Adaptive evangelistic website: an evangelistic website that blends attempt to share the Christian Gospel with secular themes and design strategies.
Apologetics: an evangelistic approach that is concerned with increasing understanding of Christianity by answering reasonable questions about the faith (Whittaker).
Emoticons: ‘emotional icons’ used to express emotion or physical characteristics [e.g., using the symbol : ) to express happiness or : ( for sadness] (Careaga).
Chat/chat room: real time conversations on the Internet, can occur on the world wide web, Internet relay chat (IRC), through instant messaging, on-line commercial servers (e.g. AOL or CompuServe). Can be accessed through websites. A chat room is an on-line forum where two or more people can engage in chat (Careaga).
Evangelical: 1) referring to Protestant Christians who spread the Christian Gospel as found in the biblical New Testament; 2) a denomination formed to distinguish a more liberal subset of Bible-believing evangelicals from conservative anti-modern fundamentalists in the 1940s and 1950s (Harding).
Evangelical web page/site: any web page or site that attempts to share the Christian Gospel.
Fundamentalist: anti-modern and/or biblically literalist Protestant Christians (Harding).
Hit counter/hits: software that allows website designers to track the number of visits or ‘hits’ a particular page receives; can also sometimes record length of visit and the regional point of origin for the visitor’s Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Home page: a webpage; often the main point of entry for an individual or organisational website.
Integrative website (“integrative space”): websites with evangelistic intent that combine an evangelistic message with a compatible secular theme, and in so doing, emerge as a new space in which web surfers can identify themselves as members of both the Christian and secular communities simultaneously.
Internet evangelism: any use of Internet technology to spread the Christian Gospel; through websites, chat rooms, news groups or via e-mail
Missionary: (as used here only) an evangelical who preaches the Gospel outside of his or her own ‘community’; missionary work usually takes place in a foreign-language ‘mission field’. Missionary work on the Internet also usually involves a working with foreign languages on a globally-networked website or chat room .
Representational register: similar to Macaulay’s ‘language register’. Representational registers are varieties of language and visual or audio symbols used in tandem (rather than varieties of language alone) in connection with a particular activity or body of knowledge.
Seeker: a person (consciously or unconsciously) looking for religious belief.
Speech register: variety of language used in connection with a particular activity or body of knowledge (Macaulay).
Transformational websites (“transformational gateways”): websites with evangelistic intent that combine an evangelistic message with an incompatible secular theme, in order to attract web surfers from communities with value systems considered antithetical to those of the Christian community. This evaluation is made according to the opinion of the website designer. The object of transformational websites is act as a transitional gateway from the secular community into the Christian community. Unlike integrative websites, transformational websites do not allow the possibility of dual membership in both the targeted secular and Christian communities.
Webpage: a document written in hypertext markup language (HTML) that is posted on the world wide web.
Website: a collection of web pages, usually consisting of a home page and several links to related documents (Careaga).
Witnessing: an informal speech act often used in conversion strategies that describes the speaker’s relationship with Jesus Christ, and often his or her own conversion experience (Harding).