#HACK NA 2021


bringing the gospel where it needs to go





Move the Movable Middle: Innovating Bible Engagement



All over the world, there are tens of millions of people who aren’t currently engaging with Scripture but are open to doing so. They are the movable middle. But they don’t know where to get started. How might we craft solutions to help these interested outsiders discover the Bible on their own terms and find points of connection relevant to their current life situations? How might we use technologies like artificial intelligence—chatbots, or smart assistants, or others—to provide automated and personalized guidance to people starting on the pathway to Scripture engagement?



American Bible Society (ABS) has done the research—a huge segment of today’s population is open to exploring the Bible for the first time.


Individuals in the movable middle want their first contact with the Bible on their own terms, but they also yearn for guidance as they struggle with biblical language and culture. The Innovation team at ABS is looking for solutions that focus on any of the following three areas:

  1. Identify relevant connection points: Help readers discover Bible passages and resources that are relevant to their urgent spiritual needs and life questions.
  2. Contextualize and explain Scripture: Help readers understand the language, history, and cultural frameworks of the Bible.
  3. Provide personalized guidance: Help readers navigate the biblical narrative and major themes of the Bible in a manner that is both personalized and automated.

More than simply looking to digital marketing or social media as solutions, we are specifically interested in solutions that can leverage technologies including AI/ML, chatbots, and smart assistants. As a minimum requirement, solutions should connect to at least one API, web service, or digital Bible database.


Join us to craft ideas and build technology tools to help the movable middle better discover, understand, and engage with Scripture.


Visit americanbible.org to learn more about ABS.


resource Kit



Where Is The Church Not?
A Map Of Every Village in the World



The Coalition of the Willing is an association of global church planting ministries dedicated to sharing data with one another in order to determine where in the world the church is—and isn’t. They’re building a mapping tool to help visualize this data down to village-level granularity. The impact of this visualization for global church planting strategy would be huge.



Their challenge is data-oriented. While they have GIS location data for villages and boundaries, all of their village names are in English. However, those best situated to report on the existence of churches are local believers, and those believers know their surrounding villages by their local names, not English ones.


Through #HACK2021, we hope to build innovative, tested, and automated processes to track down databases of localized names for villages and then accurately associate those names with their English/GIS counterparts. Is there a one-process-fits-all-countries approach? We don’t know. Is there a set of processes that will work for most countries? We don’t know. All we know is that #HACK2021 is up for the challenge.


Visit cotw.global to learn more about Coalition of the Willing.


resource Kit



Enable Global Impact:
A Marketplace For Connecting Donors to Real Needs



Around the world, there are people in great need, and there are churches in their community that would like to help but lack the resources. Their needs include:

  1. Volunteers
  2. ProBono services (technical, legal, etc.)
  3. Money
  4. Resources (such as vehicles, equipment, or land)

In other parts of the world, there are people who would be willing to donate to meet those specific needs. World Vision is inviting you to help build a global marketplace to connect donors to those in need.



World Vision is committed to ending extreme poverty and laying the foundation for every child to experience Jesus’ promise of life in all its fullness (John 10:10). Ending extreme poverty is a priority not only for World Vision. By 2030, as part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, global leaders aim to eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere. As a child-focused organization, World Vision sees children as a community’s most precious resource and central to addressing poverty. Since poverty is different in each context, World Vision works with communities, families, local leaders, and children themselves to identify solutions and transform lives.


The MVP for this global marketplace would allow World Vision to help more people impacted by poverty get out of poverty. As the project iterates and develops, World Vision expects to see an increase in the number of local volunteers and, eventually, global volunteers. The MVP would also inspire, motivate and encourage others to participate by allowing users to share impactful stories with others.


Trust in this global marketplace is paramount. The partner needs to trust the requester to bring genuine needs. The stakeholder needs to trust the partner to represent requesters with integrity and ensure that donated resources get to those requesters. And the donor needs to trust that the donation is used for the specified resources—this means trusting that the stakeholder has done its due diligence to ensure donated resources reach their intended donations.


Visit worldvision.org to learn more about World Vision.


resource Kit



Inspire tomorrow’s missionaries to engage the unengaged



The missionary task involves proclaiming the gospel to all the peoples of the earth. There are many people groups where believers are proclaiming the gospel, though few from that group have yet professed faith in Jesus Christ. These people are getting the opportunity to hear the gospel, and we pray and hope that they will come to faith.


And then, there are those people groups where no believers from anywhere are present to engage. These are the unengaged. If they remain unengaged, they will never get the opportunity to hear the gospel. An engaged people has a chance to be reached; an unengaged people does not have that chance.



Vision 5:9 is spearheading an initiative to inform, inspire, and mobilize tomorrow’s missionaries to engage the unengaged Muslim people groups of the world. Then they’d like to offer what they’ve learned to those who might serve unengaged Hindu, Buddhist, Tribal, and Non-Religious peoples! Their challenge has two separate areas of focus:

  1. Prototype a digital marketing strategy to reach today’s younger generation with the information about the unengaged while inspiring tomorrow’s missionaries to consider the possibilities for missions among them. Do so in a way that prioritizes missions to the unengaged without condemning or devaluing missions to anyone or anywhere else.
  2. Prototype a dashboard for Vision 5:9 and its partner organizations to use for gathering and managing information about which people groups are unengaged as well as collecting and evaluating submitted reports of engagements. In the process of prototyping a dashboard, address areas where their current manual processes can be streamlined and improved through technology tools.

challenge brief



Innovating How the Church Reaches Today’s Young Adults with the Gospel



The North American church is looking for new and innovative ways to connect today’s young adults (18-24 years old) to a relationship with God through the Gospel. This challenge is an ideation and design challenge. Hackathon teams are tasked with using design thinking to craft a testable prototype that presents an answer to any of the following questions:

  1. How might we use media in new ways to connect young adults more deeply to God?
  2. How might the message of hope shared on social media help influence young adults to be open to the Gospel?
  3. How might churches and ministries practically use analytics, insights, and trends to better drive how they engage young adults online with the Gospel?


A testable prototype is anything that a research team can use to conduct testing sessions with participants. Your prototype allows researchers to determine early—before significant follow-up investment of resources is made—whether a given approach is viable. Hope Media Group is open to all types of prototypes for use in testing: web applications (functional or wireframe), social media campaigns or strategies, data tools, etc.


Hope Media Group (HMG) is based in Houston, Texas. It makes up a family of brands that serve to connect people in Houston and around the world more deeply to God through radio, events, online content, and mobile apps. HMG has a vision to bring desperately needed hope to young adults across the country and the world. HMG is currently developing new ideas to help reach 18-24 year olds to connect them more deeply to God.


Challenge brief



a post-conference platform for community and discipleship



The pandemic has changed the way that the Chinese Mission Convention (CMC) operates its annual in-person conference. In 2020, CMC shifted away from its typical in-person format to try a virtual format for the first time. The result was an attendance of over 8,000 people, making CMC 2020 its most participated conference ever.


Despite the high attendance at CMC, the challenge of hosting a virtual conference lies in fostering deep connection and accountability among participants, especially after the conference concludes. How might we design and build a platform that facilitates post-conference follow-up—a platform on which conference attendees and church members can build community and take the next steps of discipleship together, through the rest of the year?



The Chinese Mission Convention (CMC) is a ministry whose ultimate purpose is to challenge and mobilize Christian-Chinese and non-Chinese of the calling to be ambassadors for Christ in all walks of life—locally and globally—to reach Chinese, non-Chinese, and unreached people groups.


At the annual conference, attendees hear messages from highly respected mission voices, attend workshops, talk with missionaries and agencies, worship, and pray. Since its inception in 1983, CMC has been attended by well over 45,000 people, empowering and mobilizing churches, ministry organizations, and individuals.


CMC is sponsored by Ambassadors for Christ, Inc. (AFC). AFC exists to reach Chinese intellectuals for Christ in this generation by partnering with churches and other ministries, to evangelize, equip, and mobilize Chinese Intellectuals globally as a vital force for God’s Kingdom through campus ministry, literature resources, training, and conferences.


Challenge brief

Do you want to put your faith and your skills into action?

Join us on October 22-24 to leverage technology to bring the Gospel where it's not.


Register for #HACK NA 2021



#HACK North America 2021



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