And the best part is that Jehovah’s Witnesses are reading it anonymously—without having to subscribe or reveal their identity.

With the Winter 1997 issue three months ago Comments from the Friends went online. The entire issue—all sixteen pages, plus the order form—appeared on the World Wide Web in electronic format for the first time.

This puts Comments in company with The New York Times and several other major newspapers and magazines which have also come out with online editions. (Also, like other publications that experimented with an e-mail edition, we found little interest in that bare-bones format and so dropped the text-only e-mail edition offered last summer.)

Response to the electronic edition has been heartening. Our Webshowplace.com domain, set up last year to house this ministry along with other hosted websites, is now experiencing as many as 4500 "hits" per day, a good portion of these directed at the online edition of Comments from the Friends.

Still, this is a risky venture. Many of the online readers appear to be coming in via overseas webservers, hence are unlikely to subscribe or to support this ministry. Many others—if we can judge from those who have identified themselves—are Jehovah’s Witnesses secretly looking for outside information. The bolder ones contact us sooner or later, while the more timid continue to read Comments online in secret. Our hope is that many of these will imitate Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea by becoming secret disciples of Jesus Christ in their hearts, even if we never hear from them in this world.

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