Rapture Ready

Rapture Ready is an Evangelical Christian site founded by Todd Strandberg as the Rapture Index in 1995 with a change to the current name in 1997. It began as an index of weekly updates posted in newsgroups such as alt.bible.prophecy and alt.christnet.second-coming.real-soon-now. The first data center to host Rapture Ready's news content was an Omaha dial-up service called Hawg Wild.

In 1995, RR's moved to its first web format and was hosted by Novia.net. At the time, RR only had seven articles - today that number is over 18,000.

In 2003, prophecy author Terry James joined the Rapture Ready staff. It is dedicated to the idea that the Rapture will soon occur. Rapture Ready has been featured by the news media, both in the United States and in Europe, in print, such as in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, New York Times, Playboy, on television news channels including CNN, and in Robert Lanham's book The Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right.

Since any member can open a thread, the Rapture Ready site is monitored by an active group of moderators, who ensure that the rules of the site are followed.

Purpose
Rapture Ready's stated purposes include warning those non-Christians who, according to the Pre-tribulation system of Evangelical Christian eschatology, will be left behind after the rapture that they still have hope in Jesus Christ if they repent of their sins and turn to God through Jesus Christ his Son. It also has as a stated purpose to explain what will happen during the period of time after the rapture including the seven-year period commonly known as Daniel's 70th Week, Jacob's Time of Trouble or The Tribulation Period which terminates with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

To help the site survive the crush of traffic that the staff assumes will follow the Rapture it has a number of mirror sites that include raptureme.com, tribulation.us, rr-rapture.com, raptureready.net, and anti-antichrist.com.

The site was featured prominently in a Time magazine article about the growing belief in the Rapture.

Rapture Ready is mainly written in English; however, it also contains articles in Spanish, German, French, and Japanese.

Website features

 * The Rapture Index keeps track of activities which could be indicators of a time when the Rapture might occur. The index includes a numerical measurement of world events and trends in light of conservative Christian views on Bible prophecy regarding the end times. This index lists a number of events and subjects, comments thereon, their influence (in points) and statistics of highs and lows by years and records.


 * Nearing Midnight is a weekly commentary on world events.