She might call it “Thessa ‘Moany,'” the chagrined German girl who accidentally invited 15,000 to her private birthday party via Facebook. She certainly will have quite a story to tell her children and grandchildren. Thessa intended to mark the invitation as private, but nearly 1,500 showed up at her Hamburg-Bramfeld home. In fact, she had to leave her own party. Revelers lit a few fires and alcohol flowed freely, as it so often does even among minors in western Europe. Police described the spontaneous event as mostly peaceful.

To me, it is amazing that a social media tool announcing such a relatively insignificant event could have such an impact and draw such a crowd. Certainly, there may be factors at play, not publicly known, that prompted such a showing, but it demonstrates how quickly “the word” can spread.

This amazing technology is a tool we must use to spread the best news and biggest event the world will ever know! Whether social media like Facebook or Twitter, the internet as a whole to stream audio and video, podcasts, blogs, or any other technological tool, God’s people need to utilize the very frontier where Satan is active and busily working. Should pornographic, violent, hateful, false, and harmful messages be the only ones to which people are exposed? No doubt, it can be done! We can get the Word before everyone in this world and there is no sin in taking shortcuts that move so much quicker than horseback or even ocean liners and steam ships.

Though the world population was so much smaller in the first century, there means of spreading the gospel was also, proportionately slower. Yet, they took the gospel, at least representatively, to “every creature under heaven” (Col. 1:23). They went “everywhere” preaching the word (Acts 8:4). How hungry are people for the gospel in Namibia? Nepal? Chile? Cambodia? What about Stumptown, West Virginia? Honey, Pennsylvania? Cuba, Alabama?

There are honest hearts all over the world and in the communities where we live. Let us use every legitimate means to get the word to them, extending them the opportunity to accept the Lord’s invitation and celebrate something better than a 16th birthday–their “new birth” day!

–Neal Pollard