In May of 1995 an up and coming Internet Tech contacted a pastor in the East side of Nashville about the Internet. Pastor HL Champion was introduced to the WWW. The concept of one computer communicating to another was new to him. He was encouraged to secure Baptist.org for $50.00. He remembers, “I looked up Ford.com and it was available”. He looked up several names of companies, Football Teams, names of presidents, states, counties, and every name imaginable. They were all available for $50.00 a piece for one year.
As a mission pastor of a small ministry, he was doing good to come up with with the money for just Baptist.org. With a 286 IBM computer the home page that was designed for him would only load up half way on his monitor and stick with the bottom of the church picture blank.
Eventually, he was able to upgrade and began receiving email at broc@baptist.org from different parts of the world. Baptist.org was definitely one of the first Christian sites online. But, being focused upon ministry rather than on computer sciences, the site meandered along without much technical help. Regardless of the growing field that eventually led to the Dot Com Boom. Brother Champion was able to keep Baptist.org at the top of the search engines pretty much by himself.
While his wife, Pat, was deteriorating in health, Brother Champion received an offer to purchase the domain name rights for $250,000. After much prayer they decided to keep this ministry. It was amazing to him to be invited to Baptist groups and be interrogated as to his Internet Ministry. By 2000’s every major Christian ministry had begun budgeting hundreds of thousands of dollars for Internet Services. The rest is history.
There is much to the story of maintaining this site. There is far more to the numbers of souls that have called and emailed results of their personal salvation and growth in Christ. Dr. Champion is renowned for his presence online.
Later, those of every doctrinal stance were represented in attacking the standard Baptist Beliefs and Practices. So much was the notoriety of this site that even an Islamic Hacker invaded the server and corrupted every index page and folder in the server of Baptist.org and all of the clients and churches. Baptist.org had been stalemated and had been wounded.
Now, a new day is rising! As you can now see, Baptist.org is back and beckons to rise again to be at the top of Christian Online ministries. Pray that this site will facilitate those who wish to present Christ as Saviour, Lord, Priest, and King!