.jpeg)
Stephen: Advances in technology are nothing new to the mission field. The modern missions movement was made possible in large part because of innovations in commerce, sailing, shipbuilding, and cartography. And in those early missions of Carey and Judson, one of the most sought-after tools for the field were the cutting-edge printing presses of the time. Likewise, the digital revolution of the 21st century has brought about both opportunities and challenges that churches need to prepare for. Brooks, our question this week comes from Maxwell. He asks, "How has technology changed missions to unreached lands for the positive and the negative?"
Brooks: So this subject that Maxwell brings up about technology and missions to the unreached, this is actually a question that I get a surprising amount of times when I do Q&A, especially at colleges. Not so much at high schools and not as often at churches, but at colleges I get this question quite a bit about how technology is going to change missions to the unreached. And it's a good thought. There's some serious grounding there.
When we moved to Papua New Guinea, the airplane had been in use for about 20, maybe 25 to 30 years. And we heard stories about previous missionaries whose wives had gone into labor and they only had horses to ride out on. And they had to take these days-long trips to get out. And one of them lost their baby on their way out. And some other really tragic things happened. And every time I got in that Cessna 206, I thanked the Lord for that plane and how it cut down what was probably a week-long journey from Yembiyembi out to the coast down to just 35 minutes.
And by the end of our time there, the Cessna 206 was getting phased out. And there was a turbine airplane that used a little bit less fuel and could carry a little bit more—it couldn't land very short, and it had a few drawbacks. But technology was changing even for us over there. We had letters that we would send out, and then finally email came way out in the middle of the jungle around the early 2000s—just because if you don't have a landline, if you don't have phone lines, that wasn't available to us.
And now we go back to Yembiyembi and Starlink is available, which is just ripping fast. And I thank the Lord for that advancement. We used a program in Bible translation called Paratext, and there was another program that I worked with a lot called Translator's Workplace. I was just having a conversation with the brothers at Ligonier about this incredible tool that, Lord willing, will be coming out in the next couple of years that could really change a lot of things in the translation world. There are just some tremendous advances that I do believe the Lord uses these thing to see His name spread further, faster, getting to some of these places. I heard a missionary one time talk about the greatest use of the computer is not all of the different things going on to see finances gained or raised or whatever. It's the advance of Bible translations and language learning in these different faraway places for the glory of our God. And I thought that was an interesting take on it.
We've got to be careful, though, with technology, that we don't look at it as a pure good and not recognize that it's got some serious downsides to it too. I was reminded when we were in Yembiyembi—and Yembi had no phones, nothing. They didn't go through the process of having a rotary phone, then a cell phone without data, then a handheld phone. They jumped straight in. Probably around 2013 or 2014 was the first time that the cell phone made it to Yembiyembi. And all of the evil that comes with it–– porn and having these long-distance relationships with people that are not your husband or wife—things like that started happening. And we had to have some church classes on, "How do you handle the phone? How do you handle that?" Because the phone was chewing up some of the younger generation in the tribe. It was just this galactic jump from literally the Stone Age to technology. And the cell phone was a real inhibitor for many young men, especially in those early days.
There are different parts of the world—Papua New Guinea is not immune to this—where they went from bows and arrows and spears to full-on assault weapons, just being able to eradicate your enemies very quickly. And what that advance in technology has done to human misery and suffering—it's not made it better, it's made it much worse. And so to recognize that technology has some tremendous benefits for the advance of the Kingdom, but it's also got some real downsides if you're not careful, and just overall in the world what it can do.
But most of the time when people ask me questions about technology, they're asking specifically about language learning. And that's a really good thing to think through, because the hardest job in missions—and I've said this on the podcast before—the hardest job in missions, especially if you're going to an unreached language group, if you're going to stay within English or you're going to go to a national language that has language schools, that's going to be a little bit easier, but that's still a barrier. But if you're going to an unreached language group that doesn't have the Bible and doesn't have a church among it, you're going to have to learn that language, and it is not written down. Most times they have no alphabet. There are very few people from the outside world that can decipher it. You're the first one in.
And it's good for us to remember that some of what AI is going to do is going to revolutionize the publishing world. It's going to change some of these larger languages like Bahasa, Urdu, and Hindi. You're just going to be able to get better and better quality reprints of books translated into these large model languages. Smaller languages, though, that don't have that data—that's going to be a little ways off. Now my friend Stephen McCaskell has told me and helped educate me that there may be a tool coming someday that can hear a language and help decipher it on a really rapid basis, like help break a language down. That tool's not here yet. And I'm moderately skeptical. Not highly skeptical, but I'm a little skeptical about how good it will be when it arrives. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
I think the two takeaways from this, if we're looking at it from a Christian perspective—and then if we bore down just a little bit more, looking at it from the perspective of Christians going to unreached language groups—are these.
One, we should rejoice. If the gospel can get to a language group faster, if we can get the Bible in a really good form—that means its meaning and its accuracy is right up there with the original autographs, we're not dropping any of the meaning because we're going so fast, and it sounds like the way that the local language would speak—what a gift to the people. What an incredible thing to have the Word of God. And then to get Pilgrim's Progress in their language, to get Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, to get all of these different resources into their language. to get The Holiness of God—oh, what a beautiful thing that would be. And not to chew up the missionary team with months and years of extra translation. We should rejoice if that happens and when that happens. And when there are tools that are making it faster and easier for missionaries to learn languages, to give the gospel, and to plant long-lasting churches and we should rejoice at that.
But we should also recognize that God is sovereign over all of these things. In the day of the horse and the day of wooden ships, I think of John G. Paton and him raising money for the Dayspring ships that would bring missionaries to Vanuatu. And as they sank twice, him raising more money. In the advance of technology, just the way that God has been sovereign over the days of the horses and wooden ships, He is just as sovereign over turbine-powered airplanes and AI. And everything is going to fall under His perfect control, and nothing is going to thwart His plans for these people. So if we keep that in mind, we rejoice at what can be used for the advance of the gospel, and we recognize that all of this is in God's perfect control. Nothing is going to happen outside of that. That's a really safe, good, biblical place to be.
Stephen: Regardless of the change technology brings to the mission field, missions will always be fueled by prayer. That's why Missionary has created a new 30-day prayer guide for unreached language groups called Gospel Ambition. You can find copies of Gospel Ambition for your church's small groups or Sunday schools at missionary.com/store. And while you're on the site, email us a question on what you'd like to hear answered on Ask Missionary. And don't forget to subscribe to be notified when our next episode, "How to Build a Sending Church," airs next week. Thanks for listening.