Still, “even when I tell the story, I hate to say that we met online,” said Hyde, who attends church with her husband and their young daughter in West Virginia.

Some church members, understandably, are wary about the Internet — a haven for sexual predators. And when it comes to online dating, “everyone has heard some of the horror stories,” said Mario Tobias, campus minister for the Southside church, Lawrence, Kan.

Tobias, who is single, said he’s hesitant to tell fellow church members when he meets someone online.

“It just feels uncomfortable,” he said. “And yet, I’ve found that online dating services have provided the simplest way to meet others that I would consider dating.

“In my present congregation, there simply aren’t many other (age) 25-to-35 singles.”

Jim Foster had small churches in mind when he launched churchofchristsingles .com, a Web site that allows singles to post personal information and meet other church members.

Foster, who was raised in Colorado, got the idea in 1997 while single and living in Dallas. At the time he was surrounded by a large number of Christian singles, but he knew that would change if he moved back to Colorado.

“The widespread nature of the Internet seemed an ideal medium to connect such a thinly spread group of people like singles in the churches of Christ,” Foster said.

Now the site has more than 4,000 members, ranging from ages 18 to 90, and has played a role in more than 100 weddings that Foster knows of. He’s heard of only two divorces.

Foster, 33, is both administrator of the Web site and a testimony to its success. Four years after he launched the site he met his future wife, Honey, a graduate student in Tennessee. They started exchanging e-mails.

“I’m from a very small town, so there weren’t very many male members of the church around my age,” Honey Foster said.

But going from Internet conversations to a face-to-face meeting was a scary prospect.

The couple’s first date, like many first dates, “didn’t go exactly smoothly,” she said. But they kept talking, and were married two years after they met online.

The Fosters live in Colorado, and their first child is due this month. One of Honey’s sisters later married a man she met on http://www.churchofchristsingles.com.

Liana Nixon, a member of the White Station church, Memphis, Tenn., also met her future husband, Russ, on the Web site.

“The more we e-mailed and talked, the more I grew to love him and his heart for God,” she said

The Nixons are one of at least three couples at White Station who found each other through the Internet.

Still, “when we tell church folks that we met online, it always brings a ‘REEEALLY?’ and a raised eyebrow,” Russ Nixon said.

“But when I tell people that there is such a thing as a church of Christ Web site for singles, I believe that they feel that it’s safer and that it’s a great idea.”

ROMANCE ACROSS AN OCEAN

The problem of too few eligible singles exists in many churches outside the United States — at least in countries where Western-style dating is acceptable.

“There are not many men in the Russian churches of Christ, (and the) Internet is considered a very unusual way of dating,” said Natalie Makarova, a church member in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Makarova, in her mid-20s, posted her information on a Web site, and a man from the United States contacted her. The two are engaged and plan to marry after Makarova completes her training.

Three women in the Mactan, Philippines, church met their spouses online, said missionary Salvador Cariaga. Others are involved in online relationships, many with people outside the Philippines.

“Philippines is a poor country. One of the ways out of poverty is to marry a foreigner,” Cariaga said. “I preach caution, but the prospect of finding a spouse, and the fun of it, is not keeping our members off online dating.”

The country already suffers from “brain drain” due to overseas jobs, and losing additional members to overseas marriages “will obviously affect our small and struggling churches,” Cariaga said.

In the more industrialized countries of Western Europe, church members see a mix of positives and negatives in Internet dating, said Scott Raab, a missionary who works with congregations in the Netherlands and Belgium.

One church member met his wife on the Internet, but only after his first wife left him for a man she met on the Internet, the missionary said. Many European Christians see the Internet as “a place where one can be easily tempted to do things that would not normally be considered.”

But Reynard Amoako, a church member in Brussels, Belgium who has never tried online dating, said that the Internet also can allow couples “to learn and to know each other on an intellectual and spiritual level” without “trying to please each other physically.”

TWO KINDS OF ACCEPTANCE

In congregations around the world, Internet dating “has been seen in the same light as mail-order brides,” said Jonathan Woodall, a member of the White Station church who works with the campus ministry at a local university.

But that attitude is changing as more and more people meet online.

“I wonder what it was like the first time a child told their parents that they wanted to pick their own mate,” Woodall said. “I’ll bet that was looked down on.”

As churches gradually accept online dating, Foster said that singles tend to lead happier lives — and find mates — when they learn to accept themselves.

Many singles in churches “aren’t at peace with the situation they are in,” he said, and some merely are “looking for a hostage to stand next to them.”

“They really need to value their single time and make use of it to serve God,” he said. “They won’t have that kind of time ever again. Had I not been single, the singles Web site itself would’ve never started.

“I wish more singles would apply themselves to both their local congregations and the church of Christ as a whole.”