high school again and build a stable career and family life. I know it was God’s will for me to take this time after living on a shoestring budget for many years as a single person. It has been a drastic change of pace, teaching in a public school and not being surrounded 100 percent of the time by Christian activists and missionaries. However, since January 2006, I’ve experienced a rekindling of the vision for The Forerunner. Partly this was because I spent some time redesigning the website and I came to think about where I have been and where in the world I want to go.

New Website on Church Fathers

http://forerunner.com/churchfathers/churchfathers.html

Here is the URL of a new web site featuring over 100 works by the Church Fathers (AD 70 - AD 200). Each summer for the past few years, I've promised myself that I was going to immerse myself in the writings of the Church Fathers. I've always been fascinated by the theology of those Christians who were only one or two generations removed from the life-time of Jesus and the Apostles.

Recently, ancient Christological heresies of the first two centuries AD have been promoted in full force by the media. The Da Vinci Code and the recent National Geographic cover story on the Gospel of Judas are prime examples. Although these heresies are nothing new, the problem is that the average Christian knows little about patristic orthodoxy. In AD 2006, we need to be prepared to refute heresy that was already dealt with by Christians before AD 200.

In completing the web site, I've had the chance to go a little bit deeper in my study of the church fathers. I've added short introductions, bios and images of the Church Fathers. Bookmark the page and check back in a few weeks. I also hope to create further pages featuring the rest of the Ante-Nicene Fathers some of the Post-Nicene and Eastern Fathers. I will also add many major works by the Reformers and Revivalists of the Middle and Modern Ages. I also hope to include some important writings and documents by those in the 21st century seeking to reclaim the vision for historic orthodoxy.

Although there are other sites like this one on the Internet, many rely on external links or are difficult to navigate. It's my hope to show the continuous thread of orthodoxy within the church especially with the many Christological heresies that are currently being promoted by the popular media.

So hopefully, The Forerunner will provide an important resource to those who believe that orthodoxy matters.

- Jay Rogers

Update on Forerunner media projects

I updated the look of the forerunner.com website a few months ago. There is still a lot of work to be done on the website, but at least the look is no longer ten years out of date!

Since then I have been getting a lot of emails from old friends. I've also been making a lot of new contacts. I believe this is a direct result of the changes.

For instance, I just got a shipment of this magazine called: "America, Return to God." The editor had contacted me a few months ago about reprinting three articles from The Forerunner. I just learned today that according to their website, this magazine "has been published and mailed out to 450,000 leaders of America of all levels (federal, state and local) and all professions (political, educational, business, church, media etc.)"

I was amazed to see how similar the magazine is to the original vision of The Forerunner.

See: http://gcciusa.org/English/ARTG.htm

It's amazing how God has continues to use what we did many years ago.

In the meantime, I am trying to get back to my original vision for Christian media.

I have a couple of DVD projects in various stages of production. Today, I had a friend come over from Melbourne (I live in Kissimmee, Florida now) and we worked all day and got a tremendous amount done. I figured out the final stages of authoring and burning DVDs -- after a lot of learning and problem solving during several days of working with this. (I am not a technical person, so I need a lot of help and encouragement.)

Part of our plan is building the e-commerce aspect of the website. The goal is to raise enough income to pay my friend to take over the maintenance of the website (keeping it fresh and current) and to build an on-line store.

I decided to put full-time Christian media/missions projects on hold for at least a year when I got married five years ago. I have been teaching in a public high school ever since then. We moved twice and bought a house three summers ago. It's amazing how the time slips away.

Last summer, I went up to visit a friend who has a similar ministry in Nashville. We discussed the idea of me contributing to a few projects. While I continue to be open to that, I decided to concentrate on producing some of my own projects without depending on things to materialize on the other end.

Then I spent the rest of the summer doing creative fund raising and getting all my video production equipment together -- and by the time I did that, I was working again. I've been slowly working over the past school year get to a place where there are a few projects within sight of being completely finished.

I am excited that I now have the leisure and the inspiration from God to do nothing but produce. I have two months off starting this week and I plan to concentrate on this full-time.

I always thought that being a teacher could be a way of balancing the two ideals. I have my vacation time to dedicate to what I really want to do. It is the first time that I have had this much time to dedicate solely to missions projects while being on solid financial ground.

My hope is to eventually get the income from the website to the same level (or more) of support where I was at before I got married. That would potentially allow me to train a few part-time interns to run a Christian media ministry.

I'll keep you informed about what happens over the summer.

How to drive traffic to a web site

The Forerunner web site has been around since 1996 and is a record of almost every article I have ever written or published. It contains articles I wrote from 1987 until the present. It also has a massive pro-life site designed by Meredith Raney that is more vast than anything I have yet seen. It is the public record describing how, by the grace of God, a handful of Christian activists closed all the abortion clinics in Brevard County:

http://forerunner.com/fyi/

While a lot of things have changed with me in the past few years, I haven't changed my theology and worldview so drastically that I will ever completely disavow what I wrote all those years ago. At worst even the most irrelevant articles are an accurate historical record of my work.

However, when I redesigned the web site four months ago, I was considering jettisoning a few of the articles that were no longer relevant to anything I am concerned about at present. Then a friend pointed out that some of those articles, even if they have relatively low traffic, may be stumbled onto by people doing searches. Since I have over 2000 articles at forerunner.com people are not entering mainly from the front index page. People find one of those 2000 pages and they navigate elsewhere on the site.

All external links to those 2000 pages drives the traffic to the site. Ranking.com has recorded over 11,000 links to forerunner.com. Because I have so many links into the site some individual pages are very popular.

For instance, go to Google.com and type in PHILLIS WHEATLEY. You will see forerunner.com is #3.

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley.html

The key word THEONOMY yields a #1 ranking for forerunner.com on Google.

http://www.forerunner.com/theofaq.html

And there are many other search words that yield similar indexing/ranking.

There are many other key words and phrases that give forerunner.com a page rank in the top ten on the major search engines.

Why are these ranked so high?

1. The pages were the first on their topic ten years ago when the web was still in its infancy.
2. In that time, these individual pages have generated many outside links from other sites.
3. Search engines look at the number of links as the number one factor for indexing / ranking.
4. A high ranking in the search engines leads to more visits and higher ranking in the index.
5. All these factors work together to drive traffic, it's like a snowball effect.

And because of that situation, I can add a single page and it will quickly be indexed and ranked highly because of the preeminence of the entire site.

For instance, two months ago, I bought a non-copyrighted an article called:

"Analyzing Website Traffic"

http://www.forerunner.com/e-business/X0021_Analyzing_Website_Tr.html

Do a search for "Analyzing Website Traffic" and you will see The Forerunner's article is already #9 in ranking on the Google index. The amazing thing about this is that this is a non-copyrighted article that is sold to help web sites generate traffic. It appears on 416 other sites indexed by Google.

The reason for the fast track on the major search engines is that forerunner.com has had ten years to build its traffic. Other web sites and search engine robots have done all the work without me even knowing how was done!

(Does that sound like the premise of a science fiction novel?)

That is why the domain name of forerunner.com is more valuable to me than it would be to anyone else who did not have 2000 articles on their web site for ten years. There will probably never be a need for me to start another web site under a new domain name. This domain name will always give me the better traffic than a new site would.

In fact, my top priority for the summer of 2006 is to add 1000 pages to the site. That in itself ought to double my traffic and e-commerce income simply because I know which are the most popular types of articles on my site.

I am often surprised that a long ago forgotten article will suddenly make it onto a national news service's list of links and suddenly that article will jump to the top of my referral list. We just had our national day of prayer, so people were searching for information on that and they found a 1988 article about the first national day of prayer that President Reagan instituted as a yearly event. Until last week, it was a forgotten article, but in the last seven days it has vaulted to the number 1 page on my site.

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0324_National_Day_of_Pray.html

Now the key phrase "National Day of Prayer" is currently #7 on Google.

You might be surprised to see the list of the most popular referrer pages in the first week of May 2006:

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0324_National_Day_of_Pray.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0497_DeMar_-_Behaviorism.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0214_Phillis_Wheatley.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0038_Bette_Davis.html

http://www.forerunner.com/chalcedon/X0020_15._Council_of_Trent.html

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0004_3._Oliver_Cromwell.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0098_Ban_on_school_prayer.html

http://www.forerunner.com/videos.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0388_Effects_of_Pornograp.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0526_Bios-_John_Winthrop.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0525_Bios-_John_Knox.html

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0332_Ted_Bundy.html

http://www.forerunner.com/

http://www.forerunner.com/mandate/X0069_The_Education_of_Joh.html

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/manson.html

By now you should have figured out the several ways that just posting this article to my blog is going to increase my traffic. Take these principles and prosper!

The Forerunner web site -- http://forerunner.com -- redesigned and updated

The Forerunner web site -- http://forerunner.com -- has been
redesigned and updated.

Since 1996 when I first put up the site, I stayed with an austere
design -- never updating the look. The vast majority of the 1600 plus
pages were just text and minimal graphics, because I thought that
people mainly wanted information to load fast -- especially in
regions and countries where there is no access to broadband.

I reconsidered this recently and decided that I wanted to identify
"The Forerunner" and "Jay Rogers" to each visitor. Within the first
few days I had some old friends who I hadn't heard from in years
email me.

Every page has a new look. The site no longer looks like it was
designed ten years ago. If you haven't see the web site this year,
check it out and remember to reload your cache.

- Jay Rogers