Scripture Engagement for Missional Technologists

What Do We Mean by Scripture Engagement?

I often find that the language of Scripture Engagement (SE) is foreign to those outside of the Bible translation world. This is sad because the concept is massively helpful for overseas church planters and missionaries. SE was a new term for me until a seasoned missionary sat down and explained it. This isn’t a new tool or innovative method. Instead, SE attempts to capture the heartbeat of a theologically reflective, culturally thoughtful, and historical approach to content creation. Let me show a diagram and explain a bit more.

Scripture Engagement Scale

I was trained by an SIL Scripture Engagement consultant to think about SE as content that points to Scripture itself or Scripture communicated in local forms.¹  In the diagram above, SE points to the Bible itself, which is its telos. 

When interacting with missionary teams, I most often see SE content as audio-driven summaries of the Bible or communicating the message of the Bible through indigenous music. For example, one team we work with crafted 120 selections of Scripture and recorded it in more of a street level, colloquial way. This effort does not attempt to replace or take away from the Bible itself. Instead, the goals of SE are to point people to the Bible and communicate the message of the Bible in art forms that traditional cultures understand. At Upstream, we summarize this sort of content under the headings of Scripture, Story, and Song (easy to remember with the S’s!).

An Inside-Out Approach to Missions²

Derek³ is a respected practitioner serving in a high security region. He taught me the language of inside-out and outside-in. The content that we create and distribute should be curated by missionaries who have a deep understanding of the target people, including language and culture. This is what he means by inside-out. Before we consider delivering Christian content to unreached peoples through digital means, we must first slow down to understand the needs of specific ethno-linguistic groups.

An outside-in approach imports content or methodology from one context into another. It is a low-cost solution to the missionary because it does not require a deep understanding of the target group. On the contrary, an inside-out approach comes at a high cost to the missionary because he or she must go through the hard work of learning the language and the culture. But the content that the inside-out missionary creates has a far better chance at meeting the target group’s needs, addressing the questions that they are asking, and speaking the gospel in a way that hearers will understand.

This missiological commitment to an inside-out approach has profound effects upon media ministry. It means that scalability and scope of reach cannot be the technologist’s highest values. An inside-out approach puts guardrails around what content we distribute digitally and how we distribute it among the unreached. When our highest value becomes communicating the gospel in a meaningful way for each people group, we may have to work slower and more carefully than we often tend to do.

This commitment also affects how we define if someone is reached or meaningfully engaged by Scriptural content. It means that clicks, views, and advertising metrics are not necessarily synonymous with unreached peoples hearing the gospel in a way that they understand. Missiological reflection should cause media ministries and technologists alike to think very carefully about what they are promoting and how they are promoting it. Theology frames digital ministry by leading us to consider particular field contexts and commit to creating and distributing content that is built by people from within that culture or missionaries serving those specific communities.

Finding the Digital Gap: Digital Scripture Engagement for the Least-Reached

I help facilitate a small network of technologists and designers at Upstream. We’ve come to adapt a handful of missiological principles than undergird our work as we’ve waded into the world of missional technology. For example, we avoid importing translated content from other cultures. We also build relationships with missionaries who have Scriptural content, including oral or written overviews of Scripture, artwork, hymns, and music created in that particular culture. As we get to know these missionaries, we arrive at a place of understanding that they use an inside-out approach. This means that they have a deep understanding of language and culture, so we can trust that the content they create is aimed at the real needs of the target people. 

Sometimes an existing website, social media tool, mobile app, or other type of existing technology can meet a missionary team’s digital distribution needs. Christian tech groups or media ministries may be able to help missionaries connect with the right existing technologies to meet their needs. However, other times, missionaries have a digital distribution gap that cannot be adequately met by existing solutions. 

After spending several years asking missionaries working among least-reached people groups about their digital distribution needs, our network began to identify common technological gaps. Many of these communities involve oral-preference learners who have little exposure to Jesus. Many missionary teams already have oral-based content that gives an overview of redemptive history and introduces people to Christ. This can be helpful for individuals and communities that do not know any Christians. But this material often struggles in the area of distribution. It is the digital equivalent of printing Christian books that sit unread on shelves in a storage unit. As we need to distribute these books to the people, we need to distribute audio and video resources to them as well – especially, since they cannot be printed!

Challenges in Digital Distribution

Even if digital Scripture-based resources are available, they are often only available on catch-all mobile apps that put hundreds or thousands or languages in one place. A person seeking to know more about Christ or a new believer wanting to engage with Scripture can become frustrated trying to sort through huge lists of written languages to find their own. They often give up.

An inside-out solution could be a customized app for a specific language group. The Scripture App Builder (SAB), for example, can be sufficient for many Scriptural resources. But it has limitations. It may not provide a home for all Scripture-based materials available in a language. And it can encounter difficulties correctly displaying certain scripts. In fact, we recently discovered a large unreached language group whose language cannot be displayed properly in the SAB (at least for now). An engineering solution is still needed for this language’s custom app to display the text correctly. 

People in countries where access to Christian materials and Scriptures is illegal or restricted also have special technological needs. We found that many people in these places have smartphones and data even in remote areas, especially in Asia. But in sensitive contexts where phones can be confiscated and searched, some tools may not have adequate security features to protect users. More research is needed to understand the technological gaps in these contexts.

Other technological challenges may be present in places where people do not have regular access to electricity, or have an unreliable connection to the internet. Perhaps people use solar power to recharge devices like smartphones, which limits their access to these devices on days without adequate sunlight. These technological gaps provide opportunities for missional technologists to use their gifts for frontline work. Their partnership with missionary teams can help them discover the best means of digital distribution for Christian materials and Scriptures.

Reaching the Least Reached Through Technology

Although face-to-face gospel proclamation is ideal, some unreached contexts also warrant the use of digital evangelism and discipleship. As technology has progressed over time, so has the application of that technology for the purpose of Christian missions. 

We best apply today’s technology to mission when we use an inside-out approach. This begins with developing a deep understanding of a community’s context, culture, and needs. Then it involves creating content and distribution strategies that help people hear the gospel in a way that they understand. 

In some cases, technical tools that already exist provide satisfactory solutions. Other times, gaps remain in digital distribution that can only be filled with more custom-built technology. Using a shared code base is one way to create more customizable apps without building them from scratch. 

Missional technologists have much to offer to fill these gaps in the frontline work of communicating Christ in unreached contexts. Let us work together to write clean code that helps the gospel to spread in every corner of the globe. Let us offer our gifts in technology for the benefit of the nations.

¹ SIL thinks about SE this way. Their definition is “accessing, understanding and interacting meaningfully with the life-changing message of the Scriptures.” https://www.sil.org/translation/scripture-engagement But I find that some missionaries, even within SIL, are confused about the meaning of SE. This is in part, I believe, because of the terminology. SE is often misunderstood as ways in which we can get people to read a Bible translation. I hope that the graphic above gives a better picture of what we mean by SE.

² The following section was previously published by the author in EMQ. D.B. Brown, “Let the Nations Hear,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 59, no. 03 (September 2023): 31–33.

³ Pseudonym