Charity Van Winkle and the Rev. Brian Gordon were reluctant to log on for love when friends urged them to explore Internet matchmaking.

She worried about the stigma attached to “not finding a partner the natural way.” But she was not meeting men with whom she had anything in common at church, work or anywhere else. So she turned to eHarmony.com, one of the Internet’s fastest-growing “relationship services.”

“This way of meeting folks was going to allow me to be in a pool of people who were like me in that they were seeking serious relationships and looking for some of the same things I was in a life partner,” she says.

Gordon, a United Methodist pastor serving three churches in New Albany, Miss., was concerned his career choice would scare women off.

“If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” he told himself before trying out the service.

It worked. After seven months of dating by commuting between her home in Nashville, Tenn., and his in Mississippi, the Gordons married on Oct. 12, 2003.

They found that meeting through an online service was much different from introducing themselves the old-fashioned way, with names, phone numbers and astrological signs. The couple had to navigate through mounds of paper questioning their personal values and preferences—from family backgrounds and pet peeves to spirituality and anger management. eHarmony’s thick and thorough computerized compatibility test was a revealing but tedious pre-requisite to earning the chance to meet face to face.

Greg Duncan, associate dean for student services at Duke University Divinity School, says the Internet ultimately helps someone have a relationship outside of his or her everyday reach.

“It also gives people some control over their own vulnerability. They don’t have to immediately put themselves out there for just random contact. And they can control the rate at which they expose themselves in vulnerable ways,” he says.

Still, Amy Laura Hall, an assistant professor of ethics at Duke, notes that communicating through the Internet has a disembodied quality to it.

“For instance, while I’m typing, I may envision what I think is a real person to whom I am writing, but unless I face real people with all their real blemishes and quirks, I may have a diminished life,” she says.

She says single people badly want real people to sit down and eat with, to share their small daily joys and difficulties with, “and a church community should provide some of that interaction.”

She wonders why people are so reluctant to ask others for help in trying to find someone, rather than turning to anonymous Web sites run by strangers.

“Having said all that, single people who take their faith very seriously face a real challenge in finding someone similar. I hope and pray that the Holy Spirit is able to make use, even of the Internet, to help single people find someone with whom to share their life,” she says. “The Holy Spirit is mischievous enough to bring even the unsuspecting who are using the Internet into the fully incarnate joy that is domestic life.”

Finding love is big business in cyberspace, although Jupiter Research, which focuses on Internet analysis, released a report in February showing a slowdown in growth. According to the company’s survey of more than 2,300 online adults, 33 percent fewer consumers are browsing online personals today than a year ago. So an industry that grew 77 percent in 2003 is forecast to grow by just 9 percent in 2005, to $516 million, the company says.

Skeptics warn the Internet is the new meat market, and they say computers are the new “little black books.”

“My own cousin met her husband on an online dating service, and I think for some, it can be a very life-giving experience,” says Bill Lizor, director of Young Adult and Single Adult Ministries for the United Methodist Board of Discipleship.

“I think my caution would be the motivation behind accessing an Internet dating service. If it’s, ‘I just have to find someone,’ then I think it’s problematic because it assumes that this service can provide me with someone who will complete me,” he says. While people may get involved in a church singles ministry just to find a spouse, the leadership of that ministry does not assume that is the foundation for the ministry.

“Vital singles ministries empower singles to find value and wholeness through the presence of God in their lives right now. They don’t simply offer singles activities to keep them satisfied until they find a spouse,” he adds.

Charity says it takes a lot of searching to get ready to meet your soul mate.

“I think Brian and I clicked because we were older and we both knew ourselves pretty well,” she says. “Most important was that we were looking for the same things, particularly a godly life partner.”