Saturday, February 04, 2006

A New Twist on Spam

Tonight Eric and I met another couple for dinner. I had first met the wife in Iowa when she was in my college small group, but she moved to Minnesota and we only periodically wrote, thus losing touch. We bumped into each other suddenly this summer when we were placed in the same discussion group where we met her husband for the first time, and have since tried to be a little more deliberate in meeting for dinner to catch up.

One amusing conversation from the evening revolved around spam (the unsolicited email, not the delightful luncheon meat). The husband has recently learned that "there are a lot of people in Africa having difficulty accessing their money." He has since begun responding to them, not with banking information, but with the gospel. Certainly one disadvantage of this is that they now receive even more spam than before, since they now know there's a warm body on the other end of that email address, but it throws the spammers for a loop. I thought this was a creative use of apologetics. Once he had composed the initial email, it didn't take any more investment of time from him, besides hitting the 'Reply' key. And the email was tailored to these people; at one point, for instance, he shared God's perspective on money. Very clever. It reminded me of someone who used to share the gospel with telemarketers after they politely listened to the spiel.

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