Our Story

She was faced with two options: abandon her passion for technology or say “no” to missions and find a job in the tech industry.

While getting her engineering degree, Jaya felt God pulling her heart towards mission work. However, there was no clear path for integrating software engineering with church planting efforts in the context of frontier missions.

At the same time, Michael completed his computer science degree and felt drawn towards overseas missions. Similar to Jaya, Michael could not find a ministry location to serve where he could use his degree.

And while Jaya and Michael were exploring the intersection of tech and missions, Caleb was serving with a church planting team in Asia. He was surprised by remote nomadic people whipping out their smartphones. It was becoming clear to him that in some contexts, it is crucial to make Scriptural resources available in a digital format (especially when literacy levels are low).

Jaya, Michael, and Caleb founded Upstream in 2019 to connect technologists to work among unreached peoples. Many teams would love to integrate technology into their church planting strategies. However, unreached contexts introduce complex security, linguistic, geographic, and cultural situations that invite unique tech solutions. There is a huge need for software developers to build these catered missional solutions.

We seek to cross denominational and organizational lines to rally the Church’s technological resources for the sake of those without the light of the gospel. Several current contributors are professionals who volunteer their time. If you are a developer or designer whom God has given a passion for the unreached, we would love to connect with you.