"For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come."-1 Timothy 4:8
The above verse is something I like to remind myself as I try to workout 3-5 days a week at the local "gym" or fitness center in Morris.
I've been trying to keep myself physically in shape as I try to do spiritually (see how?). I started working out for "odd" reason around junior high after I got tired of being "pushed around". Then my motivation and reasons has changes overtime growing up.
However, I've been trained to keep my body healthy physically since I was very little doing exercises to records-music that my Aunt pushed my siblings and I to keep fit!
Love of Sports
Besided working out, I love to watch and play a variety of sports-thanks to recess and influence by peers (including siblings) growing up by a school playfield. As I came to a growing personal relationship with Jesus, my outlook on sports has changed. I'm always waiting for "testimonies" of positive professional athletes that I can share about via websites that I make. With the media "highlighting" many "wrongs" of these popular athletes, I'm looking for the "good" to share about through this website. Please feel free to contact me of any websites to refer that I can linked here.
Ministries
*Coach Reese was interviewed in January 2004 by N.Y. Times for an article:
NATIONAL | January 31, 2004
Tucked Behind the Home Page, a Call to Worship
By JOHN LELAND (NYT) News
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/national/31EVAN.html
"Tucked Behind the Home Page, a Call to Worship"
By JOHN LELAND
Published: January 31, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/
When Doug Reese put up his Web site, he felt he was answering a call. A college wrestling coach with a long involvement in Christian youth ministries, he wanted to spread a Christian message to people who were not getting it.
Instead of working through his Methodist church, he created a site with no overtly religious images or affiliation, and articles about weight lifting, nutrition and profiles of athletes. Only after users click a few links do they start to see biblical passages or the religious testimonials of the athletes.
"I wanted it to look like a sports magazine," said Mr. Reese, who coaches at the University of Minnesota at Morris and hopes to turn his three-year-old site into a full-time ministry. "It's a little covert. I know that religion or Christianity is a turn-off with a great part of the population. I didn't want to shove it in people's faces."
Mr. Reese and his Web site, www.tothenextlevel.org, embody an increasingly popular strategy for evangelism in the Internet age. In the segmented realms of the Web, said Tony Whitaker, editor of a guide for online evangelists, sites that use overtly Christian material will reach only people who are already Christians, while everyone else can click by. Unlike Christian radio or television, the new medium calls not for powerful religious symbolism or rhetoric but for the absence of them, he said.
"You're not trying to trick people," Mr. Whitaker said. "You can't appear to be something you're not. But Christians should legitimately appear to be taking a starting point on a subject that doesn't appear to be religious."
A report released in December by the Pew Internet and American Life Project estimated that by December 2002, 35 million Americans had searched for religious or spiritual information online, compared with 36 million who had downloaded music files. Until recently, if someone typed "god" into a search engine, it retrieved as many sites as typing in "sex," said Quentin J. Schultze, a professor of communications at Calvin College who has written about religion and the Web. "So this has been a deeply evangelistic medium. The influence of religious evangelists has been greatly unreported."
Instead of Scripture, the sites come on with information about beauty, diet, fitness, sex and celebrities. Some also have links for donations or offer books or other products for sale. But the sites are not veiled pitches for money, and the approach has elicited little controversy.
Many sites have no church ties and they represent just a fraction of the religious traffic online. "The most creative ones are started by individuals" rather than churches, said Robby Richardson, director of international Internet ministries for Gospel Communications International, a nonprofit umbrella group of 300 ministries based in Muskegon, Mich., whose www.gospelcom.net reaches about two million visitors a month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. "We're trying to tell church sites, `Don't forget about evangelism.' "
Some sites direct visitors to churches or study groups; others hope readers will convert on the spot, declaring themselves by clicking a button or a link. Bruce Biesenthal, editor of www.thegoal.com, a sports-oriented site in Seattle, said about 300 people in the last two years had clicked a button to say they were making a "decision for Christ" after reading athletes' testimonials on the site. The articles discuss religious themes only after delivering the sports news, he said.
"The site is for people coming because they want to learn about the athlete or the sport," he said. "It's subversive. We want to use the celebrity of the athletes as a platform."
Even as President Bush, in an apparent nod to conservative Christians in his State of the Union address, urged Americans to "work together to counter the negative influence of the culture," many online evangelists are using the R-rated culture to attract visitors.
(Page 2 of 2)
Some sites discuss gangsta rap or movies like "American Pie" in relatively neutral language. For example, an article on www.damaris.org, a nondenominational Christian ministry based in England, advises, "Eminem and his rap entourage could be described as radical preachers, speaking frankly about the broken communities they come from."
David Bruce, an evangelical Christian who runs a movie review site called www.hollywoodjesus.com, said he liked covering racy films, as long as they were popular, because they had the attention of "pre-Christians." Parts of his site refer people to religious groups, and Mr. Bruce, a former pastor, said he has continuing telephone or e-mail conversations with 100 users at any time.
Mr. Bruce distinguished himself from fundamentalists who protest or boycott the Harry Potter books and movies as occultist.
"I would say I'm part of a new thinking within evangelicals," he said, adding that he receives angry e-mail messages for promoting sexual or violent movies. "I get so tired of Christians that bash Hollywood."
"It isn't content that interests me," he said, continuing that even exploitation movies provide "common ground" for biblical discussion.
"I was so disappointed `Showgirls' wasn't a hit because I would have loved to discuss it," Mr. Bruce said.
Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 43,000 congregations, said that the Internet lent itself to all kinds of approaches, both direct and indirect, because different users were ready for different levels of information. A site that did not declare its intentions was the best way to reach some, just as an evangelist in a public square might begin by talking about secular concerns. "You have a moral obligation not to be deceitful," he said. "But you don't have a moral obligation to tell everything you know upfront."
Yet Mr. Haggard worried that on the Internet, anyone could come on as a religious authority — "even a crazy person." He added that because there was so much pornography on the Internet, online evangelism might prove a mixed benefit. "We have more people corrupted on the Internet than we have arrive at the church by the Net," he said.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, Karen Schenk works both direct and indirect approaches to evangelism. She is the director of Web site strategies for TruthMedia, an organization of 20 sites affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical group. Two sites she oversees are www.womentodayonline.com and www.christianwomentoday.com.
The latter assumes visitors are already involved in churches, she said, and offers articles like "Dive Deeper Into God" and "True Spiritual Change." The former is for women who might not be Christians, and features articles like "I Am Jealous of His Very Attractive Ex-Wife."
It is the secular-looking site that is evangelistic, Mrs. Schenk said. "We're just being sensitive to where people are at and inviting them in. We don't have spinning crosses on Women Today."
To illustrate how beauty tips might be used to spread the gospel, Mrs. Schenk noted that the most popular article on Women Today Online has been an advice column about frizzy hair. Before reading advertisements for L'Oreal, readers see a link that reads, "Are you happy with your body?" If they click on that, they get the life story of a model who battled bulimia but then found success after becoming a born-again Christian. "You can receive Christ right now by faith through prayer," she writes.
Mrs. Schenk said that about 70 percent of the site's traffic was in the secular areas, but that visitors wanting more could receive prayers, Bible passages or Christian mentoring.
The Web site www.mops.org, whose initials stand for Mothers of Preschoolers, offers mothers advice and chat rooms for topics like playdates, money, sexuality and medical needs, and organizes more than 3,000 groups that meet in churches around the country and abroad. The group has 115,000 members, said Karen Parks, the director of ministry networks. Articles are mostly secular, but the site also has areas for religious testimonials and outreach.
The site avoids discussion of political topics or abortion. "We never hide that we're a Christian organization, but we don't want to build any walls or barriers," Ms. Parks said. "We consider a success anything that leads a mom one step closer to Jesus, whatever that step is. Hopefully she goes all the way to meet Jesus, but that might be through another group, and that's fine."
The indirect, or bridge strategy in online evangelizing continues a broader trend among Christian evangelicals, said Randall Balmer, chairman of the religion department at Barnard College and author of "The Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism." In 1975, the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., after surveying local residents to see why many did not go to church, dispensed with all Christian iconography, crosses or stained glass windows to appeal to people who were turned off by these. In the 1990's, many evangelical churches dropped the denomination from their names, switching to names like Oak Chapel.
Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, questioned the long-term value of online religious conversions, no matter how many hits the sites got. He pointed to the Internet outreach in Howard Dean's presidential campaign, which generated furious activity online but so far has not translated into first-place finishes in the primaries. "The Dean camp suggests that meeting through the Internet didn't work," Mr. Wolfe said. "I wonder if a similar Christian strategy is going to work either."
Other Related Links:
Update Report from Coach Doug Reese
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 15:18:09 -0500
From: Doug Reese
"I just got done with an hour interview with CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network). All I can say is Wow!
They love the book (Take It To The Next Level) and they will be promoting it hard. In fact they want to put up 20 chapters on their website with links to the TTNL site. We should see an increase in web activity and in internet book sales as a result.
They love the nitch we have in sport ministry and are willing to help us in any way they can. We will be certainly developing a tight partnership.
They will give us streaming audio to put up our TTNL radio devotionals on our site and will help us in marketing to Christian radio and to They will give us streaming audio to put up our TTNL radio devotionals on our site and will help us in marketing to Christian radio and to potential sponsors. They will do the streaming video we want to do with technique and testimonies of professional and Olympic athletes. We couldn't even think of paying for that stuff right now.
CBN is going to launch a video/website called "the Outdoor channel" in July. This article that I was interviewed for will be featured there, but I was told they want to pre-launch the site with this interview on the CBN.com site in June.
The Outdoor channel will have streaming video of events and competitions from around the world. The goal is to reach men for the gospel. I will let you know when the interview is up and running. It looks like God has some big plans in store
God bless,
Coach Doug Reese
From: Doug Reese
To: reesedc@tothenextlevel.org
Subject: CBN.com
It looks like I am becoming a feature writer on the Christian Broadcasting Network website. For the second straight week they posted an article with a link on the front page. www.cbn.com
The article is under the banner "More Inside" under "Outdoor Life".
Or you can go directly to the article
http://www.cbn.com/living/family/thegift.asp
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 09:57:12 -0500
From: Doug Reese
Subject: Moving On!
Final greetings from Minnesota!
Yesterday I accepted a job at King College in Bristol, TN as head wrestling coach. You can read the press release at theMat.com, the website of USA Wrestling at http://www.themat.com/pressbox/pressdetail.asp?aid=10954
Related Sites:
Doug Reese
Webmaster: To the Next Level, from gospel.com
"But, what I learned was: if you are called by God, He qualifies you to do His work. And that is a tremendous blessing!"
Lacrosse
Events
Hall of Fame
Recreation
Tickets
Magazines
Ministries
Muscles
Organization
*special personal perspective
Miscellaneous
Tickets
Missions
*using your athletic skills and passion of sports on other places of the world!
Whitney Houston - One Moment In Time (Grammy Awards Live)
Thank you for visiting my page at Angelfire. Please come back and visit again!
