a chapter by Andrew Feng
Who builds? If the tools that carry the gospel across borders are designed in the Global North and merely received everywhere else, technology becomes one more version of an old dependency.
The chapter follows four builders in India, the Philippines, Mongolia and Brazil, none of whose tools came out of a product roadmap in California. It sets Japan against Mongolia to show that access and capability are different things. It counts the failures alongside the wins: a Bible app pulled from a Chinese app store, a congregation identified through its own messaging apps, an eighty-year-old African media ministry that voted against its own survival, and a project of the author's own that is still online and unmaintained.
It ends with five things a leader can check about what their organisation actually owns, and with an argument that the 7.3 million students studying outside their home countries are not a category of need but the most concentrated leadership pipeline the church has.
To cite, once published
Feng, Andrew. 'Innovation and Technology.' In Global Leadership in World Christianity, edited by Todd M. Johnson and Mary Ho. Carlisle: Langham Global Library, 2027.
Earlier, on the same ground
Feng, Andrew, Jonah Jala, and Nick Wu. 'Digital Technology to Accelerate Capacity for Leaders Worldwide.' In Leading Well in Times of Disruption, edited by Joseph W. Handley Jr., Gideon Para-Mallam, and Asia Williamson. Langham Global Library, 2024.
The volume's own rationale returns more than once to an image: it is good to be invited to the table, better to be invited into the kitchen. That image is the editors', not the author's. Applied to technology it stops being a metaphor. The kitchen is a set of servers, training runs and design decisions, and the question is who is in it.