Next time you sit at your computer, imagine what it would be like to connect to a safe Internet—an Internet free of pornography, predators, and other intrusions into your home. Now you don’t have to imagine.

AdventPoint is a filtered dial-up Internet service that blocks the unwanted material from your computer. For only $12.95 per month, AdventPoint will provide unlimited dial-up access to the Internet across the country, and a special filtering service that blocks pornographic Web sites and 30 other user-controllable categories. Simply add a plug-in to your Web browser, and voilà! Safe surfing.

What about the broadband addicts? Not to worry, you can buy a six-month subscription to the filtering service for $29.95.

Roy Weeden, pastor of the Southside Church in St. Louis, and Daniel Davis, a nurse and medical technician from Nashville, Tennessee, created AdventPoint not only to provide filtered Internet service at a reasonable price, but also to help battle Internet pornography.

“Our filter has the human component,” explained Daniel, AdventPoint vice president. “A team of people evaluates the Web sites. That way a breast cancer site won’t be blocked as pornographic.” The Web browser plug-in is virtually impossible to override. “That way teenage ‘hackers’ can’t get around it," Daniel added. Daniel said that several computer gurus have tried unsuccessfully to get around the filter. The filter also tracks Web surfing. Parents can log on to the AdventPoint Web site and see where their children have gone or attempted to go on the Web.

“We’re trying to be a leader in combating Internet pornography,” Daniel explained. “We’re trying to be a leader in Christian family values without being blatantly Adventist.” The AdventPoint Web page (www.adventpoint.com) includes articles and features addressing the dangers of Internet pornography, many of them written by Daniel and Roy.

“People don’t know where to go to deal with sexual addictions,” said Roy, AdventPoint president. “We’re trying to provide the Adventist Church with another resource. We have a God-designed response to deal with this issue, and we want to share it.”

“We never set out to build an Internet Service Provider (ISP),” said Roy, who always had a mind for business and earned a business degree from Southern Adventist University. He ran nursing homes and worked for several Fortune 500 companies. In fact, as a new account representative for Mutual of Omaha, Roy sold the largest single account in the company’s history. About four years ago, he decided to give it all up. He felt impressed to pursue a career in full-time ministry, possibly as a pastor. He found work as a Bible worker in the Nashville area, but received no pastoral job offers. Because of his business background, he was asked to serve on an area-wide committee commissioned to find ways to effectively evangelize metro Nashville.

“We had done surveys in the community to find out what people thought about Adventists. To our amazement, there was very little negativity,” Roy explained. What they found was no awareness of Adventists at all, except through radio and television ads run by a local Adventist academy looking for people to donate junk cars.

“You’re the junk car people, aren’t you?” people responded.

"Through research, we determined that evangelism is what is needed,” explained Roy. “The problem in North America is the context and timing.” Because of the research, they developed a three-step approach: awareness, service, and preaching the gospel. “We realized that in order to do awareness, we had to purchase consistent air time, using radio and television spots in major markets,” he continued. But advertising is expensive. How can churches fund a sustained program of advertising in a metro area?

As Roy and Daniel worked to create a Web presence for this effort which Roy had dubbed AdventPoint, a Web developer suggested they start an ISP to create a steady revenue stream for the ministry.

At first this sounded like a ridiculously large and complicated project, but Roy and Daniel found out the technology was already in place while talking to an MCI Worldcom technician. “The person I finally found was a former Adventist,” said Roy. After Roy shared the entire AdventPoint concept, the technician said, “Roy, I’ve been waiting for 20 years for my church to do something like this. I will open the doors to the technology. You can operate a $50 million network for pennies.”

This put the AdventPoint team in contact with an Alabama company which operated a nationwide network. “The hard part was waiting until the company we were working with came down to a price we could afford,” Daniel remembered. The original price quoted was extremely high, and Roy and Daniel had decided against a launch with the company. Right before the end of 2002, the company approached them with an offer less than half of the first one if they signed by the end of the year. AdventPoint was up and running in February of 2003.

“Our charter states that we’re using all our proceeds for evangelism,” said Roy. As of November 1, 2003, AdventPoint needed only 45 more subscribers to break even. All profits will go to evangelism using the plan formulated by the original metro ministry team in Nashville.

That means the funds will be used to lay the ground work for the traditional-style evangelistic meetings. “AdventPoint will saturate an area with advertising for a year in advance, and then we start engaging them where we have needs,” explained Roy. The ads would raise the awareness of the Adventist Church and contain a tag linking them to AdventPoint. “Then when it’s time for evangelism, AdventPoint could help pay for the commercials, etc., and can lend its name which has built collateral in the market. You can bring in any speaker, and the AdventPoint name will bring credibility. AdventPoint would be something that people already have a relationship with.”

Roy tested his theories at a church in Nashville before accepting the pastoral job in St. Louis. Before bringing in Ty Gibson of Light Bearers ministry to hold an evangelistic meeting, the church only handed out 1,000 handbills. But they ran ads in prime time on several popular cable networks.

The church only holds 285 people. On the opening night of the week-long series, 297 people crowded into the sanctuary. That was the smallest night. In the end, 42 people where baptized and only $10,000 spent—compared to the $25,000 or more which is often spent on evangelistic meetings.

“If only five percent of Adventists in North America subscribed to AdventPoint, we could run steady commercials year round in 10 major markets,” Roy said. "That is why AdventPoint has joined Adventist-laymen’s Services and Industries (ASI), an organization networking businesses and ministries that are committed to sharing Christ’s love with the world.“

"Our ultimate goal,” said Daniel, “is to use the ISP and Web site as a base to evangelize the people that come and create a revenue stream to support other ministries.”

Roy and Daniel continue looking for ways to battle pornography and other harmful things on the Internet. Daniel believes that businesses can use this as a witnessing tool about safe Internet surfing. If you are interested in using AdventPoint as an evangelistic tool, they will send you a number of sign-up CD-ROMs that you can hand out to friends or put on display.

For more information about AdventPoint, log on to www.adventpoint.com or call (800) 849-9519.

Ryan Teller is the editor of the Mid-America Union Outlook. This article was reprinted from the December 2003 issue with permission.