What C. S. Lewis Might Teach Us About Domain Names, AI, and Christian Mission
By Fr. Richard Dalton
Creator of JesusQuestion.com and LookUpDetroit.com
I have always loved the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
At first glance, there is nothing particularly remarkable about it.
It is just a wardrobe.
Open the door and you expect coats. Perhaps an old fur coat or two. Certainly nothing that is going to change your life.
But Lucy Pevensie steps inside.
She pushes through the coats.
And then something remarkable happens.
The back of the wardrobe isn’t there.
There are trees.
Snow.
A lamppost.
And an entirely different world.
Narnia.
I sometimes wonder what C. S. Lewis would have thought about the Internet.
I suspect parts of it would have horrified him. But I also think he might have understood something about it immediately:
The Internet is filled with wardrobes.
We call them domain names.
A Few Words—and a Door Opens
Think about how strange a domain name really is.
You type a few words into your phone or computer.
You touch the screen.
And a door opens.
Behind that little collection of letters can be an entire world.
There may be photographs, music, teaching, news, video, friendships, ideas, arguments, beauty, ugliness, truth, deception, worship—or temptation.
All because you opened a door.
That makes domain names much more interesting to me than merely being Internet addresses.
They are doors with names on them.
And every day people all over the world walk through them.
Not Every Wardrobe Leads to Narnia
Of course, this is where the analogy becomes more serious.
Not every door on the Internet leads somewhere good.
Some lead to knowledge.
Some lead to laughter.
Some lead to friendship and community.
Some lead to Scripture and the Gospel.
Others lead to anger, pornography, gambling, hatred, manipulation, endless distraction, envy, deception and despair.
Scripture understood the importance of choosing paths long before anyone imagined a smartphone.
Proverbs tells us:
“Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established.”
— Proverbs 4:26
Jesus spoke about gates and roads:
“Enter ye in at the strait gate…”
— Matthew 7:13
The Bible is filled with choices about which road we take, which gate we enter and which voice we follow.
Today we might add another question:
Which link do we click?
The Lamp-Post in the Snow
One of the unforgettable images of Narnia is that lamp-post standing strangely in the snowy forest.
I love that image.
Because Christians are supposed to be putting lights in dark places too.
Jesus said:
“Ye are the light of the world.”
— Matthew 5:14
That raises an important question for Christians living in the Internet age:
Where are we putting the lamps?
For generations, Christians have communicated through church buildings, pulpits, books, newspapers, radio and television. All of those can still be useful.
But today much of humanity carries another doorway in a pocket.
A phone.
A person sitting alone in Detroit, Dubai, London, Lagos or Jerusalem can type a few words and suddenly enter a world someone else has created.
That represents an extraordinary missionary opportunity.
And perhaps that helps me explain something about my own ministry that I have not always been able to explain very well.
A Ministry That Became Harder to Explain
For many years my ministry was fairly easy to describe.
I was involved in planting churches, pastoring congregations, preaching, teaching and caring for people.
People understood those things.
What I have been doing in more recent years has been much harder to explain.
One expression of it has been LookUpDetroit.com.
I have wanted to create a place that blesses the community with good news, good stories and useful information.
We live in an age when so much of our media is driven by advertising, ratings, clicks and the need to keep consumers consuming. Newspapers, radio and broadcasting have changed enormously during my lifetime.
I began wondering whether there could be another kind of local public square—one designed primarily to serve and bless a community.
That has been part of the vision behind LookUpDetroit.com.
Another expression has been JesusQuestion.com.
I developed it years ago with a simple hope: that Christians from many denominations and traditions might have a witnessing tool they could carry in their hands and share with another person.
Not simply a tract transferred to a screen, but a place where someone could explore Jesus Christ with greater depth through Scripture, words, beautiful pictures and art.
I wanted a Christian to be able to say, in effect:
“Here. Take a look at Jesus.”
I have not been a particularly good promoter of either vision.
But the vision has never left me.
Why So Many Domain Names?
That brings me to something people have occasionally questioned.
Why have I acquired so many .com domain names?
I understand the question.
From the outside, it can look like a rather strange collection of Internet names.
But I don’t primarily see names.
I see doors.
Or, borrowing from C. S. Lewis, perhaps I see wardrobes.
I see possible entrances into worlds that have not yet been built.
Some are cities.
Some are subjects.
Some are questions.
Some concern Scripture, ministry or the Christian life.
Some may never become anything at all. Others may eventually become doors through which thousands of people walk.
The truth is that I have often had more vision than technical ability.
I have lacked the time, technical knowledge, organizational ability and sometimes simply the sustained attention necessary to build everything I could see in my vison.
That has been frustrating.
I could see the doors, but I didn’t always know how to build what belonged behind them.
And Then the Tools Changed
Something remarkable has happened during the years I have been carrying this vision.
The tools changed.
The smartphone put the Internet into billions of hands.
Social media made it possible for an individual message to travel around the world.
Websites became easier to build.
A single article can now be passed from phone to phone, person to person, city to city and nation to nation.
And now artificial intelligence has arrived.
AI is giving an individual like me abilities in research, writing, editing, design, organization and communication that would once have required an entire staff.
I certainly do not understand all of it.
I don’t think anybody fully understands where it is going.
And AI itself is another wardrobe.
What lies behind that door can be used for extraordinary good or extraordinary harm.
Christians therefore need discernment. Scripture tells us:
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
— 1 Thessalonians 5:21
That strikes me as pretty good advice for the age of artificial intelligence.
I intend to use these new tools because they expand my ability and creativity far beyond what I could have accomplished five, ten or twenty years ago.
But the tool is not the mission.
The tool serves the mission.
I Have Been Collecting Front Doors
Suddenly some of those domain names I have held for years look different to me.
The wardrobes are standing there.
The doors have names on them.
And increasingly, the tools exist to begin putting something worthwhile on the other side.
Even more importantly, I am beginning to recognize that I don’t necessarily have to build everything myself.
Some of these doors may eventually be opened in partnership with churches, ministries, community organizations, writers, artists, technologists and ordinary Christians who share the desire to serve their cities and communicate the Gospel.
That may be the part of the vision I have had the hardest time explaining.
I haven’t simply been collecting domain names.
I have been collecting front doors.
Doors into Detroit and other cities.
Doors into important questions.
Doors into Scripture.
Doors into conversations about life, death, family, hope, community and eternity.
And, above all, doors that might ultimately help someone encounter Jesus Christ.
Perhaps I Was Never Supposed to Build It All
There is something else I am increasingly comfortable admitting.
I will not personally build everything I can imagine.
Perhaps I was never supposed to.
There is a great temptation when God gives us an idea to assume He has also assigned us every part of its fulfillment.
Scripture gives us a healthier picture:
“I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.”
— 1 Corinthians 3:6
One person plants.
Another waters.
God gives the increase.
Perhaps some of these domain names are seeds.
Perhaps some are doors.
Perhaps some are simply pieces of property being held until the right person, church, ministry or organization sees what could be built there.
Stewardship does not necessarily mean doing everything yourself.
Sometimes stewardship means recognizing what God has placed in your hands, developing what you can, and inviting others to help with what you cannot.
The Internet Needs Better Wardrobes
The Internet isn’t going away.
Artificial intelligence will make the digital world larger, stranger and more immersive. There will be millions more doors—some beautiful, some deceptive, some dangerous and some capable of changing a life.
Christians should not spend our energy merely complaining about the doors other people are building.
We should build better ones.
We should create digital spaces where truth is not manipulated, people are not exploited and attention is not treated merely as a commodity.
We should build places where Scripture is handled faithfully, questions are welcomed, neighbors are treated with dignity and lonely people encounter genuine community.
C. S. Lewis gave us a wardrobe that opened into Narnia.
We live in an age when almost anyone can build a little digital door of his or her own.
That is an extraordinary privilege.
But it is also a stewardship before God.
So before we create the next website, buy the next domain, generate the next piece of content or share the next link, perhaps we should ask:
If someone opens this door, what kind of world will they find on the other side?
Will they find confusion or clarity?
Cynicism or hope?
Noise or wisdom?
Manipulation or truth?
A sales pitch—or a faithful witness?
And most importantly:
Will they find a trustworthy space that points beyond itself to Jesus Christ?
The digital world is full of doors.
Christians, let us build the ones people can enter without fear—doors marked by truth, shaped by love and illuminated by the light of Christ.
Lucy opened what appeared to be an ordinary wooden wardrobe.
She had no idea how large the world was on the other side.
As I look at these new tools, these websites, these domain names and these still-unopened doors, I have to admit:
Neither do I.
Fr. Richard Dalton
Creator of JesusQuestion.com and LookUpDetroit.com
