S. Michael Houdmann - 10-Year Anniversary Presentation

The God Questions is my life. I'm gonna share a little bit about how we started it, the things

God has accomplished in the last 10 years, and a little bit about our vision for the future. So, did you know that by the end of 2012, there will be 2 .1

billion people in the world with access to the internet? You can reach more people online than you can through any

TV show, any radio show, any other medium in the world. The internet has given us more opportunities to reach people for Christ than anything else.

In February of 2002, we launched GodQuestions .org. It's kind of an interesting story.

I had gone through Bible college and seminary, didn't really feel a clear calling of God in any of the traditional forms of ministry.

I don't really enjoy public speaking, so that kind of rules out the whole pastor thing. I really don't like teenagers, so there goes the whole youth ministry thing.

So, my wife and I were just praying, God, give me a ministry that would be the perfect fit for me.

And I'd always been a little bit of a computer geek, I'll just admit that out front, and I always loved to write, so we just came up with the idea, let's just launch a

Christian website where people can come and ask any spiritually related questions that they have, and we'd respond with a biblically based answer.

Never in a million years did we imagine this would be anything more than a hobby. We thought this would be something we'd do in addition to all our other full -time work.

But God had a much bigger plan in mind. Just to describe really briefly, for maybe, for those of you who might not be familiar with the site very much, it's a pretty simple concept.

If you wanna ask us a question, you can come to the site, enter your email address, in this case, gino at geraci .com.

It's not his real email address. And the question, does God exist? I've talked to Gino, he does know the answer to this question, but to say he submitted it to us, and we would then respond with an email that answers that question.

So initially, that was our vision. People asking us questions, us responding with emails. We started seeing the same questions forming over and over again.

So over the past 10 years, we answered over 322 ,000 questions, and as you can imagine, a lot of those questions are the same ones over and over again.

And so we started building up the website so that people could find their answers instantly rather than having to wait for a response from us.

So for example, if someone had the question, is Jesus God, they would go to our questions about Jesus Christ category, would click on the link for is

Jesus God, and would there find the answer to their question. We have currently over 2 ,900 frequently asked questions on the site.

These are divided into different categories so people can easily find the answers that they're looking for. People are always interested in, so what are the most frequent questions you get?

If you listen to Gino's radio show, I think it's funny how, typically three or four words into the question,

I know exactly what they're gonna ask him. We deal with the exact same types of questions day in and day out.

You see some of these, some of these are pretty controversial issues, pretty, very relevant issues. Tough questions.

Now this top one, why did God allow my husband to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, hit us particularly hard the other morning.

My wife and I had the wife of a Marine living with us while her husband was deployed, and we just got the news yesterday morning that he was hit with an

IED. Thankfully, he survived. He had some pretty major injuries, but he survived, and so we rejoiced with that.

But because of some people staying at our house for the anniversary, she had actually temporarily moved out and was staying with her in -laws.

And so Melissa and I were looking at each other, what in the world would we have said to her had she been living with us still?

And it's one thing to write an answer and publish it online, but when it hits you right in the face, it becomes a lot more difficult.

So we're thankful for our church family that's loving her and her in -laws and taking care of them and praying with them.

But these questions are real, very real. Why should

I not commit suicide? Imagine getting this question, and oh, I'll answer it in a few days.

No, you don't wait a few days on questions like that. We're gonna send the best possible answer we can as quickly as we can.

Well, thankfully, not all questions are as heavy as those ones. We do get some funny questions. So I always like to share these ones.

Where does the Bible talk about the little drummer boy? For some reason, every

December around the 25th, we start getting this question over and over again. I wanna tell him that he came with the three wise men, but again, that's not the right answer either.

But, did Jesus' mother, Mary, have a cat? And this one really confused me for the longest time.

Like, this didn't just get it one time. I mean, repeated times, like, okay, this has to be coming from somewhere.

So I digged into it really deep and discovered that there is some weird, ancient, apocryphal, pseudepigraphic book that mentions

Mary having a cat that she loved. So that's where it came from. I doubt that it was true, but I personally prefer dogs.

Why didn't the Israelites make the tabernacle out of iron instead of animal skins so it'd be more sturdy?

Now, I'm not an engineer, but I'm pretty sure carrying an iron tabernacle in the wilderness for 40 years would have been pretty difficult.

All time, not my favorite question, but the all time funniest question. Is it wrong to take homeless people bowling and then gamble on which one of them is going to win?

Now, the question was actually more detailed than this and that they actually, obviously the person was trying to justify their action and how they described it.

These kids went to this church and I take the word for it that they were Christians. They would pick up homeless people, would take them to a bowling alley, buy them a meal, pay for their bowling, but then not knowing anything about them, not knowing who was gonna be the best bowler, they would just gamble on them.

And so I didn't answer this question because I couldn't stop laughing about it.

But the person who answered it started out, this is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to begin.

So everyone's solving good questions like this to lift our spirits and give us a good laugh on a day.

We'll combine the top questions, the tough questions, the funny questions. God is doing some amazing things. In just the first five months of this year, the website has received nearly 15 million visitors.

Web pages on the site have been viewed over 32 million times. We've had 20 ,000 questions personally submitted to us.

We have a question of the week email that goes out to subscribers. Currently have a little over 177 ,000 subscribers to that.

And we have 275 volunteer writers to help us answer all the questions we receive. Now we've got a bunch of writers here.

I would like for them to stand so I can lead everyone in an applause for your hard work. Thank you all.

We definitely could not do this without you. Now, you see the big stats.

You see, okay, 15 million visitors. How does this actually look like? Well, here are the stats for Colorado for the first five months of this year.

No big surprise. Denver and Colorado Springs being the two biggest locations. But 52 ,000 visitors from Denver.

That'll fill up Mile High Stadium. So if you want a picture of how many people that is. Even some of the smaller areas.

I love seeing the U .S. Air Force Academy. It's 418 visitors so far this year.

So what about right now? Google has developed this really neat tool where if you install some code on your site, they will track your stats for you.

So right now, there are approximately 652 people on the website.

So you think of 15 million, what does that look like? Well, it looks like right now, there are over 600 people browsing the website.

Pretty powerful. Most important and my favorite stat to share.

There's two parts to it. First, in the first five months of this year, the pages on our website to present the gospel have been viewed over 765 ,000 times.

And from that, we've received 57 ,572 professions of faith.

These are people who have visited one of those pages, read through the article, and at the bottom, clicked on the button that says,

I have received Christ as my Savior today. Now, we believe that there's a lot more and we by no means claim that all 57 ,000 of these people are genuine first -time decisions to receive

Christ. But if even 1 % or 0 .1 % of these people, we're jumping up and down excited at 58 people coming to faith in Christ.

And if you look at the previous stat, less than 10 % of people who even visit the page are clicking on the buttons.

This number could actually be higher. We don't know. All we can report is what people are indicating to us.

So did you know, the most frequent question I've received this week during our anniversary celebrations is, when you launched it, do you have any idea it was gonna be like this?

Well, here is where gotquestions .org was launched. I apologize for the hideously ugly bedspread.

Where's my mom? My mom gave this to us, so my wife and I were very grateful at the time, but we look back now, like, man, that was ugly.

But this little bitty desktop computer in the background, where we launched gotquestions in our little one -bedroom apartment in Kansas City.

So no, we had no idea this was ever gonna be anything big. I don't know how many of you have been visiting the site for a long time, but this is what gotquestions .org

looked like when we first launched it. Functional, it worked, but honestly, a little ugly.

The next one, which we affectionately refer to as the bumblebee site due to the color pattern. Hmm. Next, more of you would be familiar with this one.

And then more recently, we went to the Head Scratch Guide, where I often receive questions, is that you?

No, it's not, but maybe for the next look of the site, we're gonna hire a photographer and have him recreate that scene with me in it.

We'll see. But no, we did not have any idea that God was gonna do anything great through this.

Like I said, we launched it thinking it was gonna be a hobby. And I tell people, and I also tell it as somewhat of a warning, don't ask for God for something to do in your spare time, unless you really mean it.

So in the past 10 years, I've spent thousands of hours doing

GotQuestions. I haven't had free time, really, in about 10 years. So I love it.

If I could design the dream ministry job description, it would be doing exactly what

I'm doing now. So I rejoice every day to be able to serve in a ministry where I can see the results.

I can receive testimonies from people of lives being changed, of me answering questions they've had for a long time.

It's a tremendous blessing. So how does it work? How does

GotQuestions receive so many visitors? Well, first, 12 % come from people directly to the website.

That's people who already know about the website or someone gives them a card or Gene O'Tell mentions on his radio show, they just type it straight into the computer.

6 % are referred to from other sites, for example, on Facebook or a church website that links to us, for example.

But 82 % are referred to from the search engines. So I wanna explain just briefly how we really view the search engines as an outreach.

If someone goes to Google and searches for, why does God allow natural disasters? For most of the time of the year, this is not a very popular search phrase, but when

Hurricane Katrina hit or the tsunami in Asia or an earthquake somewhere, this question suddenly jumps way to the top.

Well, if you search for that, GotQuestions .org's article's listed in the very top position, our article on why does

God allow natural disasters, where we discuss this issue. So we've learned through the people that God has brought across our path things you can do to a webpage so that it does well in the search engines.

So every article we write and publish to the site, we design it so that it will do well in the search engines.

So if someone were to click on that link, they would land on our why does God allow natural disasters article. Now, it goes a little deeper than this in that ultimately, this is not the question we want people to find the answer to.

There's so many questions on our site. They're pretty obscure topics that ultimately really don't matter. But every page on our site has at least two links to the gospel, two pages on our site.

So we want someone to land on this page, and then if they don't know Christ, to click on one of these links and go and read the gospel.

Everything about our site is to point people towards the good news. Now, the importance of the search engine feature.

This is something that Google released showing people that when they look at the search engine results, this is where their eyes go.

The red being where the most heat is. So you see the results at the top are getting most of the looks.

If you publish an article and it shows up on page five of Google results, no one's ever gonna find it.

No one's gonna look. They're gonna look page one, maybe page two. If they don't find it, they're gonna start over and do something else.

So every article we write on our site is designed to do well in the search engines. If someone searches for sex before marriage, out of 14 million results, got questions that already has a number two spot.

Someone searches for what is the Illuminati conspiracy? One of these obscure topics that really doesn't matter.

Sometimes I wish this was a little further down because we get some very odd questions in relation to this article.

Is Jesus the only way to heaven? We have the number one spot. One of our other passions, mentioned in the video at the beginning, is translating our content.

Sometimes I feel a little thick -headed that it took me as long as it did to realize, you know, not just people who speak

English have questions. And in most other world languages, they have a lot fewer resources in which they can find answers to their question.

So we started translating our content. And we are online in 142 different languages, which

I do not know of any other Christian ministry on the web that has more content in more languages. So God is really, we need to get this material into as many people's hands as possible, whatever language that they speak.

We've been building up our team. We can now answer questions in 13 different languages. So we have teams of people who answer questions in Spanish, in Portuguese, in Russian, et cetera.

And with these 13 languages, approximately 90 % of the world population can speak one of these languages.

So we're making ourselves available as much as we can. Just to give you an example of how fruitful some of the other languages are, just in 2012, 3 .7

million page views in Spanish, 2 .7 million in Portuguese, and you can see the other ones.

I could show you all 142 languages. There's not a single one where we haven't received a profession of faith that we don't receive visitors to on a monthly basis.

Let me focus on one language, one of my favorite stories to tell. It's a language called Sinhala, which is spoken on the island of Sri Lanka.

It's a small island just south of India. There's 19 million people who speak the language.

Sri Lanka is 70 % Buddhist, 8 % Muslim, 7 % Hindu, and less than 6 %

Christian. That's including Roman Catholic. So very few Christians there. This is what the language looks like.

Very scripty, very beautiful -looking language, but I have absolutely no idea. I could tell you this is

John 3 .16 only because I can read the 3 .16. Why they chose to use

Roman numerals, I don't know, but it helps me a little bit. Sinhala is really interesting in that our translator, he contacted us and kind of shared his story with us.

He was a very successful businessman, but was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and he actually had to have his entire esophagus removed, which doesn't sound pleasant at all.

Because of that, he was unable to work, but he was a dedicated Christian, loved our site, and had some experience in translation.

So we hired him as our Sinhala translator. And so he translated, he's translated close to 300 different articles into his language, and we received a tremendous amount of results.

There's something really interesting about the culture on this island, and that if they make a decision, they go through the extra effort of contacting you.

So thankfully, many people on it can speak English as a second language, so we had all these people contacting us and saying,

I've received Christ as my savior. Can you connect me with somebody? So I connected them with our translator, who then invites them to church, and the coolest thing happened one day,

I received pictures of people being baptized in this church in Colombo, Sri Lanka, of people who have come to faith in Christ, that we connected with our translator.

They were discipled in the church and were baptized. I wish

I could say every language is streamlined as Sinhala used to be, but we receive reports like this all the time.

It's such a blessing. Just to show you that the search engine results, it works in Sinhala.

If you search for whatever that little phrase is at the top, we have the top two spots.

It works in Arabic. I just thought it'd be funny if I spelled it from right to left at the top, if you probably can't read that.

This is actually Is Jesus God? If someone searched for Is Jesus God in Arabic, there we are with the number one spot.

It works in Chinese. That's Does God Exist? GotQuestions .movie.

We are always trying to be on the cutting edge of technology. More and more people are accessing the internet on their smartphones and with apps.

It's happening more and more, so we're always looking to what's the next medium where we need to get this material, and how are people gonna be searching for answers where we can be there with the word of God?

We have a book that we published that contains the 428 most frequently asked questions that we receive.

The book is available out in the foyer. We are prayerfully considering doing a second book.

So a lot of people expressed interest. It was really interesting when we started getting questions. Why don't you guys do a book?

And we were like, you know, we're an internet ministry. For us, a book is a step backwards.

But we received so many requests for it, and then once we published the book, and we got so many great comments, people were telling us,

I just much prefer to read the material in a book than on an electronic screen.

And I have to admit, after eight, nine hours of staring at a computer screen, if I'm gonna read something,

I would much rather read it. So we're thankful that God finally convinced us that publishing a book was necessary, and it's been a blessing to us.

So what's new? What about the other nine positions in the search results?

Let me show you what I'm talking about. If you go to Google and search for Bible questions, the top two results are gotquestions .org

pages, which is fantastic. But what about the other eight? What if the other eight sites listed there were all sites that don't teach the truth, that lead people astray?

And I can tell you that several of these actually are. So how can we push the bad sites further and further down and push better sites further and further up?

So God has given us the vision of building what we call the wall of truth. So through a combination of building new websites and helping people improve their existing websites, we wanna build a wall of truth of quality

Christian content at the top of the search engines. So we've recently launched two new sites.

One is compellingtruth .org, which is take the gotquestions .org articles and get them focused a little bit more on the apologetics and worldview aspect.

Blogos .org, which is writing on some of the same topics and issues, but from a much more personal and practical perspective, more like a blog.

And God is taking these sites and already pushing them to the top. So around Easter time, this is very popular, why should

I believe in Jesus' resurrection? Got questions in the number one spot, compelling truth in the number four spot. So God's taking our efforts faster than they should.

He's pushing them to the top of the search engines. And we readily share this information with any ministry, any individual who wants to know, how do

I do that? Myself and a friend once went to Charlotte, North Carolina and shared this with a ministry.

And they're like, why are you telling this? We might potentially beat you in the rankings. They're like, you know, if you're teaching the truth,

I don't care if you beat us. And that's fine. If we're in the number one spot, you push us down one spot, that's great.

We're not competing in the body of Christ, we are cooperating. So how can you help?

Well, I'm very glad you asked, but it's really awkward for me just to throw that out there like that. Please pray continually for the ministry.

Our number one prayer request is wisdom. Wisdom in answering questions, wisdom in seeing through the question they ask to the question they really need to hear the answer to.

Give, and we are primarily funded through donations. So if the

Lord is leading you to give, we would love to talk to you more about how you can do that. You can serve as a writer.

As you saw earlier, several of our writers are here. Do not think that you need a doctorate degree in theology to answer questions for us.

The vast majority of questions we receive are much more practical and personal issues that people are struggling with.

They just wanna know what the Bible says about that issue. Some of our very best writers have no formal Bible training whatsoever, but they love the

Lord, love His word, and wanna help people. So if that's you, please apply to serve.

You can promote us. We have a little card you can give out, brochures, links, share us on Facebook.

Just tell other people. If someone asks you a question that you don't know the answer to, rather than just saying, well, I don't know, go away, a better solution would be, hey,

I know this site, and they'll answer your question for you. So in the first 10 years, we've received over 109 million visitors to the site, and 524 ,000 from professions of faith.

What's gonna happen in the next 10 years? I don't know, but I have a feeling it's gonna be really good.

So thank you all for coming. Thank you. We will be upstairs in the cafe after this.

Any questions, anything you wanna talk to us, the other GotQuestions writers will be up there. We'd be happy to talk to you.