UNREACHED
In Revelation 7, John shares his vision of heaven with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb.
Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world.
For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining.
Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work through the men and women he has called to reach the UNREACHED.
UNREACHED
From Code to Kingdom: Reimagining Biblical Engagement
Craig Bradley, founder of AO Lab, introduces the revolutionary Seed Bible platform that enables communities to create customizable, shareable digital Bible experiences with integrated multimedia content and collaborative features.
• Creating digital Bibles that communities can fully own and customize
• Building technology that works globally and offline through web-based solutions
• Enabling "playlists" of scripture with integrated videos, links, and resources
• Giving families tools to create generational Bible legacies with personal reflections
• Supporting Bible translators with free-use frameworks and distribution tools
• Working with non-Christian developers who have opportunities to encounter the gospel
• Addressing copyright barriers that restrict Bible distribution and accessibility
• Partnering with organizations like E10 (Every Tribe, Every Nation) to reach the unreached
• Making all technology free without monetization strategies, ads, or data harvesting
If you want to support this ministry or learn more, visit helloao.org where you can watch demonstrations and see monthly updates about this revolutionary gospel tech platform.
Check out this video from Craig to get even more info!
https://youtu.be/KWDSWSpzplo
Follow @unreachedpodcast on Instagram for more!
In Revelation 7, john shares his vision of heaven, with members from every tribe, tongue, people and language standing in the throne room before the Lamb. Yet today there are still over 7,000 unreached people groups around the world. For the last six years, my family and friends have been on a journey to find, vet and fund the task remaining. Come journey with us to the ends of the earth as we share the supernatural stories of God at work for the men and women he has called to reach the unreached.
Speaker 2:Hello friends, dustin Elliott here, your host for today. Welcome back to the Unreached podcast Really cool episode. Today We've talked about this concept of finding new methods, finding new ways to reach the Unreached people, groups around the world, to love our neighbor across the street and across the ocean, and through those of you that have been following along with the pod through, one of those new methods being our friends Scott Eloquin and Switchboard. I got pinged, I told y'all, clint and I both set up a profile on Switchboard and I got a ping from a guy that wanted to talk about his ministry and what he was building, and so I jumped on it. I accepted the invitation and my friend Craig is here with us today. Craig Bradley the invitation and my friend Craig is here with us today. Craig Bradley. Craig is with Hello AO or AO Labs and he is building this integrated tech stack into a Bible. That I wish I could explain, but I don't have to because I got Craig, so help me. Welcome, craig Bradley. Craig, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me, dustin. Yeah, so AO Lab is the 501c3 nonprofit and our website is helloaoorg. It's exciting to be able to work on tools today that can have massive global impact using the Roman roads of the modern world the internet right and so it's all about gospel tech and seeing what God can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, incredible. And so he took me through in this conversation we had through Switchboard. He took me through kind of the concept, what they're building, his background, why he has a passion for this, why he has a skill set for this, and I got so excited about it. I called Clint, I called Brad Thomas, our head pastor. I told him about it and our whole team at the Ridge and beyond is fascinated by this. So, craig, why don't you take us through your story a little bit, get us kind of teed up through how you got into building this type of tech? You were doing it on a for-profit side and then you kind of had a revelation Wait a second, I could do this over here as well. Kind of bring us up to speed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's a weird story, but I just feel like God has led me in a direction for a long time without me knowing it exactly. But years ago I live in Grand Rapids, michigan, so I'm up here hanging out far north from Austin, and I was a venture capital advisor for startups and I was working my way through helping startups build their business plans, their models, things like that, and this patent attorney kept telling me about another guy who kept talking about this weird concept of augmented reality. This is back in 2015, 2014. This is long before concepts like AR or VR were in the popular nomenclature and, long story short, I connected with another guy who was working on that core technology and it happened to be one of the most innovative firms in and around Michigan, and we went on to work with Google, atap. We went on to work with most of the major players. I traveled all the world. I even flew out to Nintendo. I flew all over the world meeting and talking with people from the tech industry and that became my life from 2016 onward to the present.
Speaker 3:That organization started building out this new tech stack for the future that we were imagining. That could be pretty compelling and I saw an opportunity to take that tech stack that was being built and share that with the world. So I founded a nonprofit. With the support and it was even the idea of some of the partners of that organization, I founded a new nonprofit, put all the technology in this nonprofit that was built for education, but my heart was always the gospel.
Speaker 3:So I left that nonprofit and I founded a new nonprofit and that was AO Lab, which is a lab for the Alpha and Omega. That's what the A and the O are for, and our whole mission is to take the tech that's out there that people don't even realize can be used, and to make that freely accessible, free use, maximally powerful for the reach of the gospel and get that out into the world. And that whole tech stack was honestly a revelation as to what the internet can do. People don't fully understand what the internet is capable of of and our nonprofit has built a lot of core technology and used a lot of open source technology that's already out there to create a new platform that will enable everyone to use the internet in new ways. That's a huge opportunity because the internet goes everywhere. It's globally, on all devices across the world, and that's what we want to do so. I'd love to unpack that a little bit more, but that's how I got here.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, so stay with us. Stay with us. If you don't understand everything that was just said, we're going to take this down into terms people like me can understand for all of us. So I think of what you're starting, or what you're working on, and similar to like a Bible app, so you have access to the Bible and you can get in there and you can read it in different translations if you like, and right now that exists, and it exists in the context of I can highlight and I can share, and there's some limited use, but it's nice. It's been a great tool and one of the most popular apps ever with YouVersion and Craig Groeschel and their team, and so when I brought that up, you were like yes and yes and yes and so tell us about the ands.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's a huge—the problems that we're trying to solve are so big. People don't realize these problems exist in a lot of ways, and I can say a lot of sentences that require explanation, because people assume the Bible is so much more accessible and more useful than it is. And until you actually try to apply the scriptures to some kind of ministry application, only then do you hit a massive barrier between what you're trying to accomplish with what God has laid on your heart and where the industry currently is. So that gap is what we're trying to solve and that gap it looks like a Bible framework that is useful for any ministry purpose. Youversion can't do that right now as much as they would love to and I spoke to them about this years ago because of the copyright restrictions that they're under and because of the tech stack that they've built. So our heart is to see a digital Bible that every family can own, every church can own and every ministry can own, that they can customize with study resources, that they can customize with tools for their audience and that they can deploy on demand, online or offline, all across the world. And some specific examples of this would be, for example, let's talk about a playlist. You know, a playlist is an easy thing that most people can understand. If you go to Spotify or any, or even a YouTube playlist, you can find a playlist of songs or a playlist of videos that someone can make. But there's no tool right now that is a Bible that you can make and share a playlist of scripture.
Speaker 3:If I could open up a Bible, make a playlist for tackling anxiety, or let's say I'm a ministry that's targeting a children's ministry and I want to have, for children specifically, a playlist of verses that are going to take that children's ministry through lessons that I've pre-planned, and I want to have, for children specifically, a playlist of verses that are going to take that children's ministry through lessons that I've pre-planned, and I want to include in that links to videos, links to articles, links to songs, even and I want to text that to somebody. There's no tool that lets me do that right now, today, and so, having the ability to take a playlist, put all that into a single link that I can text to someone. They can open that up and then it opens the Bible with them. That capability, right there is a simple tool and it's one of many kinds of tools that we're working on. That suddenly puts the ability to share the Scripture and Scripture resources into a single text and it's just a link. You can share that anywhere.
Speaker 2:So I could take a concept or a topic. I could walk through the seven deadly sins and I could go and I could find scripture relative to greed or envy or lust or whatever the rate I could go in. I could create a playlist of the relevant scriptures through the Bible. Then, within each verse, when I got to it, or my constituents or my group got to that verse, then it would open, next to that verse, videos that I included, links to articles, links to other commentaries around that topic, so they could dive deeper into really understanding what I've curated for them on that topic. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:Yep, exactly, and so we're building use cases and tools like that for a whole host of audiences. Let me just run through those audiences and then we can unpack that in a lot of ways. But we're building tools for Bible translators that are trying to actually create new Bible translations. We're working with E10, every Tribe, every Nation and their innovation lab on that. We're building tools for pastors. We're building tools for families to collaboratively experience God's word together.
Speaker 3:We're building tools for content creators, so Christian evangelists that are going on YouTube making videos. They want to share a playlist of follow on scripture for people to go explore on their own. And we're also making tools for any developer out there that has something that God has laid on their heart that they don't have a way to do that. We're making tools to help them put their dream into action, and everything we're making is 100% free use. There's no strings attached, there's no monetization strategy, there's no gotcha, there's no ads involved, there's no data harvesting. It's very much open-handed. What can we do for the global Christian church that can really make an impact and equip everyone with new tools to live out the gospel?
Speaker 2:Love that. And one other thing I was going to add that you told me I think was possible is I could actually even record on my own phone myself talking about that verse and then I could put that into the playlist or into the family Bible or the group Bible. And one thing that just gripped me was this could be a family Bible that's generational, so grandma and grandpa can go through the Bible, highlight, make notes, talk about what's relevant to them, shoot a little video, even talk about what that verse has meant in their life, talk about you know, this was the verse we were praying over your mom when she was in your grandma's womb. This is the verse that we talked about when we lost your uncle, so-and-so, and this is kind of what was going through our minds. And so then that family Bible becomes something so powerful and so generational that your grandkids and great-grandkids could even connect back to grandma and grandpa, et cetera. Is that right?
Speaker 3:That's exactly right, and the challenge here for years was working on how do we create and we don't have good language to describe this because we think about the word Bible in a certain way but how do we create a Bible that is useful for all of those use cases? So how do we make a Bible that's useful for building a legacy as a family? How do we make a Bible that's useful for immediately sharing the scripture with someone that you maybe don't even know or you haven't even met yet, like a content creator putting video out there for the internet? How do we make a Bible that's useful to explore content in 3D and we have a whole game engine in it. So if you want to explore something like the tabernacle, or you want to know you know where is Jerusalem as it relates to, or you want to know you know where is Jerusalem as it relates to Shiloh or Bethel what do these words mean in context? And so going all the way back to how I began this journey is it was really a quest to discover what are all the ways I could ever imagine myself or anyone else I know and love using the scripture, and how can we make a framework that makes it easy for anyone to accomplish any of those purposes, and how do we make a framework that makes it easy for anyone to accomplish any of those purposes, and how do we make it simple and accessible? And even if we made that, how could we share that with anyone? Those questions led us to a few answers.
Speaker 3:Answer number one is we had to make all of our technology web-based.
Speaker 3:It can't be something that you have to download, because downloads take a long time and not all devices share the same hardware, and even if they do share the same hardware, you know, if I want to give you something that's, you know, 10 gigabytes to download, it's gonna be impossible to use in places with low connectivity. So I had to work offline, and so this is another revolution for people to even consider, but you can actually make web-based internet solutions that work offline. That's what we've been working on, and it has to also be something that can be useful in 2D, in a traditional Bible setting, or going all the way back to 2015, 2016,. When I started thinking about things, it had to be something that could work in augmented reality. If I wanted to walk through the Bible with my son, with my family, I wanted to have a path to be able to get all the way from traditional problems to that future state, and so working on a tool set that could accomplish all those things without overcomplicating that was a real challenge.
Speaker 2:I can imagine.
Speaker 3:Yeah it was. And long story short. You know we've accomplished the core goals and we're looking to be in early access this September, but everything we've been making is all in public, and before I talk more about what the product and what the platform is, I'd like to talk about how we do it. If that's okay, yeah, come on.
Speaker 3:So because the things we were working on were so ambitious that I wasn't sure it was even going to be possible, I decided I would make the ministry a ministry, and so what I did is I went online. I didn't have any money. I had to self fund basically everything, and we've been on small budgets ever since day one, very small budgets, and so the only thing I could afford was developers that were three to five dollars an hour to start, and so I would go on Upwork or Fiverr or forums anywhere, and I would just do anything I could to find developers anywhere, and I was committed to trying to find non-Christian developers, so Muslims, hindus, agnostics, and that's what we did. We built a team of non-Christians and we built a Discord community where we all worked together, and for three years we just worked day in and day out on these tasks and I told everyone I was hiring.
Speaker 3:You're joining a Christian nonprofit. I am going to try to evangelize you at some point. Just know that it's coming. You don't ever have to accept it, you don't ever have to believe. We'll always work together. You'll still get paid, but it's going to come for you. Just by doing life working on these tools, two of our developers have become Christians Wow, and we still are doing active evangelism to the developers working on these tools. Most of them are agnostic or Muslim, or now we have a few Christians that have become Christians, and so even the process of creating these tools for me had to be a ministry, because I wasn't sure if we would even succeed. But we're moving in a good direction, doing good while doing good, yeah, well, and it's critical.
Speaker 2:It's critical right. We're not called to just disciple on Sunday mornings or just disciple our kids or just our life group, et cetera. I mean, we're called to make disciples of all nations. It's very clear, and you got to do that through how you work and why you work and when you work and who you work for right. So it's beautiful to hear you say that.
Speaker 2:I think that a lot of ministries start on a small budget. I think that a lot of people listening to this can certainly relate to that concept, and a lot of it gets built out through sacrifice, and sacrifice being one of the greatest tools for advancing the gospel ever, be it through the persecuted church or through the own personal sacrifices that we make to give our life to God's will and His mission. And we talk about it a lot. Right, you don't wake up in the morning and think, what am I going to do with my day? You wake up in the morning and you ask God, what do you want to do with your day? And you're aligning your life to God's will. And, craig, you're certainly living that out. I'm thrilled that you found Switchboard and we got connected and had a chance to get to know you and understand this ministry a little more. Let's talk about more use cases.
Speaker 2:So our church here at Austin Ridge exegetical teaching right, we're going to start at the first verse of a book of the Bible. We're going to work all the way through it. In fact, we were just in Acts for 15, 16 months and now we're in Revelation. We'll be in Revelation all year and when we're teaching through these books, be in Revelation all year. And when we're teaching through these books, there's going to be, you know, six or eight or ten probably verses per Sunday, but then there's going to be a ton of references back to the Old Testament, new Testament, other places.
Speaker 2:Where did this come from? Where was the prophecy first said? Now we've seen it fulfilled and here it is in Revelation, etc. And so I think of your concept in this Bible and there being a version for our church and I think of our pastor's ability to go in, do his sermon notes and either him or someone on the staff can tag those other verses. You can upload the sermon video. You could probably use some sort of AI to generate sermon notes and you could create something far beyond just a video series that lives online, but it would be a whole teaching component to go with it. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let's unpack that, because that's a great example, and there are so many—I've never attended Austin Ridge—but there are so many use cases for a church body like Austin Ridge that are opportunities for the global church to benefit from and to also follow that model if they want to. So for starters, the goal was to imagine what would a Bible for a community look like, and this is going back to the core challenge of what's limiting the global Christian church today as far as technology goes. Our technology is inherently isolating for the most part. You know you have a Netflix app is for streaming movies, many, many different shows just to you or Disney Plus, or we have social media like, let's say, Facebook or X or you know, TikTok. That's for creating a single piece of media and pushing that one piece of media to many people. But what not many people have attempted to solve is how do you do many to many, how do you get a community of people all creating and sharing content with each other in a way that are going to actually facilitate discipleship, growth and doing life together? And one of the ways that you need to begin that process is by giving a church a space that's. Think of it as in the margins or that study notes section of scripture that is alongside the scripture, so that the content you're making is in context with the scripture. So, going back to what you're saying, Revelation your pastor's preaching through Revelation and there's a sermon now in Revelation 2, verse 4. Well, three years from now, whenever there's a new church member that's studying Revelation, they want to know hey man, I love this church, I love this teaching, I'm hungry for more. And in Revelation, if I want to, I should be able to look at Revelation, chapter two, and see oh, there's the highlight there. You know, so-and-so preached on that two years ago. Let me go up three years ago, whatever it is, Let me go back and listen to that and find that over time. That is one of many examples, and so what I'd like to unpack are a few different types of content that if we could start thinking about as a global church, we could see how much opportunity we're missing.
Speaker 3:So one of the features in what we're working on and I'll talk about the name of it right now it's called the Seed Bible. The Seed Bible is a platform designed to help any community plant and grow a community Bible for their community. So one of the features we're talking about is a layer. So a layer is something that is going to be content specific over the whole Bible. So, for example, sermons. Sermons are a layer of content where, as a pastor, you may have many different sermons on many different passages, maybe even by many different pastors if you're a large church. Different passages, maybe even by many different pastors if you're a large church. But another layer that people might be interested in is arts and crafts. What if I'm a Sunday school teacher and I want to know hey, Timothy is coming up. Are there any arts and crafts that our ministry team has put together for kids to use for unpacking Timothy?
Speaker 3:Or are there video resources, or are there recommended sources that the people want me to go to for preparing some kind of lesson? And if you think about how many moms out there are homeschooling, if you think about how many families are trying to engage their children with the Bible, if I'm a family that just attends Austin Ridge and I want to be able to do some kind of activity with my kids in Austin Ridge just by being a church, having their own children's ministry, creating resources, if they're just putting those resources in a community Bible for families to discover later, well, suddenly we just create this content layer of arts and crafts or kid engagement or whatever you want to call it over time that everyone can benefit from. So sermons, study notes, video content, podcasts, pdfs of arts and crafts. There's songs, worship. What if Austin Ridge Worship was creating songs specific to scripture, the Psalms, for example and I'm an attendee of Austin Ridge, I want to go to the Psalms, I want to find scripture that has pairings with music that Austin Ridge has made. I want to just have access to that.
Speaker 3:So Austin Ridge itself becomes an opportunity for people to experience the media, all forms of media that Austin Ridge is generating.
Speaker 3:And then, hopefully, phase two, as the congregation gets an appetite to go wow, if Austin Ridge makes a song that I can open up the Bible and discover, maybe if we made more songs, more people would open their Bibles, right? Or if people, if Austin Ridge, made content teaching on these specific topics. Let's say Revelation Revelation's a very popular topic. If Austin Ridge has a YouTube channel and puts up a sermon on Revelation and in the link to that sermon says hey, if you want to open up the Austin Ridge Bible, you'll open up the Bible and find other content on Revelation, then suddenly, by sharing content, austin Ridge can share the Bible and by sharing the Bible, austin Ridge can share content. And all of this has to be something that's web accessible. It has to be performant, it has to be fast, it has to be cheap, it can't have ads, there can't be strings attached and Austin Ridge needs to be able to fully own, completely, with no licensing agreement, all of this media. So it's Austin Ridge's now and forever, and so that's what we're trying to work on.
Speaker 2:Okay, Now, this is beyond fascinating and it takes me in a lot of directions, but let's just let's go to the least fun of the directions for a moment, which is who gate keeps it. So you talked about it like layers, right? So there's I'm assuming there's like the A layer, or whatever you want to call it of the pastoral leader of the church, and then maybe the B layer could be the other pastors that are the heads of the premarital or the special needs ministry or the addiction ministry or the divorce ministry or the business ministry or whatever, and they could then put their notes in there or they could tag those for part of what they want their people to connect with. And then you've got another layer that could be community at large, right, Just the folks in the seats, and they may be putting comments in at different levels of maturity, and some may have eyes to see and ears to hear, and some may not. Some may say things that are inappropriate. How do you handle?
Speaker 3:all that. So the answer to how we handle all that is we just leave it up to the churches as to what they want to allow. One of the things we, if a church wants something to be, you know one directional where hey, only approved people can post resources, PDFs, links, whatever. Then that's all that exists, and that's wonderful. If the church wants to open up to a wider community and let everyone participate, they're welcome to do that as well, and the answer is that everyone can set their own boundaries and will support that and build tools to undergird that. What I'm most excited about, though, are for churches to have an appetite to figure out what does it mean to be a community of people in the Word of God, and if we were, what sorts of opportunities might emerge? Let's talk about a few more use cases to tell that story.
Speaker 3:Going back to your Revelation series, let's say the pastor is preaching next week on Revelation chapter 10, and they have a path through the Bible that everyone can see that says hey, next week is Revelation chapter 10. So, hey, anyone in the congregation let's call it the Austin Ridge Bible Go to the Austin Ridge Bible, Go to Revelation chapter 10 and put questions. You have right in there, the pastor will see them and on Sunday we can go through it and we can answer questions the pastor wants to call out and we can answer questions the pastor wants to call out. And if the pastor wants to then take that sermon, that whole moment on Sunday morning, the message, the questions that were answered, and then put that as an annotation in Revelation chapter, whatever it was, then that's there for the future.
Speaker 2:Well, you could do it live, or you could do it after or before. You could pre-record answers or you could post-record answers to the questions and add that as supplemental content.
Speaker 3:Yep all of the above and two weeks later, the church might have questions on a passage that you just spoke about that you want to go back and comment on, absolutely, and so we're going to make tools to support all of those things. We're going to make tools to support all of those things and then we don't know currently what the right mixture of leadership activity and an audience participation or church participation is the right mixture. So our goal is going to give people as much control over the platform to let them figure it out.
Speaker 2:Let me go to the nations. So we are the Unreached Podcast. We've talked a lot about local. Let's talk about global Use cases that I see. A lot of us support missionaries directly. Right, we're part of the funding team that supports a missionary and we may be on a WhatsApp or a Signal group where that person is sharing back images and videos and stories and things that are happening as they're taking the gospel to the nations and we're praying and we're supporting and we're financially supporting and all that.
Speaker 2:How cool would it be to have your own seed Bible within your small community, which I think would give that missionary a lot of support as well as something to do with a lot of their time. A lot of times it's a very lonely thing to go do and now you're giving them a path or you've created a mechanism for the support group to the missionary. So that's one layer, and then another layer could be the mission's team, from the church to the missionaries they support. Another layer could be the sending agency, the pioneers and ethnos and GSIs and all those folks in the world who have 100, 200, 400, 500 teams. They could have an agency-wide seed Bible or they could have them to particular regions, they could have different leaders. Am I getting all this? I mean, you could take it corporate right. My team could have one at work. My whole company could have a seed Bible.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you're exactly right, and what I realized years ago in working on this project is that every individual and every group is its own context and all of those things need to exist. So we started out by imagining not what does a church Bible look like, but what does a family Bible look like for a husband, a wife and the kids to have a Bible that they go through together. But then you also want to subscribe to your local church, austin Ridge, and you want to see what content does Austin Ridge have for me. But you may also want to subscribe to a missionary you're supporting.
Speaker 2:And you may have 10 or 15 or 20 different ones that you're clued into.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then it just becomes a matter of filtering, right, and then you begin to have so many content layers that then the next thing that you build is the feature of turn all that off. Just be in the Bible only by itself, with nothing else. Just be in the word. Just be in the Bible only by itself, with nothing else, just be in the Word. And then, after you've done that, load in the content layers and see is there content from a missionary that I'm supporting, that I can be praying for? Is there a prayer request? Is there anything that we can be a part of? Those are the ways that we should be able to engage.
Speaker 2:You know what I think of. I think of like Microsoft Teams or Slack, where you have different channels and different conversations with different groups, and so, like I log into my Bible and if I've got notifications turned on for each channel or off for each channel, then I can see which channels have had updates, new highlights, new videos, new things added and I can go in there and get caught up with that group. Is that on?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is the idea long term. So we're working towards an early access this September and what we're going to start with is simple reading activity and annotations, because one of our main use cases going back to the sermons being inserted along with the scripture one of our main use cases is also Bible translation itself, translation itself. One of the things we want to support is a team of missionaries in the field sharing for all intents and purposes imagine a blank Bible that has no text in it and they want to all collaborate, with two, three, four people recording audio translations for the oral mother tongue movement, for John, chapter one, john chapter two, revelation, chapter 4, genesis, whatever. And as they are all recording audio, the Bible is updating in real time and building itself out with the actual audio recordings for their target language, or the same thing for text. Maybe you're working on a new Bible translation with a team of people. Once that translation is ready, you can now share that Bible translation from the missionary to that community if they want to use it, and then you can begin improving that over time and that missionary can be working on a new Bible translation, also being a content layer, so people back home can stay engaged with what they're reading personally in the Bible, and they can also subscribe to churches they want to be a part of. And you could also have the sending agencies, all these things.
Speaker 3:What all this comes down to is that every single Christian in the world is trying to grow in the word of God. More useful for every use case translation, distribution, discipleship, evangelism, ministry then we can lift the global Christian church to do all those things far more effectively. We're all trying to tell the same story, we're all trying to translate the same story, we're all trying to disciple others into the same story, but we're not creating and sharing resources that other people can benefit from, except for our own selves. And many people have the heart to do that. There is YouTube, there are these things, but there's no platform that enables me, as an everyday person, to create something just for my son that he can subscribe to and it's just me and my son, but I can also subscribe to the missionary, my church and all the rest. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No, it's revolutionary. What are the biggest barriers right now?
Speaker 3:There are some huge barriers. The huge barriers are the challenges people don't realize exist and so people aren't funding and aren't approaching. Aren't funding and aren't approaching. Challenge number one is that there are, sadly, limitations from copyright publishers from copyright holders, I should say on what people can do with Bible translations.
Speaker 3:So most of the popular Bible translations you don't have permission to use them to make a playlist and share it. You don't have permission to use them to make a playlist and share it. You don't have permission to read that translation offline or anonymously. You don't have permission to take Bible translations like, let's say, the NIV or other popular translations, and you can't just share that Bible with someone because they have restrictions on it. You can only share 500 verses, but you can't share the whole Bible, and so, because there are restrictions that copyright holders place on how the word of God can be shared, there are a number of Bible translations we just don't have access to with a framework that lets people do that. So we need to raise awareness that Bible translators and copyright holders need to have less restrictive Bible translations so that we can enable people to do all these things, because we're just holding them back right now. So that was actually the first problem that we had to solve to even get to the point where we could do what we're doing today.
Speaker 2:Okay. So if you're listening to this and you know a publisher or you know somebody that owns some content or has the ability to influence this space, this might be an opportunity for you to reach out to Craig and connect them and see about breaking down a wall.
Speaker 3:Yes, please do, because we would absolutely make that translation a part of our core product and framework if we had permission to, but sadly we just don't.
Speaker 3:For many of the popular translations, the ones that you're using in your church, we don't have permission to use because there's restrictions on how they would be used, and that's tragic, right.
Speaker 3:You would think that any copyright translation holder would want people to read the Bible, but in effect they say no, we need to know who's reading it, where they're reading it, how they're reading it, how many verses they're reading of it, and if we don't know that information, you can't have our Bible translation.
Speaker 3:So, going back four years ago when I started on this project with a whole team of people it's much bigger than just me but when we started on this project, I naively assumed well, if we can make this framework that can do everything that we're saying it can do and it will be able to, then great, that's all we need to do. But I realized quickly that we wouldn't get permission to use any Bible. So I had to create with our team a new service that we could use but any other person could use, and so we made, going back three years ago, what is now called the Free Use Bible API. We had defined our own translations, we had to source over a thousand Bible translations and we had to put that in a web service that we could use or any other developer could use, and right now it's currently the best free-use Bible resource out there on the web.
Speaker 2:Now I know what you mean when you say people don't know what problems exist Exactly. I hate to think that somebody that created a translation did it with the intent of restricting access to it. That certainly would— I don't want to assume the worst there, but probably just because of the mechanisms that are in place in the legal and copyright structure. That's how it came out and if we can kindly make them aware of it, there may be we could influence some change. But it sounds like you know you just built another version and you've got something to work with now. But there sounds like you know you just built another version and you've got something to work with now, but there's an opportunity for others to unlock theirs as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we actually had to convince—so when I began this project three years ago, there was not a single—and just hear me when I say this, because this is insane, I didn't think this was true—but there was not a single quality modern English Bible translation in a free use state that we could use to do what we're trying to do with this platform. There was not a single translation. By the grace of God, I got put in touch with an organization working on a Bible translation. That's not perfect, but it's on par in terms of readability and modern language with the ESV and NIV and other popular translations, and that Bible translation is called the Berean Standard Bible and you can find their website at bereanbible.
Speaker 3:The Berean Standard Bible was put together by the people at Bible Hub because they had faced this issue for years, and I lovingly, in the name of Jesus, harassed these poor people for a year and a half until they finally gave our nonprofit, unlimited use of their translation and I said that's wonderful, but it's not good enough. It has to be something everyone can use. And they released their translation after much conviction, after much loving harassment, into the public domain. They released it Creative Commons so anyone could use it for any godly purpose, with no restrictions, and we took that translation and we built the Free Use Bible API and added to that API. We have over a thousand translations and counting and that is the Free Use Bible API that's used today. So problem number one is going to lead us into problem number two that people aren't aware of, but let me just summarize problem number one. Problem number one biblical texts have limits on how they can be used digitally and that precludes us and forbids us from sharing a digital Bible that people can use.
Speaker 2:And, to be clear, you're not saying free to use to go in there and edit and change Scripture. You're just saying free to use to supply as is but could be then put onto your platform supply as is, but could be then put onto your platform.
Speaker 3:You both saw, I'm actually trying to say both, but my goal is not to get everyone changing scripture, but my goal is to give translators a scripture that they can just work from and edit and change and modify for their purposes. Right, so that's so that there's two. So one of our major partners is E10, Every Tribe, every Nation.
Speaker 2:And there's an absolute authority on this.
Speaker 3:Right yeah. And until we had released, until we had convinced by the grace of God and it was their gift to the world, use and go wow, I can just take this, I can change it. I can take this English Bible and literally change it word for word into Spanish if I want to, if that's going to get me to a result, or into any other target language that's going to get me to a result quickly. That then I can refine and hone over time. So there is a huge need for translators to have Creative Commons, free use, public domain resources that they can just take and just start translating with, without having to jump through hoops, sign waivers, have red tape. That's a big need we're trying to solve as well. Problem number two is let's say you have a text that's public domain. That's like having water without a bucket. That's public domain. That's like having water without a bucket. If you have a text but no way to distribute that text, then you don't effectively really have much of anything. So, for example, the entire Bible text for the Berean Standard Bible that came to us in basically a large think of like a large notepad text file where it's just all those words just jammed together. It's unreadable. It's a massive, unstructured file. You can't give that to someone to read. You can't read it yourself, like it's just, there's no formatting. You just have all these words dumped onto a page with no clarity to it. How do you take that text and then share it with other people? Well, we built our own parser. We did all that work. We put that in the API, but then we had to also make technology to let anyone else who had a Bible text out there share it with their audience.
Speaker 3:So, going back several months ago, I was talking with a Bible translator making an Arabic Bible translation. This man is in the field. He's a missionary working on an Arabic Bible translation that he has and he wants to give away. But he has basically a Word document and that's it. He can't text a Word document to someone and let them just open up the entire Bible. First of all, it breaks Word. Second of all, you can't read the scripture that way. You need to have a framework that lets you take that and load that chapter and verse right Like a traditional Bible interface. So we made that framework into the seed Bible that now any translator can use, through our API or through their own resources to distribute translations.
Speaker 3:So problem number two is that there's a lot of money flowing into Bible translation and that's good. It should. Obviously that's a huge need. But there's not a lot of ways for translators to distribute their translations unless you personally get permission from YouVersion or email it to BibleHub. It's very difficult.
Speaker 3:If I'm a translator with a Bible translation, it's difficult for me to share that by myself with a community I'm trying to reach with that translation. On a technical level, just to clarify here if there is a translation, you know, copyright aside, whatever those issues are aside people need a way to then quickly distribute that over the web to an audience, and so that's what we're trying to make tools for is for that pipeline. If I'm a translator, how do I quickly get my translation out to the world? Because we're trying to solve literally every use case with the scripture. How do you translate, disciple, get community into the word, share the word with people how do you do all of those things? That creates a big problem. But if we can build tools that address those issues, we have a massive opportunity to let everyone everywhere do that today.
Speaker 2:Love it, love it. Okay. So some barriers there being, kind of copyright issues and red tape and what's free use and what's not, and how do we kind of break those walls down? And then, based on the platform that you're building, there's going to be a way for translators to maybe work together and hopefully achieve an end result faster, more efficiently, have that end result be open for free use and not end up with some kind of red tape. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:Yep, and we're working with E10 to make that happen and we're building tools to support that too. And so it really is. Just our goal is to make tools for every use case. Like I said, translation, distribution, discipleship, to solve content distribution issues and to equip every believer, every church, every family, to fully live out whatever God places on their heart in the Word of God for others to enjoy and to benefit from.
Speaker 2:All right. So here's the ask to the audience. I mean, you know this podcast will never be monetized either. We don't have ads. This is just a gift that Clint and I and a few others really love to put out there. But I have no problem asking for help and support of causes that we feel really moved by. And so, craig you, craig we'd love for our audience to consider financially supporting what you're doing. We'd love for them to consider reaching out to you if they have contacts or they have some talent that they can share to help move this ball down the field. And so, to that end, give them your website and how to reach you real quick. Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:We would greatly benefit from that. Our website is helloaoorg and every month, at the start of every month, I do a YouTube monthly update. There's a video that you can watch where, if you're like, what is he talking about? How does this work? I'll show you. There's a demo. I'll walk you through it. It's easier to show than tell some of these things and that'll all be available for you. And right now we're at a point where we have enough money to get to an early access launch, but by the end of the year we don't have what we need to continue and our goal is because we're working on the Bible itself. We don't want to monetize that. We just can't be in a position where we're putting monetary barriers between people and God's Word itself. So you know we're dependent upon donors to fund and partners. So we're looking to connect with anyone who has a heart for that and that's what we're asking.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. So I'm going to load your 501c3 into the NCF National Christian Foundation Donor Advice Fund so anyone that's an NCF DAF giver will be able to find you there. I'm going to work on that this week. If you're a part of another one of the major platforms, let's get them loaded up in there as well. If you can help, that'd be great. I think the kingdom could grow massively through this new method and just the thought of taking it home, even my wife and I being able to curate a Bible that our kids will grow up with and we can have for the family.
Speaker 2:It's great to have a physical Bible that you can hold and turn the pages on. Don't get me wrong, this isn't going to replace that, and that's fine for Bible reading and quiet time and things like that. But to add all these other pieces and have that be generational, have that be transformational for your company, for your team, small group, d group, life group, church mission organization, et cetera Really special man. I'm so glad God put this on your heart. You know what we do here at the Unreached Podcast, craig, is we ask the guests to pray for the listeners at the end of every episode. So if you would man let the Lord speak through you and lay it on us.
Speaker 3:Heavenly Father, thank you for the joy that it is to serve you. Thank you that you have given so many people across the globe talents, passions for creating resources for sermons, for knowledge, for new Bible translations, for all sorts of things we haven't even thought of or conceived yet. Father, I just pray that you would help us to equip the church with tools to effectively be who you've made them to be all the more, and I pray that you would have the global church be one as you prayed in John 17. And, god, I know that you don't need technology, you don't need our team, you don't need the internet, you don't need anyone to accomplish your purposes, but we know that you love your children and that you love to work through your children to do these things. And so, father, I just pray that you would do that here and now, in 2025, as we seek your will and seek your face through our team and through all those who are working in this way. In Jesus' name, amen.
Speaker 2:And amen. Thank you for listening to Unreached. Our sincere desire is that what you've heard today will cause you to see the mission of God differently and your role in it more clearly. If this adds value for you and we hope it does would you please rate and review the podcast wherever you listen. Also, share with your family, your friends, your church, your life group, small group, dgroup, wherever you do life, and if you want to connect with us, find us on Instagram at unreachedpodcast, or email us at unreachedpodcast at gmailcom. You.
