5/29/24 - 2044: Redemptive Technology

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him the voice of collaboration for the faith and work movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts Jim and Martha Brangenberg and our mission is to transform the workplace of every Christian into a mission field. What does that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now

Jim: You know, there's no more behind the scenes job than the jobs offered in the tech world. Each of these jobs is essential to our economy But most of the tech geniuses operate in relative or purposeful obscurity. Do these jobs matter to God? Of course they do! The tech world has been absolutely critical in getting the gospel around the world to translating the Bible rapidly into thousands of different languages and to getting Bible teaching online so that billions can observe and learn.

So what happens when a bunch of tech people gather together to worship God and collaborate? Of course, there's Mountain Dew involved, but you may find them online at faithtech. com, faithtech. com. Today, two Faith Tech members from Kansas City joined us to tell us about Faith Tech and how God is using their tech skills to be a blessing to their communities and our world. Al Wilkinson and Joe Hollowell, welcome to iWork4Him.

Al Wilkinson: Thanks guys.

Joe Hollowell: Good to be here.

Jim: We're excited about, but before we get into the whole Faith Tech world and again, faithtech. com, Joe, what's your Jesus story?

Joe Hollowell: Gosh, 40 years ago, when I was 27, I had a Damascus road experience. At that time, I had been heavily into the occult. I was antagonistic towards Christianity. I was into divination, incantation, spirit guides, all the New Age theology, and it was a TV show that my wife had insisted that I watch called Something Beautiful, where a darling little old lady was teaching us how to crochet and bake goods, but she had interviews, and the interview she had happened to be a person who practically spoke directly to me and what I was going through. The Holy Spirit used that, opened my eyes, and ever since then I've been growing in grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. It has been just a joyous life.

Martha: Wow, that's so amazing. Thank you for sharing that with our listeners. And Al, what about you? What is your Jesus story?

Al Wilkinson: So I accepted Christ in fifth grade, as part of a class that all of us kids at the church I grew up in were encouraged to go through. And I was, after that, I was a good kid. Never got into a whole lot of trouble. But my faith wasn't really real to me. So as I went off to college, I had this notion of, I was going to go seek truth. And so I, I got a chance to explore some other religions a little bit on the surface level and explore no religion, but God kept putting these believers back in front of me and around me.

And they kept just Kindly asking, Hey, come check out this thing with us. Yeah. So eventually going into the second year of college, I decided that, maybe I should consider my faith that I grew up with. And so got connected to a church in the college town I was in that had a great college group with just a lot of people who just wanted to share. And during that time, God showed me that He'd taken me at my word even though I didn't know what it meant, and I started to learn about that relationship with Jesus, and it grew from there.

Jim: Joe, my question for you is this, did God give you your technology skills?

Joe Hollowell: Oh, he absolutely did, and he still does. I still rely on him to help me through every technical challenge I get. Again, at college I had, this was back in the mid 70s, I had truly believed that computer technology was the destruction of civilization. I had nothing to do with it. I didn't even have a pocket calculator. I used a slide rule for all of my mathematics classes. It was during economics, where I was taking an econometrics course, teacher challenged us to do linear regression. That was the closest thing to the voice of God that I had known at that time, and he gave us 20 of those problems to do with what for the end of the week, which was impossible with the way I was doing with pencil and slide rule.

He said, Don't worry, I've got a, I've got a account for you with the lab using a newfangled statistical analysis program called Shazam. You'll be able to knock these out pretty quick. After struggling to even find the computer lab, logging on, I discovered that, wait a minute, there might be a use for computers after all, as it was able to knock out those linear regression problems so quickly.

Ever since then, I could go on story after story of how God has revealed his design in code, in networking and team building and project management. It's all from God. A Wise man once told me if you've got 20 minutes to do something, you better spend 10 minutes praying about it.

Jim: So true Al, what about you? Your technology skills? You're a little younger than Joe so you didn't start on a slide rule. You probably started on a texas instrument, Ti 110 or whatever those, 115, whatever those deals were.

Al Wilkinson: Yeah that and the Apple 2C, it was first grade when I first wrote code. But the moment that I always jump to on this question that was really defining for me was about 15 years ago. Michelle and I, my wife and I, were accepted with a ministry to go do international missions work. And it was Bible translation in particular, and a good close friend I'd been in accountability group for two years with at that point, were sitting down at breakfast and he says, why would you want to learn Bible translation? God's gift to do with these tech skills. Why aren't you using that?

And I tucked it away at the time, and said now I'm supposed to do this translation stuff. About six years later God sent us to Kansas city and I've been involved in a ministry connecting churches and I felt like I was supposed to be doing something else because I kept seeing this problem or this lack of community for people that love Jesus and are tech people.

And it just, God brought that conversation, that comment from that friend back to the front of my mind just clear as it just happened. And that really stuck with me, God telling me, I've gifted you with these skills, I've gifted people with these skills, and there's a community that needs to be brought together.

Martha: That's such an important conversation, because we have so many listeners that, their eyes are being open to that idea that God gifted us with skills to be used for Him, but in a way that helps solve problems, and that helps create flourishing, whatever it might do to propel us forward. And so I love that.

And that's a perfect segue into this question. I want to know then, Al, you start this one. How did you get introduced then to Faith Tech, which really then we'll dig into what it is, but how did this progression of God opening your eyes to using your tech, how did that lead you to finding Faith Tech?

Al Wilkinson: Yeah. So there's a little bit of a crossover in those two questions there. In 2016, a buddy and I started, we called it Cross Tech Casing, and the same year Faith Tech started in Canada. And so we'd run across it at the time, but it was new group, didn't have any size to it. It was in Canada. We're here in Kansas city.

So there was another ministry in Kansas City that connected churches that had been involved in, and seeing a model there of churches of different denominations working together to do ministry, to share God's word, was this model that, in the midst of it, I'm feeling like there was something else I was supposed to do.

Seeing this lack of faith in tech community, God saying, remember this comment. I've given you these tech skills and now I've given you this model of connecting people that don't necessarily want to be connected and talk with each other and work together. Go build this community.

Jim: It's not that they don't want to be connected, Al. They don't want to talk to each other. That's probably true, but I remember in my programming days I would always pray when I couldn't solve a problem. I would always pray and say Lord, I gotta go to bed. Could you please help me solve this problem in my sleep so I can wake up the next morning and finish the line of code that I needed or whatever? And never failed! I always came up with a solution. That's why I think technology is amazing. We don't even realize how much we spend on it until something goes wrong.

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Martha: So Al, you're saying that you had this crossover between what God was stirring in you, finding out there was another organization. Joe, how about you? How did your life intersect and you get introduced to FaithTech?

Joe Hollowell: That's interesting too. I got introduced to Al at Crosstek through Rick Boxx from Unconventional Business Network.

Jim: Another free plug right here and iWork4Him.

 (laughter)

Joe Hollowell: And his mission, his ministry, really trying to encourage business leaders to reorganize, restructure their businesses for Christ. I had been consulting with Rick about another kind of startup business that I was working on with a colleague down in Orlando, God IT. And Rick said at one of his summits, one of his forums, he had the cross tech table with Al and Ben. He said, Joe, you need to go meet Al. And he walked me over, introduced me, and within a few weeks, Al and I were communicating. I started going to the meetups.

We've been with CrossTech now through that FaithTech transition over the past six years. And it was Al's focus on this whole concept of communication, the community, that got us in touch with and in contact to start up that transition to FaithTech.

Martha: So Al, let's talk about that just for a minute. So I just want to know what is FaithTech all about then? We've alluded to where God was leading you, but what actually is FaithTech for our listeners? Tell me what we're actually, you guys are involved in.

Al Wilkinson: FaithTech is an organization built around, there's a couple of phrases I want to throw in. One of the driving mission statements or goals, value statements is to awaken a Jesus revival in and through technology. And so a way that we often talk about walking that out as part of Faith Tech is having regular meetups quarterly, once a month, very city by city. But during those we, we focus on three, three aspects. We have a meet, a learn, and a build.

The idea is that we build community through spending some time, usually sharing food, with each other. Getting to know each other, what we're interested in, what God's doing with us, where we're struggling, where we're thriving. And there's a time to learn. So it might be about a specific technology. It might be about a faith at work type of topic. It could be about anything, but we all need to continue learning and growing and expanding who we are because God's built us to be that way.

And then we allocate some time for building and it might literally be break out the computers and write some code. It might be sharing an update from a labs project that's being worked on in the community, or it might just be a time to brainstorm ideas. But that's the basic structure of a meetup that we aim for.

We always stray a little bit from it cause we, Joe and I in particular, we like to be a little less formal. But that's some of the driving of what is it that we do, what are we about. And all of that just leads to the goal of building community and then how can we deploy that community to use tech skills and business skills, entrepreneurial skills of all sorts to meet needs of the kingdom and to make God's name known, to make disciples and share Jesus throughout the world?

Jim: All right. Let's talk about that meet part first. Joe, why is it so important for Jesus following tech people to gather and know each other? Why is that important? Can't they just go to church on Sunday?

Joe Hollowell: They can, but what you learn in church, boy, if you have a relationship with Jesus, you better have relationships with those around you. And in the tech world, like you had mentioned, people don't want to talk, or there's such an easy distraction to compartmentalize that technical work, the technology focus from the Jesus focus, from the Jesus mission. So bringing the tech heads together at least once a month, if not more often, on some of the lab opportunities that Al was just mentioning, brings not just some of those skills to be used in advancing the kingdom, but it also advances our relationship with each other and Jesus. That is the key to what we do.

Martha: Al, what kind of things have been accomplished when these Jesus centered tech geniuses get together? Give us a couple of examples of things that you guys have done in that build realm to help advance the kingdom, like you said.

Al Wilkinson: So I'll give one from Kansas City and one from FaithTech as a larger one. One of the things that got FaithTech, the larger organization started in Waterloo, Canada, was around someone had a few people close to them who had committed suicide, and they said, we can do something about this. We've got this whole internet thing, this whole world wide web. Surely we can do something with technology.

And they started looking into it because a part of that story was that at least one of those people had visited websites that talked about how to kill myself. How do I kill myself? And so this person started looking at those and thinking I can put up a website that responds in Google searches and instead of in response to those kinds of searches, but instead of talking, instead of giving them those answers, what if I put up a website that points them to Jesus instead as an alternative?

And that's what they built. That was the, I believe that was the first official Faith Tech labs project. And it had amazing results. I didn't get a chance to find the numbers, but there were many people who came back and shared stories of, I found your website, and it saved my life. And so that's one that I just love because that's a great use of technology to change the tide.

Another one in Kansas City somewhere during maybe a year or two in, a church where we met at regularly, on that particular night, there was a different ministry that had a prayer meeting in the sanctuary to the right when you came in the main door, and we were meeting in the community room to the left.

And this one guy happens to walk in, didn't know there were two different groups, follows some people, goes to the left, sit, grabs some pizza, sits down, starts talking, and he's thinking he's out of place, and about that time one of the leaders comes in and grabs him. The guy, as it turns out, had started a ministry to fight pornography addiction, and he was looking for people to build an app.

They talked with software shops and was getting estimates of 100 to 250, 000 dollars to build a mobile app. And he says guys, I can't even pay myself, let alone pay to build an app. And so the leader says, yeah, let's get you guys connected. We shared the idea. We had him come and talk about it. And we had a few people who, some had struggled with pornography addiction. Some just felt a nudge to say, I can help build something like this. And they built a proof of concept app that got used by several hundred people for a few years and did that at helping draw people out of pornography addiction, help them work through that recovery. And yeah, those are just a couple of examples of what God can do with tech skills.

Martha: We often say, Jim, on iWork4Him, that each of us has our own lanes that we're driving in, even when we're headed down the same road. And it seems like our listeners might be in a different industry or work environments, but we all are on mission, living out our faith in our work.

And the Awaken podcast network is filled with podcasts from over 135 different hosts that are sharing just a little different take on their own faith and work journey. So I want to encourage our listeners to go to awakenpodcastnetwork. com and learn more about other podcasts that might help you grow in your faith and your boldness with the Lord.

Jim: Joe, what kind of projects have you been working on as part of Faith Tech?

Joe Hollowell: The most recent one that I'm focused on right now, is to take a book that FaithTech spent a couple of years developing. It's called the Redemptive Technology Playbook from FaithTech, which offers a Jesus focused, Spirit led way of delivering solutions and building technology redemptively, that both offers solutions that redeem the world, but also redemptive to the people who are building it.

That playbook, I'm actually working with another group called Sync with God, you know the blog, that takes that content, takes that book, puts it into a discipleship platform that allows small groups to go through this step by step, learning the different methodologies, the different theology, the different applications of how to build technology redemptively, and disciples that, inculcates that into this, into these small groups. So we're putting that together on this platform and getting ready to launch that right now, it's targeted for 2025.

Jim: People are thinking right now, Joe, how can technology be redemptive? But I think we need to understand the kingdom if we're gonna understand that sentence, because God told us as believers to allow our faith to impact the work that we do and to be a blessing to others, whether they believe in Jesus or not.

And so we're supposed to be bringing healing to the land and technology can do so many things today. It can feed cattle. It can, it can water crops. It can tell a farmer how it would fertilize over here this much, but over here don't fertilize as much. And technology is so incredible. It also has some creepy sides too, but we're not going to talk about that today. What I want to know, Al, why should somebody get involved with Faith Tech? Why should they join FaithTech today?

Al Wilkinson: Why wouldn't they want to? (laughter)

So reason reasons I like to encourage people. One is the community aspect of it. For a lot of tech people getting a good size corporation, even some small companies and it can be hard to find other believers inside of tech spaces. That's another aspect of what got started with CrossTech and FaithTech was running into individuals a decade ago who, multiple people at a company who had no idea that there were other believers there. And making people more comfortable with that idea of how can I share my faith in the workplace, if for no other reason than to be different, to look different and get people curious enough to ask why are you so nice? Why don't you ever yell? Why is your language always clean? Any of those kinds of questions.

So having that community to support but then also that opportunity for a lot of us as tech people we might, it's common to find that feeling of, I'm just working to make a bunch of money for someone else, or I'm just working to make a bunch of money, which is great. But, It's not always enough.

Jim: No, it's never enough. It's not always enough. It's never enough.

Al Wilkinson: It's never enough money. We always want more, no doubt. But part of what Faith Tech and the community offers is an opportunity to use those tech skills or the business skills or design skills or any related skills to help build software that has a more direct impact on the kingdom.

So whether it's working on, an X iteration of how do I not kill myself website? Or another app to fight addictions or engaged discipleship or prayer life. Those are opportunities where anyone who has that time and capacity can use those tech skills in a way that can be more directly life giving, which for an individual can be really encouraging and make a job that they don't love be a lot more bearable because that full time job lets them work on this, maybe it's five hours a week, but this project that can have a different kind of impact.

Jim: You could check out Faith Tech online Faith Tech. com That gets you to the main one up there in Canada, eh? And if you really want to get in touch with these guys at Kansas City, faithtech. com forward slash city forward slash Kansas dash city. That'll get you to these guys, Joe and Al. Joe, before we're done, what kind of, what project are you working on right now for Faith Tech?

You said you're working on getting that manual out there. So people do small groups. Are there other projects you guys are working on in Kansas City that you could use some tech help with Jesus followers that are looking for a project to do on the side? You got one that you, that people could get connected to?

Joe Hollowell: Oh, there's a number of them. First off, on that same main page of FaithTech, there's a section called Labs that outline a whole catalog of all kinds of projects that are being worked on across the world. And that's one of the advantages of some of the current technologies that we can have virutal, locationless groups, teams that come together to work on those projects.

Jim: Okay.

Joe Hollowell: We're working on a project to build a mentoring community that introduces resources to people that need to understand different skill sets, especially international students, people graduating from college. We had a great discussion with Kyle Smith, a friend of yours that you introduced.

Jim: Right out of Marionville, Missouri. That's right.

Joe Hollowell: There you go. That's the kind of mentoring community we're building and putting together a platform and interaction ability just in our area to start with.

Al Wilkinson: The other thing I'd throw out there is that yeah, like Joe mentioned there's over 100 labs projects being worked on by different cities, and they all need help. And so whether it's something we're working on directly, or if anyone is interested in working on something, go check out that page and let us know. We'll get you connected because we want to encourage anyone who has that time and desire to work on anything. And if there's not a project there, we'll help you get one started.

Jim: You want to get in touch with these guys. You can always get ahold of Martha and I, and we'll connect you up with Joe or Al, or you go to the Faith Tech website and just go to communities and find Kansas city. And you'll find Joe and Al there.

Martha: It's amazing. There are many different locations. And like you said, technology is really limitless anymore. There's not really boundaries around a lot of things. So I love what you guys are doing. And I would just imagine that we have listeners that are really interested in this because of how God has gifted them. So this is such a great thing we're getting to expose our listeners to.

Jim: Yeah. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Al, from Faith Tech Dot com forward slash city forward slash kansas city. Thanks you guys for being here today.

Al Wilkinson: Thank you guys for having us.

Jim: You bet. Faith Tech. com. Check it out. You've been listening to iWork4Him with your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Chrsit followers. Our workplaces our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him!