Dotcom Disciple
Vipool Patel follows his heart to reach spiritual seekers online.
Mark Cutshall
While you were sleeping, 3,000 Chinese, awake to the increasing availability of the internet, were privately scrolling through a website whose content, spelled out in Chinese script, is perhaps something that elements in their government might not want them to see—much less accept.
Sixteen time zones away in San Diego, Vipool Patel, the website's founder, views a new collection of Chinese names on his screen. Every day, at least 10 more Chinese people sign up for an online course, "Jesus 101."
Welcome to the 24/7 world of JesusCentral.com.
This month alone, an estimated 200,000 online visitors in 197 countries will search, study, and perhaps embrace the words of Christ found on this site that promises "simple, clear and credible information about the life, teachings and impact of Jesus."
This is good news for leaders from Campus Crusade for Christ and church pastors who have already contacted Patel wanting to use "Jesus 101" as a source of basic, trustworthy teaching for new believers.
Patel is certainly not the first person to effectively wire the gospel to the Web. No one, however, can duplicate his story. His journey from a hardscrabble childhood to Silicon Valley successes and now into an emerging global online ministry is still a well-kept secret.
Gifted, Skilled, and Uninsured
Patel grew up in Anaheim, where his Hindu family ran, he says, "a dumpy roadside motel a few miles from Disneyland." Vipool and older brother Nick were expected to do many of the chores.
The boys lost their mother to cancer when Vipool was 11. A year later, he and his brothers went to live with another family. During his lonely teenage years, Vipool attended a church youth group and found a booklet: "The Four Spiritual Laws."
"I read it and prayed the prayer at the end," Patel says, "and nothing happened."
But a year later, the reality of Jesus became deeply personal. "I was just looking for a friend," Patel says. "I found a Savior, a guide for life." Christ's impact was simple and profound, though it would take Vipool years to discover his calling.
Patel became a student at Stanford, where he earned degrees in industrial engineering and economics. But one day in 1985, after graduating, he was curled up, sick, on the living room floor of a rented house. "I went to the student health center, and they told me 'Sorry, you're no longer enrolled here. You no longer have insurance. We can't help you.' "
After he recovered, the experience prompted Patel to wonder how he could address problems with health insurance.
"Analytic, strategic thinking came easy to me," Patel says. "I wanted my skills to count for some social benefit in education and health care."
After becoming a product manager at Hewlett-Packard, he earned an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He landed at Silicon Graphics, where he specialized in workstation and internet product marketing.
At a Netscape conference in 1995 he met venture capitalist John Doerr. Between meetings, Patel asked him, "How can I get involved in one of your start-ups?"
Doerr's response immediately got his attention: "What's in your heart, son?" It wasn't about joining someone else's vision, but following your own.
With Patel's personal background and experience in internet product marketing, an idea was beginning to take shape. But first he had more lessons to learn.
In 1996, the internet was merely an idea with untapped potential to bring products, such as health insurance, to market. Enter HealthScape, a fledging Internet health company, now called WebMD, started by Jim Clark, who founded Netscape.
At the time, major health insurance companies used the computer primarily to manage databases and store customer records. Patel tried to get HealthScape to grow the business via the then-revolutionary approach of internet marketing.
"The upsides were all there," Patel recalls. "With the internet, a health insurer could take the initiative and put its product in the lap of the customer and give the customer the edge. An internet presence would give the company increased market share, a competitive edge, as well as cut down on administrative costs, including oceans of paper.
"Like all good business people, health insurance executives really wanted to know just one thing about the internet: Can you use it to create revenue and market share?"
Patel knew the answers to both were yes.
He laid out his internet marketing approach to HealthScape's executive team. At first, there was excitement. But when it came time to pull the trigger, the executives hesitated.
So Patel carried his idea out the door and decided to work with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins (which Fastcompany calls "the cradle of the Web revolution")—along with John Doerr. On June 10, 1997, Patel became CEO of his new company. Without bricks and mortar, the corporate address was nevertheless simple enough for anyone to find: eHealthInsurance.com.
"The marketing challenge was fairly apparent," Patel says. "Could we deliver the same quality health insurance broker service that larger companies were used to receiving to small companies and individuals who had no health coverage and didn't know where to turn?"
Patel says the internet made the challenge relatively straightforward: "To overcome the consumers' ignorance and confusion surrounding health care, we had to make the online experience incredibly simple and clear. We had to give people choice and options. And we had to provide personal service. On the internet, that meant an 800-number customer call center. We wanted to create nothing less than a tremendous customer experience."
Today a growing eHealthInsurance.com has a million customers. But despite this success, Patel still had not fully satisfied the passion in his heart: to help others, particularly those who shared his Hindu background, discover Jesus Christ.
The Essential Jesus
Prompted by Doerr's question of "What's in your heart?," Patel began to recognize and address the most daunting marketing-communications challenge he had ever faced—in or out of business: helping people understand the Jesus who had turned his life around. "While, many Hindus are comfortable with respecting Jesus as a great religious teacher, few have come to realize that he is the unique Lord of heaven and earth.
"At a family reunion, I gave my family members a Bible," Patel says. "Gandhi had great respect for Jesus. So do most Hindus, including my relatives. But the Bible, even written in their own language, didn't make Jesus transparent. I had to explain everything to them. I had to make sense out of the cultural and historical context. … The Bible did not have a chapter called Jesus, or provide a table of contents to the four biographies about Jesus."
"What if I could offer them the essential Jesus? It would be like handing them a Hershey's chocolate bar without the wrapper. Give people his words, organized of course into helpful categories, and let people dig in."
The idea was as simple as the little booklet that introduced him to the faith years ago, like the inviting choices of eHealthInsurance.com, like an unwrapped chocolate bar: Give people the opportunity to explore, in private, the life of Jesus.
Using this unique selling proposition, Patel launched JesusCentral.com in 2001. Last year, more than 2 million visitors (twice the total in 2006) came in through the front door. Visitors receive clear, unthreatening choices. The site's tagline says it all: "A place for people of all backgrounds to learn about Jesus."
The site map allows the curious to explore words directly from Jesus, claims of Jesus about himself, and promises to followers. Click "Paul Describes Jesus" (under "Eyewitnesses Describe Jesus"), for instance, and you will receive quotations from Paul describing Jesus from five angles, including "Jesus as a Demonstration of God's Love." On this page, there are seven biblical passages, interactive options, a YouTube video, and a short, first-person changed-life story.
Unprecedented Openness
The word has spread to ministry organizations such as InterVarsity, Youth for Christ, the Luis Palau Association, and Campus Crusade for Christ. Several are now are offering the site's popular six-week online "Jesus 101" course for new Christians. Recently, Calvary Church of Los Gatos in California, facilitated "Jesus 101" for 65 participants.
Patel estimates that he and his team have invested 20,000 hours to build the site. The biggest work, however, may still lie ahead. The Beijing Olympics and what Patel calls "unprecedented openness" among Chinese users of his site have led him to call 2008 "the year of China." The dedicated site, YesuZhongxin.org, launched this past December. Patel expects as many as 2 million online visitors next year from China.
In JesusCentral.com's one-page annual report, Patel writes, "I'm sensing something spectacular ahead."
If God's call on his life in the past is any guide, that may be an understatement.
Mark Cutshall is editor of Outcomes.
