The following post was dated September 6th, 2012 when TheoTech was in its infancy. It is preserved here for historical reasons.
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Basically, I love God and I love technology. Growing up, I was disheartened by the various ways the purposes of God were “held back” by technical inadequacy on the part of the Christian community. I’ve always dreamed of integrating my faith with my technological bent for the benefit of God’s people and the world at large.
Fast forward to now, I’m more grown up and a slightly more mature software developer. Many of the dreams and ideas that bubbled up when I was younger are now within reach. But I have one major problem: I can’t do it alone. So, I discover that I need to have a community and ideally God would launch a movement of people who can do technology entrepreneurship for the gospel.
Technology since it lets us scale up and out and in and deep, enabling us to be more productive, effective and useful in fulfilling God’s purposes. Entrepreneurship since the development of technology creates value and needs a sustainable model that provides for the people who give themselves to such work and fuels new innovation. And the Gospel, since ultimately God alone truly matters and there is no deeper pleasure than magnifying his worth through our lives and the works of our hands by using the gifts He’s given us to love others.
But all of this requires a team. I can’t do it alone.
Hence according to the grace God gave me, I started a group at Amazon called the “Theology of Technology Discussion Group”, a gathering of people who wanted to think through the theological implications of what we were making and how our work fit into God’s purposes. My hope was that getting more people into this mindset of thinking about technology from a biblical worldview would stoke the flames of passion and insight and stir up a movement of TE4G.
We met and we were not alone. I soon discovered similar movements at Urbana ’12, tech accelerators being started by philanthropies and churches, business plan competitions at churches, and much more all geared towards honoring God through the technical and entrepreneurial arts. I would like to go into further detail in the future.
Suffice it to say, it appears God is already working to stir up such a movement and now it remains to be seen how the particulars will play out. I avoided thinking through and writing this post for the longest time because I wanted it to be a perfect “pitch”, but I realize now that it is more helpful to have at least something out there for others to consider–whether or not you my readers will read it can be optimized later :-).
The impetus behind getting this out now is a recent project I’ve worked on that helps you pray for others by sending a daily e-mail with 5 suggested facebook friends to pray for you. You can check it out at pray.theotech.org ceaselessprayer.com. I wanted to make sure the theotech.org site had content before I started sharing the link to the app…
So, if any of this piques your curiosity or interest, please leave a comment or connect with me on twitter. Thanks!
Chris
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Christopher Lim is founder of TheoTech, an organization focused on activating a movement of Technology Entrepreneurship for the Gospel. This means beginning with God as the customer and working backwards to create the things He desires to see in the world. As a practitioner, Chris is focused on Ceaseless, a technology-supported movement to personally pray for everyone on earth. He is also developing a system to help churches reflect the multilingual glory of God’s kingdom by subtitling messages in real time so that congregations no longer need to be segregated by language. You can reach him on twitter @meritandgrace or read his blog at www.meritandgrace.com.