Chris Lim resides at the corner of digital and discipleship. While at Amazon, he formed a community of like-minded co-workers to think through the implications of Scripture on their creative acts as technologists. During that time they identified three specific technological initiatives that have the potential to advance the gospel:
- Ubiquitous multilingual churches – what if worshiping God in many languages became the norm?
- Worldwide biblical literacy – What if people around the world could remember the whole counsel of God in their heart language?
- Personal relationship management – What if technology could help you not simply connect with people, but cultivate healthy relationships?
Chris has set out to tackle two of these initiatives with projects that have the potential to have a global impact on prayer, and streamline how multilingual churches conduct worship services. I had the wonderful opportunity to talk with Chris about these projects as well as his thoughts on the adoption rate of new technologies within the church.
Praying For Friends
“I had this idea that since I had a list of friends on Facebook, I should be praying for them”. And with that, Chris formed Ceaseless (http://pray.theotech.org/). Currently in beta, the service will send you a daily email with 5 friends to pray for. Upon registering for the service and connecting it with your Facebook account, Ceaseless selects the friends and couples it with a scripture related to prayer. Chris hopes that this service will flood the social media site with prayer and is even looking forward to the day when every person could be prayed for using this service.
A Better Way for Multilingual Churches
Having been a member of a multilingual church and seeing first-hand both the beauty, as well as some the challenges that it presents, Chris sought to improve the language barrier with a technology called SPF. With this service, it is now possible to create excellent multilingual worship services by enabling the worship leader or pastor to speak in their native language and have those words subtitled into the language(s) of the people in the congregation. Because of this valuable tool, Chris was able to cut a recent multilingual church service worship time in half. He is actively working to get this product finished and get it in the hands of those who need it the most.
It was a pleasure talking with Chris. He has some tremendous goals that he wants to achieve for the Kingdom, and he is certainly poised to meet them with these ideas. His group, TheoTech, along with Leadership Network, and Labs8 will serve as the organizers for the March 21-23 Code For The Kingdom. Code for the Kingdom is a weekend Hackathon where global issues are tackled with a Christian perspective. Join us as we battle the challenges confronting people all over the world.
