Pages for children and young people

Evangelistic pages for children are an exciting and potentially powerful opportunity. Sadly, there are very few which are not designed for 'churched' children with pre-existing Bible knowledge, for possible reasons which are analyzed here.

Kidsranch has a great range of games, jokes and stories. It can be inserted into any other site (for instance as a church site children's section) using a narrow top frame. RugRat's Fun Room is beautifully done without being preachy. ATS Kids is a very attractive site for younger children, which includes presentations, games and activities.

Kids Links and TruthQuest lists a number of top Christian children's pages. Some are designed primarily for children within the Christian community and would not relate to non-Christian children, though others may be more evangelistic in varying degrees. See Mr Plat – a page on platypuses. There is surely a need to create pages on secular subjects like this which will attract children's interest, and then bring them over to the Gospel (the 'Bridge Strategy'). Rather than create a gospel presentation, sites can link to something like Four Spiritual Laws Children's version or Meet Max's Friend.

The needs is for a magazine-style site similar to the secular Blue Peter | FunBrain | Cyberchase sites – with lots of general interest material, and equivalent in some ways to the IamNext outreach site for teens.

Cartoons have a major significance for children and can be used as single amusing pictures, or as comic strip stories. See Kid's Wisdom in Cartoon Form as a Christian option, and look at the secular Adventures with PosNayko as as example of how an evangelistic comic site for kids might look.

Games

There are fun games for younger children at Kids Web, ATSKids as parts of larger sites, and Nadya's Underwater Adventure Game and Mission X Space Game are stand-alone kids' games by pastor's wife Nadya Andreadis.

King's Call is a well-produced evangelistic adventure game for ages up to early teens.

Here are encouraging results from these games sites.

Teens

Happily, there is a wider range of sites suitable for teens and students, though there remains a big need for good pages aimed at teens which would match the style and content of secular sites such as Teen Mag.

Iamnext, Hopenet.net and Gloriazine use this approach. Hope for teens focuses on teen problems and is accessible to non-Christian teens. More pages for teens and students

Teaching computer skills to teens is also a powerful form of ministry in both the West and non-western world.

School material

In some countries, religious education is a required part of the national curriculum. It may surprise people in USA, with strict separation of church and state, to hear that in relatively secular UK, religious education (RE) is compulsary throughout primary and a considerable part of secondary schooling. Admittedly, these days it is multi-religious, but there are still many opportunities for Christian teachers (and even invited outsiders) to cover areas of the curriculum in a sensitive manner from an evangelical viewpoint.

Young people often undertake online research to find additional material to help with their religious studies. RE:Quest has been designed to provide biblically-based curriculum material for young people (and teachers) in UK. (Stapleford Centre exists to resource Christian teachers. Damaris offers RE lessons online.) There are other apologetic sites which could also help them. Here's an opportunity to create a detailed religious studies homework portal with links to many appropriate sites.

Most students also study secular set books and plays during their schooling. Here too is a way to offer thought-provoking material based on books and plays.

Games can be used on teen sites in ways that are thought-provoking, or purely to make the site sticky – i.e. to encourage return visits.

Publicity

Children's pages should be registered on kids search engines and family-safe resources, as well as the main secular search engines and directories.

Designers of children's pages should be aware of usability issues for children.

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