And the best part is that Jehovahs Witnesses are reading
it anonymouslywithout having to subscribe or reveal their identity.
With the Winter 1997 issue three months ago Comments from the Friends
went online. The entire issueall sixteen pages, plus the order
formappeared 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 othersif we can judge from those who have identified themselvesare Jehovahs 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.
Copyright © 1997 by David A. Reed, all rights reserved. Clipart copyright © by Corel Corp., Metro Creative Graphics, Inc., Metro ImageBase, Inc., T/Maker, Zedcor, Inc., et al., used with permission.