CCC reports one million decisions for Christ in one month

|PIC1|For the first time in its five-year history, the media arm of Campus Crusade for Christ recorded over one million decisions for Jesus Christ in a single month.

In its announcement Wednesday, CCC’s Global Media Outreach (GMO) reported that 1,030,581 people indicated either a first-time decision to follow Jesus or a decision to recommit their life to Christ through one of more than 90 GMO-hosted Gospel Web sites in June.

"This is an historic event only possible by God's power," said GMO founder and chair Walt Wilson. "Over the past few months, we have seen an increasing number of people come to our evangelistic Web and mobile sites."

Since its inception in 2004, GMO has seen the number of people making commitments to Christ grow from 21,066 people annually to more than three million people in 2008. For this year, the ministry had projected around five million decisions. In the first six months of 2009, it has already recorded 4.1 million.

The demand is so high these days that GMO has had to enlist the support from Northland, A Church Distributed, one of Florida's most prominent megachurches, to recruit and train 5,000 online missionaries by 2010. Even with the added support, the ministry admits it needs about 10,000 to meet the demand – 7,000 more than they currently have.

On an average day, sites like Jesus2020.com get 150,000 visitors, and about 25,000 of them click a button to say they want to learn more. Of those, about 5,000 a day fill in a form so an online missionary can contact them via e-mail.

GMO estimates that one in 1,000 Internet searchers is looking for information about God. On a daily basis, around two million people look for God each day.

"The number is staggering," GMO CEO Mark Weimer recently told ABCNews.com.

In the first six months of this year alone, GMO’s 91 websites have drawn over 22.7 million visitors, prompted over 5.6 million Gospel inquiries, and led to over 800,000 e-mail being sent.

GMO estimates that 80 to 90 percent of their e-mails are sent from outside the United States. And even many of the English e-mails they receive come from countries such as India and the Philippines.

“Lately, we have been bombarded with thousands of e-mails. Today I answered my normal quota, plus 10 more and we still have 2,000 e-mails begging to be answered,” reported Mario MacDonald, one of 220 Spanish-speaking online missionaries.

“We are seeing a lot of people in Latin America coming to the Lord. They are looking not for religion, not for a denomination, but for a relationship with Christ - a personal relationship,” he added.

GMO is currently sowing the seed of the Gospel daily in 191 countries in 11 major internet languages.

One of GMO’s goals is to present the gospel in the top internet languages, namely English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, and Russian. Together, these languages cover 85 per cent of the world’s one billion internet users, the ministry noted.

The ministry also intends to reach more people through other technologies, including cell phones.

Last year, GMO launched a cell phone evangelism programme that helps reach people in developing or controlled countries who cannot access a computer or internet but have mobile phones.

Out of the one million decisions recorded in June, 360,903 came through GMO’s mobile sites.

“As the number of cell phone users continues to grow worldwide, we expect to see the percentage of decisions through cell phones go even higher,” the ministry reported.

Earlier this year, GMO reported presenting the Gospel to more than 14 million people (one every second) in 2008. Previously, the ministry had been presenting the Gospel to one person every three seconds.

“We are asking the Lord to use us in providing everyone on earth multiple opportunities to know Christ through the use of emerging technologies by 2020,” Wilson said.