Arrivals · a Tuesday
Mei walks out of the airport with two suitcases. She is twenty-two, she has never left her country before, and her phone has no signal here. Nobody is waiting for her.
Three kilometres from her new campus there is a church. Last Sunday its members prayed for the nations.
They do not know Mei exists. She does not know they exist. For the next four years they will live down the road from each other and never meet.
The mission field lands at the airport most nights of the week. What would it take for someone to be there?
The church has answered that question with tools before. Paul's letters were the most effective distribution technology the first century had. Luther and Tyndale used a press. Shortwave radio crossed borders closed to missionaries. Each generation's tools became the next generation's infrastructure, but only where somebody kept them running.
There is a harder question underneath. If the tools that carry the gospel across borders are designed in one part of the world and merely received everywhere else, technology becomes one more version of an old dependency. Another room where you are welcome at the table but not in the kitchen.
Who builds?
Students outside their home country, 2024
7.3m
Roughly triple the number two decades earlier. Past ten million by 2030. Most will go home. Not a category of need: the most concentrated leadership pipeline the church has, and the default posture toward a capable one is still to hand them a t-shirt to design.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Global Flow of Tertiary-Level Students, 2024
Five questions, four minutes, no signup. Print the last page and you have an asset register your board can review once a year. This is the reason the site exists.
One has everything and built almost nothing. One had almost nothing and built its own publishing platform. Access and capability are different things, and the second does not follow from the first.
Two bars. 27.5 against 15.4. Whoever sets the language sets the boundary.
My own projects folder, counted this morning. One of the fifty-seven argued that ministries should own their infrastructure. It is still online. Nobody maintains it.
Where all of this comes from. Global Leadership in World Christianity, Langham, forthcoming 2027.