Anyone with 5 minutes and access to the Internet can do ministry online. You don’t need to be a programmer or designer or know anything other than the good news of Jesus Christ. Here are some ways to get you started:

Pray for someone you’ve never met

• Go to PrayAbout.com right now and find people who know Jesus and some who don’t. Many are desperate and aren’t sure where to turn or if pray works. You can read their story and pray for them and even respond with some encouragement and wisdom.

• Go to Operation Mobilisation and view their up to the minute prayer news from around the world. They are an amazing organization that really has a heartbeat on the local Church across the globe and do a good job of communicating it to everyone. Pray for the country you have visited for vacation or maybe even a short-term mission. Pray for the country your sponsored child lives in.

• Go to People2Pray.com and register for an account. Then you can connect with others that you know (and don’t know like PrayAbout) and pray for each other. We are called to community and to bear the burdens of our fellow brothers and sisters – this is a tool that helps you to do it.

• Actually you can forget all the fancy websites above and just open up a good old fashioned email :-) That’s right, do a quick scan of your address book and see who God puts on your heart to pray for and then do it. Give them an email to let them know you are thinking about and praying for them.

Answer questions with Godly wisdom

Have you been to one of the many Q&A websites out there? People post questions about anything and get back great answers and silly answers. How about giving people some Godly answers?

Check out one of the sites below and look for their questions on anything from abortion to doing business (aka you don’t just have to look in the Religion and Spirituality sections). There you will find people who have questions that you can answer. They may not be perfect answers but you can use eBible.com to pull scripture from and look up topics to help ensure you are pointing them towards Jesus.

• Yahoo Answers
• Wis.dm
• Yedda

Help other people study the Bible

Now this one may be a bit biased cause we created the site … but I can’t not mention it because you can minister to yourself and to others at the same time. Go to eBible.com and sign up for an account. Now start searching and following links to other Bible passages and then “Save” or bookmark them. Don’t forget to add topic tags and notes because this is a very cool way to build up the database of information around the Bible. Try and provide personal insight and relevant application to the passages with your notes and people will see these and be ministered to as they read and study the Word of God. But here is the catch … so will you! Taking 5 minutes to read even 1 passage a day and make a note and some topic tags for it is a great way to minister to others and to yourself.

Post your other ideas as comments and maybe we’ll turn this into a blog series :-)