Tools, Technology and Missions

How Modern Technology Fuels Modern Missions

In a previous post, I spoke about the profound connection between money and missions. Today I want to talk about tech, tools, and missions, and how they can benefit missionaries serving abroad and the advancement of the gospel in difficult places.

When many Christians think of missions, their minds often go back centuries to a bygone era. We think of William Carey, David Livingstone, and the heroic age of long sea voyages and handwritten letters. We think of those who packed their belongings into coffins because they knew they would likely not return home before dying. Things have changed a lot since those days, but the mission of God still continues all over the world, and we now live in the era of modern missions.

Missionaries can now jump in a vehicle, hop on a plane, and be on the other side of the world in less than twenty-four hours. Instead of waiting months for a letter, the modern missionary can call, video chat, or message a home church or family member instantly. Email and digital newsletters have replaced snail mail, and ministries like ours now run podcasts and media channels that invite the body of Christ into the action. Our approaches to frontline missionary work are essentially the same. We still go sacrificially to evangelize unreached people groups, make disciples, plant churches, and train pastors. The way we go about doing the work, however, has changed quite a bit. We now have some rather wonderful tools at our disposal to assist us in the advancement of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

With great tools, however, comes the risk of some pitfalls. New tech and new tools don't automatically help us. Not every new advancement is actually beneficial. Sometimes they can harm us or entangle us. Social media can be a great blessing, but in many cases it does more harm than good. We'll save that discussion for another post perhaps in the future.

The digital world, what I like to call the digital piazza, is a wonderful supplementary space, however. Today we can create podcasts, radio shows, and videos without needing expensive radio towers or massive studios like in times past. I consider these kinds of ministries to be like supplements. These tools and places can never fully replace the face-to-face time, hospitality, fellowship, and Bible teaching that happens in communal settings like the church and homes. They are supplements, not replacements. Good supplements, like certain vitamins or herbs, have their place in our diets.

For the missionary, especially newer ones, there’s a particular temptation regarding the digital piazza/world. When we experience difficulty or loneliness in a barren land, the natural pull is often to retreat. Instead of being driven to Christ to better learn the language and to go to the lost, we can slip into a habit of connecting with people back home to soothe our discomfort. This can kill our drive to evangelize. Missionaries must be watchful. The digital world, when rightly understood, should push us outward to the harvest, not pull us backward into isolation.

With that warning in mind, here are some of the modern tools and resources I find to be a great blessing in my work as the founder and director of Practical Missions Cohort, and as a frontline missionary evangelizing, making disciples, and church planting here in Italy.

1. My Digital Librarian: Recall AI

Generally speaking, I'm hesitant about the use of AI today. I've been hesitant to use it, and I've seen some of the slop and the dangers of chatbot interaction. If we're not careful, it can dehumanize us or dumb us down, making us mentally slow.

Sound biblical theology helps us to be on guard with tech like this. We understand the sinful, depraved nature of unregenerate man and the dangers of things that man creates.

However, when we see AI as a tool like any other to be yielded for kingdom work, we can learn to use it appropriately to enhance our productivity. I much appreciate Tim Challies' reflections on the subject of AI and writing, for example, and I land in the category of a person who sees AI as a useful editorial aid or assistant for research, structuring, and editing in the work of writing.

One of my favorite AI tools thus far is Recall. It serves as my digital librarian. I can upload all my ebooks (in PDF and now EPUB format) and interact deeply with the author's material. (I now often prefer to buy certain books digitally so I can engage with them more).

With Recall, I can chat with my library content at any time. I can quickly find a concept I remember reading, extract short summaries of sections, gather quotes quickly, and even group books by hashtags. It lets me pull together points of view from multiple authors on the same subject—a phenomenal resource for a missionary, pastor, teacher, evangelist, and disciple-maker. It also allows me to interact with YouTube videos and Spotify podcasts, extracting the core teachings without losing hours listening, and jumping to specific points when I want to go deeper.

Additionally, it has built-in quizzes that work wonderfully for reviewing (recalling) and mastering books and other content. This is a great tool for strengthening your retention of and mastering subjects and material.

If you want to try it out, you can use my referral link for a 10% discount!

2. The Broadcast Studio Kit (On a Missionary Budget)

We live in a wonderful time where broadcasting is accessible and cost-effective. We no longer need to purchase radio towers and airwaves to broadcast the word of God and sound biblical teaching. We can do much more and much better for a fraction of the cost!

• Side note: Did you know that the radio was invented by an Italian named Guglielmo Marconi? It's true; our lives have been blessed in many ways by the Italian people.

Since the pandemic, we’ve increased our video and audio output for Missions Incorporated, the Missions Academia, and Vera Vita. After testing many products and services over the last several years, here is the budget-reasonable setup we currently utilize for the advancement of the gospel:

• Video: Canon M50 camera connected to a Mac M1 mini via an HDMI card reader.

• Lighting: Two main spotlights (Amaran Verge and Small Rig RC 60B) plus a simple background light tube.

• Audio: Rodecaster Duo interface with various mics. Our current mic of choice, surprisingly, is the Behringer XM8500—with a couple of tricks and some light processing on the Rodecaster. These simple upgrades make it sound very similar to the much pricier Shure SM7B (the gold standard for serious podcasters). It also appears similar to the SM7B with our strategically placed low-profile Elgato Mic Arm and a windscreen. The XM8500 mic is one that surprises many due to its very affordable price. We also use a more expensive, but still low-cost, Rode PodMic. It's great, but after honest evaluation, we prefer the Behringer even though it is not as aesthetically pleasing. For my voice, at least, it just sounds better.

• Recording/Broadcasting: We use Ecamm Live for recording and streaming. It works flawlessly for our shows, enables us to customize all our scenes just the way we want them, and allows us to switch between profiles for different shows like Vera Vita Podcast and Missions Incorporated Podcast. By creating our shows with Ecamm, our post-production editing is greatly reduced, and our production quality is increased enormously.

• Control: A Stream Deck 15-button pad lets us jump between scenes and views with one push, drastically reducing our post-production editing time.

• Ear Monitors: We use the Linsoul KZ ZSN Pro Dual Drivers. They are low-profile and work great. I never liked the idea of wearing clunky studio headphones. Once we discovered the ear monitors, it was like going from a Windows machine to Mac; there's no going back.

3. Editing & Repurposing Content

When we do edit longer content into segments (a vital part of the ministry), we use a few key tools. We’ve loved LumaFusion on the iPad for editing, as amateurs. For streamlined workflows, we now use mostly Descript (and are considering Riverside in the near future as an upgrade/replacement because we might start doing more interviews with guests). Descript gives us a transcript for our audio and video files and allows us to edit video by simply editing the transcript. This is a slick feature that makes editing and clipping accessible to almost anyone.

• Thankfully, we now have a well-trained editor assisting with certain projects. He uses DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro.

4. On-the-Go Content: The Pocket Kit

We recently started recording shorter segments out in the piazza to let ministry partners see the mission field while we share lessons or updates. After much research, our newly formed kit is incredibly simple:

• A DJI Osmo Pocket camera

• The companion DJI M3 wireless microphone for improved audio

• A short tripod

• A protective case for throwing it in a bag

• Polarized lenses to handle bright sunlight

This setup powers our “Practicum” series on practical, everyday mission work. It also serves our Q&A sessions, field reports, lessons on evangelism from fresh encounters, theology deep-dives, and application discussions. We record, plug it into the computer, upload it to a shared drive that our editor can access, add an intro and outro, and publish.

When traveling in the US to promote the ministry and visit the supporting churches, I also use a compact setup for studio-level podcast recording.

For an audio interface, instead of the Rodecaster Duo, I use our older but almost as good Zoom PodTrak P4. Then I connect our XM 8500 mic to a basic mic stand. I use the same style ear monitors on the road; they're compact and easy to pack in the kit. For a video camera, I use the Osbot Tiny 2 Lite on a small tripod. Everything gets connected to a MacBook Air. Next time we take the studio on the road, we'll pack one of our old LED spotlights too because good lighting is crucial.

5. AI Chat Assistants (Grok, Gab, Lumo)

I don’t fully trust AI chatbots, nor do I believe they do better work than humans, especially in the work of creating, but I do use them for specific tasks to save valuable time. They can be useful for handling grunt work.

Grok is useful for information gathering because it seems balanced and a bit less biased towards the woke left. When I want a bit more assurance of privacy with my interactions with chatbots, I use Lumo by Proton. It's part of my email subscription, together with a cloud storage drive, VPN, password manager, calendar, and video call center. Privacy online is something I think we all need to be more careful about, especially as we enter more and more into an era of seemingly constant surveillance by the state.

My preferred choice for a chat assistant, in any case, is Gab AI. I'm aware that Gab is often labeled as right-wing extremism, but it's helpful to separate the social platform from the AI tool. Their AI interface is a separate thing and is worthy, in my opinion, of attention. It's built with a Christian worldview as a top priority and respects privacy. I don't know of any other general AI platform that can say that. It may be the only current platform that doesn't subscribe to the secular-progressive censorship frameworks common in platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

With it, you can create and train custom “agents” programmed for your specific field of interest or work, so you don’t have to explain your context every time. You can upload PDFs, create collections, and interact with it based on your materials. It stores memories, learns who you are and what you do, and tailors responses accordingly. You can even have it send daily email or notification updates on news or topics you care about. It handles PDFs and, if you're into it, generates images and video—all in one place.

I primarily use these AI tools for research, summaries, editing, and fielding resources for teaching, preaching, and writing projects.

Rather than lazily telling a robot to write something from scratch (like some do today), I use AI as a tool for editing and even to extract my own words from my audio/video recordings.

I can take my transcripts, ask for title suggestions, generate brief descriptions, or request an outline or topic suggestions from my content for a blog post based on my own spoken teaching. It’s like having an editorial assistant available to transcribe and repurpose my sermons, bible exhortations, and lessons for further reach.

This is where AI, in my opinion, helps to level the playing field, so to speak. Typically, only very influential or wealthy folks could afford to have a team of assistants to do this kind of work. Now, with some knowledge and skill, even the everyday missionary can access these advantages for the furthering of the gospel in unreached places.

The AI tools are also great for translation work. I can take articles that I've written in English for PMc (or sermon notes) and have them translated into Italian. Our Italian editor just has to review and make a few changes, but it's mostly grammatically correct and very fast on its own.

6. Writing, Notes, and Task Management

In the work of missions, like most ministries, writing plays a key role. We write articles and blog posts for the mission organization and for the Italian outreach ministry, Vera Vita Press. We also write gospel tracts and booklets for the Italian people. Writing is also a critical part of the ministry of the Word. Writing is part of the work of sermon prep and expository preaching. Here are some tools I find beneficial for the writing, note-taking, and project management aspects of our missionary work.

• Obsidian is my writing platform of choice. I link all my notes, outlines, courses, and teaching series there. It’s not for everyone, but it’s my go-to. If you're a bit nerdy (or particular) like me, you can even take a look at the cool constellation-like graph that it generates from all your notes and see how things are linked together.

• Apple Notes is perfect for simple, on-the-fly note-taking. I can even now record audio and let it transcribe into text, which I then paste into Obsidian for deeper work.

• TickTick is my task and project manager. It syncs across phone and computer, is free, and handles categorized to-do lists wonderfully. This is helpful for a missionary like myself who has various fields of responsibility: family, outreach, mission admin, content creation, writing, study, church, etc...

• Proton is my email ecosystem. I’m steadily moving away from Google because I don’t trust them (and nothing is truly free, except the Gospel); Proton is paid but protects your data and privacy. It's based out of Switzerland, works great, and is worth the price for security.

• Notion serves as my hub for content creation (podcasts, videos, etc.), media calendars, and team collaboration on our various projects.

• Canva is the tool we use for creating visuals like thumbnails and presentations. It works great, especially since we have the Pro features for free through the nonprofit organization.

7. Digital Team Spaces: Discord

I used to prefer Slack as a messaging platform, but when it started deleting content older than three months, I switched to Discord. It was designed for gamers, but it works great for ministries or teams too. We have a server for The Italian Cohort. I see it like a digital coffee bar with different tables of conversation to share ministry news, photos, links, and updates. We have another private server for the internal workings of the PMc ministry and our board of directors. It’s a far better system, in my opinion, than group texts on WhatsApp or endless email chains.

8. Audiobooks for the Whole Family

One danger of our age is the use of screens like smartphones and tablets. Many parents, in the busyness of life, hand the kids devices to keep them quiet. I don't believe this is a good practice. Parents must be wise about how much time their children can spend on a device and what kind of content they can access. Even we adults must be disciplined with the use of our "smart" phones. This too is another topic of its own, worth a separate article.

Recently, we came across Sherwood Kids. It's an audiobook platform designed for the whole family and helps develop a love for books. We love it. Our kids love it too! Check it out. If you listen to Michael Foster's podcast, Settled and Grounded with Michael Foster, he mentions a code you can use to get a 10% discount. That's what we did.

The platform works great and is beautifully designed. I'd say it's good for the everyday Christian family, but also great for missionary families like ours who are often on the road. It works seamlessly on multiple devices. The audiobooks can also be downloaded ahead of time, which works great before a long road or air trip.

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In today's post, I spoke of how tech and tools exist for the advancement of the gospel and the discipling of the nations. I also shared some tech tools and services I use and recommend as a missionary and mission director. Not to be overlooked, however, is one of my most important analog tools: the smooth-as-butter fountain pen ("stilografica" in Italian) and the paper journal. 

Daily, I take time to prayerfully record my thoughts and prayers in a journal during my bible reading time. This process of being able to pen my thoughts has, for a long time, helped me to clear my mind, pour out my heart to God, and gather thoughts for various projects and teaching lessons. I could go without many of the digital tech tools I spoke of today, but I would be hindered in every way without my trustworthy pen and paper. There is something very human and good about doing things the old-fashioned, slower way. Walking and biking also have a key role in my life and ministry.

In any case, here we are in a rapidly changing world where the digital world is now part of our reality. The mission of God continues, and Christ is still Lord of heaven and earth. He is actively reigning in the midst of it all. Though there are real dangers, we have, nonetheless, unprecedented tools at our disposal for advancing the Kingdom of God. Like all new periods of technological advancement, we must be thoughtful and wise regarding our approach and use of these tools.

The work the Lord has called us to is great. Tools are useful and good when used rightly. They enable us to increase our fruitfulness and advance the gospel all around the world. They help us maintain our fellowship even from a distance, and enable us to shine the light of God's word into the digital piazza to serve the Kingdom.

I’ll likely review and expand this list one day, but for now, these are the resources and tools that are best serving us on the front lines and as we incorporate more people and churches into the Lord's work in Italy. SDG.

What tools are helping your ministry?

Are you a missionary who has benefited from certain unique tools too?

If yes, let me know in the comments some tools that you appreciate.

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. - Romans 11:36

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Written by Jesse Schreck | founder, director, and missionary church planter in Italy with Practical Missions Cohort

Did you get anything out of this post? If yes, consider sharing it with a friend, buying me a coffee, donating to PMc, or subscribing to receive our newsletters.

Interested in learning more about Biblical Missions and Missionary Church Planting in Italy? Visit practicalmissions.org or missionsacademia.com.

To see and be more involved with the frontline work in Italy, join our Discord community — The Italian Cohort.

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Related Content:

Money and Missions: Why God’s Economy Matters for the Great Commission — A look at how Christians should rightly view resources, wealth, and stewardship in relation to advancing the Kingdom.

[Ask a Missionary] The Need for Italian Bible Resources

https://youtu.be/PF63W-Dg_nE