What exactly is Evangelinformatics?

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,

  for it is the power of God unto salvation

  to everyone who believeth: to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

  Romans 1:16

 

It is with the Apostle Paul’s same sentiment that I begin this blog/website journey. After 15 years as a physician, this past year has revealed to me a particular interest in the area of informatics.

What is informatics? It can be defined as the knowledge, skills, and tools which enable information to be gathered, refined, researched, utilized, and presented in support of some greater purpose. For example, Clinical Informatics involves supporting the practice of medicine using information tools such as an electronic health record. Informatics need not involve computers, but informatics professionals invariably turn to computers because of their information processing benefits.

My vision is to apply informatics methods and tools to my deep and unashamed Christian faith in ways that are novel, appealing, relevant, and practical. Euangellion is the Greek word from which we get our words gospel AND evangelism. In my desire to create, gather, and organize tools and resources to support the belief and spread of the true biblical gospel by “ordinary” Christians, I came up with the term Evangelinformatics. A Google search provides no results for this word except the recent website name registration. I recognize this is not quite the best search engine optimization strategy. This will only make it more rewarding if people discover the site and find it helpful.

The process of creating content for the site will be of great value to my faith as well as to my working knowledge of evangelism, apologetics, and the gospel itself. But I pray God might use me to touch the lives of others for Christ.  I recently heard Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias, say “When you feel the gospel, you will touch lives.” And Christ himself challenged the disciples in Matthew 4:19 where he says, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’”  Father, help me follow this command and fish with nothing but “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).