History Of This Ministry
History Of This Ministry
The ComingInTheClouds.org Internet ministry has evolved (for lack of a better term) very much over time. By God’s grace, this evangelism and discipleship ministry has been going on in one form or another for perhaps 25 years under various names. It became Comingintheclouds.org in 2007.
This ministry actually started out before the Internet came into being – with a weekly lunch-hour bible study where I worked. Some of the bible studies developed for that group are on the current website. At about that time I started to write my own gospel tracts for street evangelism I was doing with a brother in the Lord, from around 1989 to 1996. We were looking for tracts that gave people the whole council of God – Most of the tracts for sale at Christian books stores or at church tract racks were pretty watered down and often omitted the “H” word (hell) and talked about the Love of God without saying much, if anything, about His wrath and judgment. Eventually I started writing gospel tracts for a pastor (Dan) of a small local church, back around 1994. That pastor along with his young son and my street evangelism friend George and I would go door-to-door sharing the Gospel and handing out tracts with the church contact info printed on them. Because of personal reasons Dan had to retire early from both pastoring the local church and his roofing and construction business. He then went on to become an evangelistic long-haul truck driver.
Some of those early Gospel tracts written for street evangelism and door-to-door evangelism are on the current website, though some have been edited to be more in line with the Doctrines of Grace.
All these accumulated tracts and bible study materials ended up becoming part of a website around 1997 or 1998 which ran on a free website service that is no longer in existence. That website was built using Microsoft FrontPage web design software. Eventually, Microsoft FrontPage become obsolete and so the website was rewritten to run on more modern server-based web development software. This new software made it possible to make the website more user-friendly. That software was called Joomla and the year was around 2007 when we acquired the comingintheclouds.org domain name. Several years later, the website was rewritten in more widely used software (WordPress), allowing us to add more features to the website along with increased security – since hacking is a very real and very constant threat. Hacking attempts on the website are a daily occurrence. Hundreds of attacks occur every day from dozens of countries around the world. A common reason why people hack into web sites (web servers specifically) is so that they can then send out spam emails, which they will do until their spam emails cause the server they broke into to be blacklisted by other email servers on the receiving end.
In 2017 we acquired the domain-name “intheclouds.org” to give people a shorter URL (web address) to access our website. Soon after that, we setup a Facebook page for this ministry which can be reached HERE
At this point in time God has blessed this ministry and website with thousands of visitors every month from all over the world. Our list of popular articles can give you an indication of the volume of people seeking discipleship information at ComingInTheClouds.org.
The website currently has hundreds of gospel tracts, bible studies and discipleship articles that I either wrote myself or I obtained from other Christian authors (and that were posted as-is or were slightly edited for clarity or biblical accuracy). Any material that is not my own, I do my best to give credit to the author, if known.
Through the years God has enabled this Internet ministry to operate on a very low budget. A lot of the software used to build and maintain the website is free open-source software. As God put people in my path to teach me new things about web site design, I have been able to affordably improve the usefulness of the website. I hope it is a blessing to you and to whomever you share the materials with.
RM Kane
PS: Because of the “watchman” nature of this website I realize that some visitors may get the impression that the site is advocating being a lone-wolf Christian or it is encouraging Christians to bash churches and their leaders. Christ didn’t advocate that and neither would I. The major focus of this website is to encourage others to:
- Test the spirits
- Prove all things
- Earnestly contend for the faith
In the process of doing those 3 things in a luke warm church environment a person can get discouraged and want to either give in (to mediocrity) or give up. But if you are like most true believers who are passionate about biblical truth, you will absolutely love to fellowship with and dialog with other Christians who have the same hunger and thirst for righteousness and you will do that whatever it takes. And in that regard, God has blessed me – over time, not overnight – with more than a few wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ whose own spiritual gifts have blessed me in various ways. Some of them have contributed articles to this site or have reviewed existing articles. Others have brought discipleship materials and ministries to my attention that were then mentioned on the website.
Surely, in the Church at the local level – especially in a conventional church with many “members” – it can get lonely at times. Which is why it is important to have a solid network of friends whom you can call, email, text, write to or visit locally or visit virtually with services like google video chat or Skype.