Internet Work Report for 2025

Thank you, Gavin, for leading our singing this morning, and thank you for being here today. We’re glad that you’re with us, and this morning, as we get into our lesson, we’re going to be looking at our worldwide internet work, and so we’re going to be bringing in some scriptures to talk about the gospel, and then also give a report on the work that we’re doing here at this congregation with the internet.

And maybe you know of that work, maybe in the past you’ve been here for one of these reports, and maybe you haven’t, but this morning that’s what we’re going to talk about, and we’re going to talk about the good that’s being done by this congregation all over the world, because we have an influence for people in many different places in this world that you really don’t see.

But let’s remind ourselves of the commission that Jesus Christ has given us, and that is our mandate for doing this kind of work. So Mark chapter 16, verse 15, Jesus said, Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Matthew 28, verse 19, He said, He said, “‘Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.'”

So we have two different verses here. One talks about going into all the world and preaching the gospel to every creature. One talks about making disciples of all nations. How in the world are we, the New Boston Church of Christ, Here, in the local place that we are at, going to fulfill these commands. You may be asking yourself, well, I, as an individual, can’t go to every single nation on earth. But, maybe you can, with the power of the internet. And that’s what, of course, that’s what we’re talking about. How? How do we do this?

There are the traditional methods of going to different places, you know, such as taking a bicycle. Maybe you want to ride down the street and go somewhere. You might take a bicycle to do that. Maybe you want to go over to Texarkana. You might hop in one of these smart cars and do that.

Or maybe there is somewhere you want to go on the other side of the world. You know, some of us have been to Brazil, some of us have been to Asia, some of us have been to Europe, and you got to take a plane or a boat or something like that to do that.

Maybe you could use a train to go places. I know some people who have done that recently. So there are a lot of different ways to go, and you know, a lot of these ways, they’re time-consuming, they’re expensive, and they cost a lot of resources, and you’ve got to justify your expenses, you know, when you’re using the Lord’s money.

And so, but the way that we want to talk about this morning is with the internet, because the internet is one of those resources that we have that enables us to go to many places that it would be maybe not impossible, but nearly impossible to go to.

And this is a resource that is in front of us that we can use to fulfill that great commission of going into all the world and preaching the gospel to every creature. In Revelation 14, verse 6, we read these words, Then I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people.

And you know, this is the story of salvation in the book of Revelation. And part of the story of salvation in the book of Revelation is preaching the gospel to every creature under heaven, to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. And you know, we have that opportunity to do just that this morning.

So we want to look at three things today as we think about our internet work. First of all, what do we have available? And we’re going to answer that question. Secondly, who and how many are using it? And then third, we’re going to answer the question, what can we do in response to the work that we have here?

So let’s look at that first question. What do we have available? You know, in Exodus chapter 4 and verse 2, there Moses was encountering God in the burning bush and God looked at Moses and He said to him, What is that in your hand? What is that in your hand? And he said, a rod. And what did God then do with that rod that Moses had available to him? Just what was available to him? What did God do with it? He performed powerful signs before Pharaoh. He was able to then use that rod to free the children of Israel.

And he used that rod to do what? To part the Red Sea. That rod was there. A simple tool. Yet, in the hands of God, it is a powerful weapon to accomplish great things. Well, that’s kind of the situation that you’re in. You know, what is in your hand? And one of the things that is in our hand is our websites.

And we have two of them now, and maybe you didn’t know about the second one, but I’m going to talk about that just for a minute here. But we have our church website, which is the New Boston Church of Christ website in newbostoncoc.org.

And we’ll talk about what’s out there, but we’ve had this website for many years now, since the end of 2014, so over 10 years. And it has done a tremendous amount of good in those years. But then just last year, a friend of mine who had his own personal website called gewatkins.net, he, and on this website are sermon outlines and Bible study articles and things of that nature. It’s nothing crazy or anything. It’s very similar to our website, but he is no longer, he had a stroke several years ago, and he, you may notice his name in our bulletin.

As one of the people that we’re praying for. But he had a website, and it did a tremendous amount of good. Thousands of people visit it, but then when he had his stroke, he just wasn’t able to keep up with it as much as he used to, and he limped along for a few years, and finally his wife said, would you please take it and do something with it? Because it was going down, and people were calling me to ask, well, why isn’t this up anymore? And I was like, well, I don’t know.

So I got involved, and I took it over last year, and I paid for it for a while out of my own pocket just to get it going and make sure it was going right and everything was going well, and after that, I had a meeting with the elders. I said, what do y’all think? You know, we can add this to what we’re already paying for, and it won’t cost us a dime, and it’ll save me some money because I won’t have to pay for it with a separate hosting site.

And the elders said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Why don’t you go ahead and do that? And so we did that, and we just added it to what we have, and now it’s something that we support, and it’s something that is in addition to the website that we already have. And it has sermon outlines, Bible articles by different gospel preachers out there, and these are our men who preach the truth. It’s not anything crazy, but it’s good stuff.

And I would encourage you to go to these websites and to visit and to see what they’re all about. But in total, both websites, we have almost 6,000. 5,974. Just a few more weeks, we’ll probably get up there to six.

But we have almost 6,000 pages of content. Preaching and teaching the gospel. Reasoning with people about what the scriptures say. You know, Bible articles, sermon outlines, different things, different studies, questions and answers. We have, and we’ll talk about this, what we do have here. Let’s just look at that for a minute. Now on our website, our church website, we’ve got 1,337 pages of content. I think that went up one this morning when we published our Bulletin article.

So, but we also have on our website the map to our place of worship. When you go to that very first page, that’s one of the things you’ll see there. If you scroll down, you’ll see the map. We have an online bulletin that we publish every week, and if you don’t get the bulletin in the back here, you can get it online, and it’s published every week.

We have 496 bulletin articles that have been published in text form, not in a PDF, but an actual scrollable text that you can read. You can read it on your phone. You can read it on your computer. And we have 684 sermon outlines. And we have 145 questions and answers. And along with all those, we have several audio recordings that we placed out there as well.

And so, this is all available to you. It’s available to your friends. It’s available to anyone that you may meet. And they can come to our website and they can study the Bible and see what we’re doing and see what it’s all about.

Now, on the other website that we’re maintaining right now, GEWatkins.net, we have 3,013 bulletin articles, 1,624 sermon outlines, and 172 questions and answers, and 52 audio recordings. And so we have 4,637 total pages of content. Now, obviously, this isn’t as much as some others who have put a tremendous amount of content out there.

I think the church out in San Angelo has a website with many, many sermon outlines, sermons, audio sermons that you can listen to, and that’s a big, big resource, but we do have some things, and people come to see those things.

We have 1,142 videos published on YouTube, and we began publishing on YouTube on April 11th of 2019. That’s our very first video that we put out there. We have videos of the worship services prior to that point, but that was the point when we decided that it was too much to save videos on our own website.

The website was just resource intensive, and we ended up deleting a bunch of those videos to save space because our hosting company didn’t want to use that much storage space. So we just offloaded that onto YouTube, and now everything on video is being published to our YouTube channel, and you can see that there.

We began live streaming in March of 2020 and we still do that. We live stream our Sunday morning and our Wednesday night services. We don’t live stream our Sunday night services, generally speaking. Sometimes we do, but most of the time we do not. And that’s so that those who don’t want that can have an opportunity to come in and be in a service that isn’t live streamed.

So what else do we have available? Our Facebook page is also available. It’s been active since 2010. We now have 1,100 followers on our Facebook page, and that’s a pretty good number. We publish two items a day on our Facebook page automatically through a special program that I’ve got installed.

And so that is constantly being refreshed with new content every day. And those are bulletin articles and sermon outlines and other things that come from our website. And so our Facebook page redirects people back to our website. We have people following us practically on a weekly basis. We have one or two new people following us. And so that number’s going up. And that’s good.

But we also have available to us, or that’s what we have available. So now let’s talk about who and how many are using our website. And maybe you think, well, we’re talking about numbers. And that’s right, because the Bible talks about numbers sometimes. Numbers 1, verse 19, the Lord commanded Moses, and He numbered them in the wilderness of Sinai. So we keep track of numbers, and we keep track of our contribution, our attendance.

We also keep track of how many people are visiting our websites. And so I want to talk about that for a moment. For the year 2025, last year, we had 64,063 visitors to our website, to the church’s website. Now that’s pretty good for a church website. We had 119,499 page views.

Now, if I were to tell you, personally, that you individually, next this year, you needed to hand out 120,000 tracts, what would you say to me in response to that? You’d probably say, when am I going to do that? But that’s exactly what you did and we did as a congregation last year on our website.

We handed out 119,499 tracts to people who were looking for information about spiritual matters. And that is commendable. Now, I’ll tell you, on the next website, you know, the GE Watkins website, it has a lot more. And he’s built this up over many years, and there’s a lot more people visiting that website.

That website had 221,648 visitors last year, and it had 907,133 page views, almost a million page views last year. It’s been more in the past, but because things have changed on that website, it’s kind of gone down recently, but that’s a lot.

That’s a lot. Think about handing out a million. Now together, both of them, you know, 907, I got my slides kind of messed up here, but 907 plus 119, that’s over a million, isn’t it? Somebody do the math on that. I’m not a math guy.

But that’s over a million tracks that we have handed out via our website. And so that’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of stuff. Now we think about how many are using it in terms of, you know, people. We are spreading the gospel to all seven continents, Asia, Europe, Africa.

A lot of our hits come from Nigeria and Africa. We’ll talk about that in a minute. China, Venezuela, even Saudi Arabia, Russia. All these places have people coming and finding information they’re looking for on our website. And so there’s 223 countries and territories that we have impacted with our website. So that’s a tremendous number.

And the people who are using it, who are looking for our information? Well, primarily, you have weekend and full-time preachers who are coming to our websites to find resources for preaching the gospel. So, and you say, well, why is that significant? Why is that important? It’s just preachers, and what about people who are looking, searching? Well, we have some of them too, but I want you to think about this.

For every preacher who comes to our website looking for a sermon to preach, and they find a sermon that they want to preach from our website, let’s say, there’s a congregation of people associated with that preacher who are going to hear the gospel because, and we’ve aided them in doing that.

So we are assisting thousands of churches throughout the world in preaching the gospel to their local members. And that’s a tremendous thing. That is really helpful to the church throughout the world. Now there are some who are visiting to look for information who aren’t Christians, but there are others who take that information and share it with other people who are not Christians.

And we can’t count that. We don’t know what those numbers are, but they are far greater than the actual numbers on the website, maybe 10 times as much, maybe 20 times as much. So if you could think, if just one of those items was taken to a foreign country, let’s say in Nigeria, because they have a lot of visitors come from Nigeria and visit our website, And they’re printing out our sermon outlines. And then they’re taking that to other people out there.

10 times would be 10 million. 20 times would be 20 million. Well, that’s a tremendous amount of folks. Who else uses our website? Bible class teachers, missionaries, visitors looking for us. You know, we have a lot of visitors come in and, how’d you hear about us? Well, I looked you up. I found your website. And we decided to drop in. Okay, great. We’re glad you did that. And we appreciate it. And you too, hopefully, are using our website. And this is a great, great resource. So we’ve looked at what do we have available. We’ve looked at who and how many are using it. So let’s think about what can we do.

You know, James chapter 1, verse 22 says, “…but be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” And so we want to be involved in the way that we can with helping this work. And I want to talk about our expenses because one of the ways that you can be involved in supporting this work is by giving, through your contributions, by giving.

And if you think this is a good work, you can give a little bit more to help support this work. But really, it’s not costing that much just for the direct expenses. So what are the direct expenses? We got domain names and that’s about $10 a year. Actually, our plan includes domain names and we have a little maintenance thing. But then our hosting service is about $205 a year. We pay a little bit for security to keep out the riffraff, people who are trying to upload spam, people who are trying to do nasty things.

And use our website, take advantage of it. So we pay for a little security to keep them out. We have end-to-end encryption certificate, which is $80 a year, and that’s something that we do so that when people visit our website, they can be secure in knowing that the things that they’re doing there can’t be viewed by someone else. Now you say, well, why is that important? Well, what if you’re in Saudi Arabia And you’re visiting our website, and you know the government doesn’t want you looking at Christianity.

Would you want what you see to be in plain view of the government there? Probably not. So this protects people who live in countries that are adverse to Christianity. We have some visitors from Saudi Arabia and other places over in the Middle East, and so we want to protect them. And so it’s encrypted And it’s encrypted for everyone, but it’s not so much important here because, you know, we’re not worried about other people saying that we’re looking at a church website, but some people might be in other places in the world, and so the encryption ensures that when they view our website, they can be assured that the government doesn’t know what they’re looking at over there and it can make sure that they can get the information they need without having to worry about the government.

You know, because that’s a big deal in some countries in the world. And so we have that end-to-end encryption. So if you add it all up, all together, it’s costing us about $25.50 a month. That’s just our direct expenses of what we pay to have the website itself. And that’s a pretty good deal.

I mean, if you were to hand out a million tracts, do you think it’d be as cheap as $25.50 to do that? It wouldn’t be. It’d be a lot more than that, to hand out a million tracts to someone, even at just like 50 cents a tract, or even 25 cents a tract.

Multiply that by a million, and that’s what your cost is going to be. You know, that’s a lot. That’s a lot of money just for tracts. But we can do a lot more than that with the website that we have. Now we have some indirect expenses as well. Computers, cameras, recorders, network devices, we have our internet service, our building where everything is kept. All of these are indirect expenses and there’s like a one-time cost usually to some of these things for computers.

We actually got some new computers last year, at the beginning of the year, because the software that we use, the operating system, Microsoft, updated to Windows 11, and our old computers, we couldn’t install it on those old computers, so we had to update it to the new system.

And so we got new computers for that, and so all of our computers are up to date. They’re secure so that people can’t hack in and try to do things. But, you know, think about our expenses and how little they are, really. These expenses are almost nothing compared to what it would cost to visit, let’s say, all 50 states.

Has anybody here visited all 50 states? I haven’t yet. I’ve got, I’m close. I need a few, few more. But I plan on doing it before my life ends, Lord willing. But if you, you know, it costs thousands of dollars to visit all 50 states. I know because I’ve spent it. And we’re about to spend some more to go. Gavin wants to go to Maine for his graduation trip. So we’re headed up to the northeast this next summer.

But anyway, it costs a lot of money to travel. What would it take to visit all the countries and territories of the world? Over 200 countries and territories in this world. Man, that would be a lot. You know, just the plane ticket alone would be a lot. What would it take to mail? You say, well, I don’t want to go there. Let’s mail it all.

Have you seen the price of postage lately? It’s not going down, I’ll tell you that. It would take a tremendous amount of money just to mail. Now, we have some brethren who do that, and I don’t begrudge them at all. We have Brother Eddie Clower, that’s what their work do. They mail things to all the countries of the world. That’s very expensive, very expensive to do that.

This is, by comparison, very inexpensive and it enables us to take the gospel to many places. So what do we want to do? Well, first of all, let’s pray for this good work. We have a website. I would appreciate it if you just say, Lord, please bless our website. Bless it with visitors. Bless it with people who are looking. Bless it with people who have come and preach the truth with the stuff we have.

Visit our website, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and keep giving to support this good work. And attend and participate in our worship services because if you do that, that’s part of what we do. And it encourages people to visit our resources that we have available.

And if you have any suggestions for ideas or topics that you would like to be published, we would be happy to take those suggestions and be happy to work on it. If you want to learn about how to do the back-end stuff, how to do the technical stuff, I’d be more than happy to teach you.

Because right now, between me and Jim, I’m doing the lion’s share of the work and I’m not complaining. I’m happy to do it. It’s a great work and I want to keep doing it. But I could really use someone else to, you know, what if I get hit by a bus? Who’s going to do this work? We need some other people to want to be involved in this so it can keep going if something happens to me or something like that. So how are we doing? What do you think? Are we taking the gospel to the world? We are. And that’s a good thing. We’re fulfilling that great commission that Jesus wants us to fulfill.

And, you know, we want to fulfill it in our personal lives as well. Maybe there’s someone here this morning who needs to obey the gospel. Through hearing, believing, repenting, confessing, and being baptized, you can become a child of God today. And that’s something that we would really appreciate as we seek to fulfill this Great Commission, because it not only applies to all those 200 countries and territories, it also applies right here in New Boston.

And we want to do that work also. And so maybe this morning you’d like to respond to the invitation of the gospel. If that’s the case, we’d be happy to receive you right now while together we stand and while we sing.

End of transcript. Thank you for reading along!