Did you know that more than 80% of Christians choose Christ between the ages of 4-14? Children are the biggest mission field, and they have impressionable young minds that are fertile ground for the Word of God.

Build a mobile application to help children learn the word of God, bury it in their hearts and share it with their friends in a fun, interactive, and engaging way, using the platforms they're already using while making the Bible more "awesome" and "cool" than Angry Birds, Temple Run, and Candy Crush.

Champions

Knowing that generosity brings about spiritual growth and that generosity is a like a muscle (the sooner they start exercising it the stronger the person will become), how do we radically shrink the amount of time it takes someone to become generous to a cause?

Champions

So you are a homeless kid, living in your car with your sister and mom. How is mom supposed to submit applications to housing providers to get into a shelter or transitional housing? She can’t send or receive faxed applications. She doesn’t have the $5 to send it to RiteAid or Bartels… She doesn’t have the gas money to go pick one up. She doesn’t have a mailing address so we can’t send her one… and even if she did, she can’t get to the post office to pay for it and mail it… BUT!! She can get to the library or a service center to fill out the form online and submit it!

Right now organizations serving the homeless, like Vision House, are using paper forms , that they try to fax, mail or email to the homeless client. Yet, it is really difficult for the homeless to get it back to them for the reasons above.

Furthermore, the homeless has to fill a separate application to every single organization, increasing their frustration and despair, while at the same time creating more work and inefficiencies for the organizations which are working from separate applications queues that contain many of the same homeless cases. What if there was an online free service that would allow the homeless to complete a single form, and update when their information changes, which then would go in a service queue from which all organizations providing housing will pull from? What if that service allows better communication with the homeless, and between agencies? What else can that service do to bring the hope that is Christ and the generosity of our communities to positively affect the life of the homeless child down your street?

What if the service had a mobile app that church volunteers can leverage to go on the street and help homeless people apply for housing? What if by providing such mobile app, you could foster an “adopt a corner” movement by which a Christian would take responsibility for bringing the application process to the homeless person on that corner? What if those “adopt a corner” volunteers can also help the homeless update their information on the mobile app?

Champions

When a major restaurant chain looks into expansion in the city, they have market research to understand everything about how that community is being served by others. They know who is serving the community, what they serve, where they serve, who they serve, how they are serving, and how the community perceives the service.

How can Christian ministries do the same? How can a comprehensive, up to date, asset based map be created to provides a holistic map of resources, needs, efforts, and gaps? The goal would be to foster collaboration, improve service quality, and focus giving to the areas where it can be most effective.

How can technology be used to identify, promote, evaluate, collaborate, augment, and fill the gaps of ministry programs around the city?

Imagine a real time map to track every ministry initiative in the city. Imagine the crowd providing information about who is doing what, and how they are serving the community. Imagine a Yelp for Ministry with some level of quality control to vet the entries.

Now imagine, as an example, tracking children ministry efforts in a city:

Help direct children to locations where they can be taught and show gaps where ministry in unavailable.
Data could be categorized by type of ministry and number of children typically involved, including overlays of population and youth statistics
Enable leaders to check in with category and numbers. Frequency of check in at location would communicate frequency/consistency of ministry provision.
Help potential volunteers and funders find local community opportunities to contribute.
Helps families learn where the nearest sports ministry or literacy training or grief counseling for children is available.
Also begins to show where new initiatives and resources might be strategically directed.
When gaps are found, there could be an aspect of a Christian Kickstarter.com the Church. All ideas funded are not for profit but rather to fill an area of need in the world of ministry

Then imagine similar possibilities for any type of ministry.

Champions

Ministries tend to be underfunded and often led by someone with a big heart, but that doesn’t mean they can do everything that might be needed. All of us need help with various things and there could be someone in our city that would love to help with their area of expertise, but not know how to find the person who needs the help.

How can technology link those who need help doing ministry to those willing to help them?

In some countries there are new movement to equip young people with technical skills, but the question remains, how to match them to people who need that expertise? What if there was a task rabbit for those doing ministry and those who want to volunteer. No money is exchanged, but rating systems could still identify satisfactory volunteers and “customers”, so that those accepting the offer of help can have confidence that the one offering it is safe, effective, and dependable—and volunteers don’t offer their time to someone who misuses it.

Volunteer opportunities could be limited in size so that no volunteer is exploited. Young people looking for community involvement/service hours would have an easy way of finding opportunities. People working in professions could offer their services and those doing ministry could find the type of service they need. Some of this work requires physical involvement, but other types could be done remotely (ex. IT help, set design, creating a parent newsletter template, etc.).

Champions

50% of the world is illiterate and will never be reached with the printed page. And yet, every person has the right to receive God’s Word in their own language because, only God’s truth has the ability to transform the heart and the mind.

Even among the literate, biblical content in their heart language may be scarce and even in languages where there is an abundance of content, many people are not biblically literate.

How can technology promote worldwide biblical literacy? How can technology help people with limited reading skills to understand and engage the Bible?

There is such a thing as “heart language.” These are the thoughts in your head, the phrases you naturally repeat, the songs that make their way from your lips into your psyche. Most of these are first heard with our ears and repeated with our lips.

For the first time in history the Bible in text, audio and video has now been normalized and made available via APIs so YOU can reach 5.7 billion people in over 800 languages. Through the Digital Bible Platform you can integrate the Bible in all of your most effective digital evangelism, discipleship and engagement tools? Faith Comes By Hearing is looking for the most creative ways to apply this platform to reach the World! And they want to support you all the way to accomplish this.

What if people around the world could remember the whole counsel of God in their heart language? Can believers have the promises, reasoning, implications, songs and stories of Scripture readily available in their hearts and minds instead of simply on their smartphones or bookshelves?

Can we build oral translation technology to help multilingual churches thrive and promote the witness of a united church that spans language and cultural barriers?

Can we invent tools that empower people to create multilingual video and audio content that engages people who are not proficient readers with the Scriptures?

Champions

There’s a growing body of evidence that directly connects pornography to human trafficking and sexual slavery. In fact, 1 in 5 pornographic images online involve child victims of sex trafficking. Traffickers are using technology to exploit people more effectively than the organizations who are trying to protect and rescue them.

Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, and the second largest after the global drug trade! There are an estimated 27 million people in slavery around the world, which is more than any other time in history. The average age of entry into prostitution in the United States is 12-14 years old.

Human trafficking has become one of the key issues of our time and people in every sector of society are rising up to end modern day slavery. Meanwhile, pornography is on the rise. The average age of first exposure to porn is 11 years old. 93% of boys and 62% of girls are exposed to porn before they turn 18, and 70% of 18-24 year old young men view porn monthly. Within the church, 50% of men and 20% of women are addicted to porn, and 37% of pastors say that it’s a current struggle.

What if a choice to view porn, was actually a choice to promote and condone sexual slavery? In a day when at least 1 in 5 porn images is a child victim of sex trafficking and 88% of all porn contains acts of physical violence or aggression, the line between porn and human trafficking is rapidly diminishing

Can you create technology to affect Demand Reduction?

This effort would focus on getting fewer men to buy sex and consume pornography by disrupting online channels to pornography and sex by presenting alternative messages to men, including targeted search ads (Google, Bing, etc.), banner/page ads (on Backpage, MyProviderGuide, etc), and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This intervention could include information about where men can get help/counseling, the harmful effects of sex buying on trafficking/prostitution survivors, and possible consequences (legal, social, health) of buying sex.

Build technology for Victim Outreach

This consists of sending messages crafted by survivors of prostitution to ads online selling sex. Email and text replies are then received by survivor services organizations which are able to follow-up with information for support.

Use technology for Awareness & Victim Identification

Blanket awareness efforts on signs of possible trafficking through online channels and social media platforms to drive identification and reporting.

Create technology to produce better data for the Anti-Trafficking Movement

The current state of information and quality data in the anti-trafficking movement is limited at best. Develop an open dashboard to help existing organization leverage and share the data they do have in meaningful ways both internally and across the non-profit, law enforcement, and government ecosystem. Social media or other web data could be valuable for detecting popular sentiment about pornography and prostitution, or perhaps even detecting instances of illicit activity that’s difficult to track by conventional means.

Champions

So much as been written and researched about how technology, and social media in particular, has changed us as a society and as individuals. While there are many benefits that can be harnessed from these technologies, there are also many ways that these technologies have negatively affected us. One area that has been profoundly shaped by recent technology is community.

How can we leverage technology to create, cultivate and strengthen some of society’s most foundational relationships–marriage, family, friendships?

For example, can you build an app that helps husbands and wives build gospel-centered marriages?

Can you create a social network that fosters mentoring relationships between generations?

How about games or apps for latchkey kids to stay connected and avoid loneliness, boredom, and fear?

Can you make a game that includes children in the lives of their itinerant parents? Can you building an app for a parent who travels to develop closeness with child. Child gives parent the traveling challenge. e.g. photos of something from: each letter in child’s name numbers of phone number or street address what you liked best in the hotel you stayed the funniest thing you heard?

Researcher John Gottman says the best thing we can do is have a 6 second kiss every day with your spouse. Can you create the technology equivalent to the six-second kiss?

Champions