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Surfing the Internet may not give you the rush you get from catching a 15-foot wave, but it can give your ministry a lift.

Oceans of Information
The Internet places enormous amounts of information at your fingertips. It allows you to find illustrations for sermons or teaching from historical documents, books, and magazines.

It provides instant access to major newspapers, such as:

• New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/)
• Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/)

The following search engines will help you look through several sources at the same time:

• Google (http://www.google.com/)
• ProFusion (http://www.profusion.com/)
• SurfWax (http://www.surfwax.com/)
• AllTheWeb (http://www.alltheweb.com/)
• WebTop (http://www.webtop.com/)
• AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/)

Pastors can brighten sermons with anecdotes and examples they find on the Internet. In a recent sermon in which I spoke of salvation as God's free gift, I used an illustration from an article in Worth magazine (http://www.worth.com/), which I found by asking a search engine to find sites related to the word sale. The editors of Worth had asked some of America's wealthiest people, "How much would you pay for eternal life?" According to the article, women would pay about $300,000. Men would put down a cool million.

[Note: In October 1999 Christianity Today released a online resource for sermon illustrations, quotes, statistics, and anecdotes. Check it out at: PreachingToday.com.]

Steve Long, an attorney and associate pastor at Sierra Vista Baptist Church in Belen, New Mexico, used a search engine last summer to find a sound clip of Franklin Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Long used the recording in a sermon encouraging his church's senior citizens to keep active in Christian service. He reminded the seniors that they were the generation that accomplished the impossible in World War II and that their leadership was still needed today.

A Cup of Cold Water
John Coiner, Sunday school superintendent at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Mableton, Georgia, was so discouraged that he was ready to resign.

Coiner was surfing the Web one night and ran across 20/20 Vision (http://www.joshhunt.com), which offers tips on how to lead a Sunday school class. The site encouraged him to try a new approach to Sunday school, which has rekindled his excitement about his work.

The Hall of Church History (http://www.gty.org/~phil/hall.htm) features writings from church fathers, medieval churchmen, heretics, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Reformers, Puritans, Anabaptists, Arminians, Baptists, and contemporary theologians. A friend of the site's curator jokingly refers to the source as "Theology from a Bunch of Dead Guys."

Robert Morgan, pastor at Donelson Fellowship in Nashville, Tennessee, accesses the Hall of Church History to read Spurgeon's sermons. He says the site offers the best collection of church history he's ever found.

Lighten the Load
If you're looking for religious humor to brighten your sermons, try Ecunet's Eculaugh (http://www.ecunet.org/ecunet/eculaugh/laugh.html). Here's a sample: "An usher heard a little girl explain church protocol to her brother. 'You have to be really quiet—if you talk, that man there will make you stop!'

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