Evangelizing Technology
Digital Evangelism is Spreading the Gospel … and Technology
In 1956, the same year Jim Elliot and his missionary teammates were killed in Ecuador, another Christian ministry was celebrating its 25th anniversary of work in the country. The HCJB radio broadcast had begun on Christmas day in 1931, beaming its shortwave signal across the capital of Quito to the six or so receivers able to pick it up. By 1956, the ministry had exploded. About 30,000 people each year, from at least 80 countries, were writing in to HCJB, now perched in the Andes at 8,600 feet.
The success of the radio ministry was bolstered by numerous stories of life change like this one: “I was restless and was about to turn off the radio when by the grace of God He guided my hand to tune into the 25 meter band. Today I am a new creature . . . .” The impact of HCJB seemed undeniable.
Over the next 25 years — from 1956 to 1981 — the ministry would invest much more in advanced radio technology, expanding to an array of 48 antennas covering at least 110 acres. And beyond that, they would invest in the power they needed to support their burgeoning communications infrastructure. The age of radio seems quaint to us today, but radio technology in the 20th century dramatically transformed how the world communicated. Radio’s global scale and mass audience was unprecedented. It set the stage for our Internet today, from wifi to cell phones to satellite communications. So when HCJB started in 1931, it was a Christian tech innovator not unlike today’s start-ups, and the ministry continued innovating for the next 80 years.
Like Christian ministries today, HCJB was driven to reach every corner of the globe for Christ. Should any doubt arise, that mission was embedded in their call letters “Heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings.” This evangelistic zeal motivated HCJB to invest heavily in building tech infrastructure. One early ministry engineer, Clarence Moore, even patented his own radio antenna.¹ In its service of the Gospel message, HCJB and many other ministries like them raised millions of dollars to build advanced technical systems.
For many of today’s ministries, the same logic is often used. Spreading the Gospel can justify almost any tech investment. Jim Elliot’s words still ring in our ears: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” Investing in tech infrastructure can pay eternal dividends, or so the thinking goes. Fortunately, with HCJB’s 80-year track record, we can now look back and more accurately count that cost. The radio ministry’s story and journey presents today’s Christian innovators with a case study worth learning from.
From Relational to Organizational
By the early 1980s, HCJB was truly a radio powerhouse, with 10 transmitters drawing more than 400 kilowatts of power. By then they had already built their first hydro-electric dam, generating 1800 kilowatts of energy. The dam, built on Lake Loreto high in the Andes, powered HCJB’s massive radio transmitters, with enough energy left to deliver electricity to the local population in nearby Pifo.
HCJB’s listenership had grown as well. By 1979, the station was receiving some 88,000 letters from 134 countries. The ministry had more than 20 staff managing the correspondence. Responding to those letters was essential. “Without that, we’re just broadcasting the gospel and not doing anything about it,” one missionary reasoned.
This follow-up was critical. HCJB’s broadcast truly became valuable when follow-up happened. But even with 20 staff, HCJB’s correspondence strategy was likely under-resourced. Given 88,000 letters a year, each staff person needed to respond to 12 letters per day, 365 days a year. Perhaps not every letter needed a response. Nonetheless, maintaining correspondence and nurturing those gospel relationships would have required increased resources of all kinds — from writing materials to emotional energy. But the more profound change had to do with the new systems being created to track correspondence threads and manage follow-up.
Today’s internet-based ministries face many of the same challenges, from driving engagement rates to providing adequate follow-up. Some of these ministries, known as “media to movements,” reach and engage people through various social media platforms. Like HCJB, they often have more people respond than they have capacity to follow up with. They train volunteers to engage respondents. Some use automated systems to collect and distribute these messages to ministry volunteers. But even with hundreds of volunteers and advanced messaging systems, many ministries still can’t keep up with the number of responses they receive.² The harvest is still plentiful and workers are few. The reach, for both radio and Internet ministries, has certainly exceeded their grasp.
From reach to engagement to follow-up, HCJB built new systems to address these challenges, and those systems look a lot like the methods still being used today. They built a successful ministry using a deeply technical radio system, and in turn the ministry reorganized itself to accommodate the technology’s deluge. Today’s digital ministries are still restructuring themselves to stem the tide brought by the Internet.
For HCJB in 1979, these structural needs and overwhelming challenges were already apparent with their 400 kilowatts of transmission. Far from the relational forms of ministry in earlier centuries, HCJB was heralding a new organizational form of ministry. Even as the message of the gospel reached farther than ever, the nature of ministry was being transformed in profound ways. The message and the messenger were increasingly linked together through chains of technology. Gospel communities looked more and more like systems and less and less like families. Could HCJB’s expanding global reach justify this transformation of evangelism? Before answering that question, there’s one more aspect of HCJB’s technological efforts worth accounting for.
Powering the Gospel
HJCB’s first hydro-electric dam, built in 1965, proved insufficient for the ministry’s expanding vision, and so by 1983, HCJB had invested five years and $2.25 million dollars to build a second hydro-electric dam that would produce more than twice the amount of energy.
Shortwave broadcasting was energy intensive, and powering it was expensive. HCJB needed a cheaper option. They wanted to be on the air as much as possible, reaching as many people as possible. The gospel seemed to demand it. Having an energy source they could control would be more predictable and more reliable. Shortly after their 50th anniversary, HCJB’s new 500 kilowatt radio transmitter was broadcasting with more power than ever.
Thus, HCJB not only created front-end systems to manage correspondence. They also innovated new back-end systems that would build up their radio platform. The ministry’s board must have seen the long-term value of this major investment. In today’s dollars, HCJB spent more than $6.4 million to build its second dam and produce some 4000 kilowatts of energy.³ While the ministry was already investing significantly in following up on correspondence, it would also invest heavily in the energy necessary to reach the farthest parts of the globe and continue fulfilling the Great Commission.
HCJB’s multimillion-dollar campaign covered the dam’s construction costs, but longer-term they would also have to cover ongoing maintenance costs. They would need more engineers to manage the technical work, not only of radio broadcasting and generating electricity, but also of maintaining the dams themselves.
In 1997, more than 100 meters of steel pipe feeding the first dam collapsed after a portion of pipe ruptured. All of it had to be replaced. Additionally, another 100+ meters of pipe needed to be added to the second dam. Two of HCJB’s engineers, along with a US-based consultant, ultimately concluded that the repairs were justified despite the first dam’s generator being 86 years old, from 1911.
Of course, how could the repairs not be justified, given their ministry purpose? Reaching “the uttermost part of the earth” seemed to depend on it. Assuming you could raise the funds, would any cost be too great? All HCJB needed to do was show that they were reaching enough people to justify these technical investments. So how many was HCJB reaching?
Conversion Rates
To answer that question, we need to understand the kind of radio HJCB was broadcasting. These weren’t your typical AM and FM radio signals like you might tune into in your car. These were shortwave signals. HCJB was transmitting at a higher frequency than AM. To pick up its signals, you would need a special shortwave receiver, and one you knew how to tune yourself. You needed to know which “meter-band” to use and then what “megahertz” to tune the receiver to. That technical knowledge limited who HCJB might reach.⁴
What shortwave radio lacked in ease-of-use, it may have made up for in sheer broadcast reach. Shortwave radio waves could go much, much farther than AM or FM. Shortwaves would bounce through the atmosphere — the ionosphere, technically — echoing all the way around the globe. All the way, that is, if you could send out a strong enough signal. Hence HCJB’s multimillion dollar investment in hydro-electricity.
Another advantage with shortwave was that, unlike AM and FM, the radio signals were hard to jam. As the Cold War churned on, shortwave radio enabled any government to spread its propaganda around the globe. Opposing governments could do very little to censor them. By 1983, an estimated 200 shortwave radio stations were spreading their ideas around the globe. Many were dubbed things like “Voice of America,” “BBC World Service,” “Radio Rwanda,” and more.
HCJB, known as “The Voice of the Andes,” leveraged shortwave radio’s advantages to spread the gospel message. By then, there were an estimated 350 million shortwave receivers around the world.⁵ With a global population of about 4.7 billion, this meant HCJB had a potential audience of about 7.4% of people around the world — even more if multiple people were listening to the same receiver, or if HCJB had local AM or FM affiliate stations. However, their listenership was likely much smaller than 350 million. In the mid-1980s, the BBC World Service and Voice of America each estimated their listenerships at about 100 million globally. That would peak in 1989, the year the Cold War ended. For HCJB, total listenership in the 1980s may have more likely been between 3 and 9 million.⁶
Compare that to today’s reach. One recent analysis of 45 “media to movement” initiatives found that they achieved 48.4 million impressions online from January to September 2022. Of that, over 12,000 people sent direct messages to these organizations,⁷ and nearly 1,800 made professions of faith.⁸ The investment? $125,000. In simple accounting, that means each profession of faith cost just under $70.
Today’s investment costs appear to be radically lower than HCJB’s were. But HCJB was a true innovator. The cost of pioneering new technology will always be higher than those who come after. Few of today’s ministries are investing in massive hardware like radio towers or hydro-electric dams either. Instead, that $125,000 went into the pockets of major ad platforms like Google and Meta. That money goes to renting space and time on the Internet, and to the cost of using the cell towers and fiber optic cables that transmit digital signals.
Since ministries have turned over these back-end platforms to major tech companies, they’ve turned their attention to making front-end correspondence and follow-up more efficient. That means creating more technical systems — from dialog management software to automated responders to AI chatbots. As these systems are installed, evangelism continues to become more organizational than relational. One can track this shift by tracking the growing number of ministry engineers. Ministries are hiring engineers, investing lots of time and money to build this infrastructure, not unlike HCJB did with its dams.
Sacrificing for Ministry … and Technology
HCJB’s efforts not only expanded the reach of the gospel, they also expanded the reach of technology. Today’s ministries will do the same. As organizations continue to take on more evangelistic efforts, ministry metrics will continue to justify building more technical systems. Technical innovation may indeed result in greater ministry capacity, but there’s another side to the equation. The value doesn’t flow only from tech to ministry. Rather, ministry and technology are in a reciprocal relationship. Ministry ends up expanding technology’s reach as well. And that technology is much more ambivalent about what ministries want.
Ten years ago, along my commute to work, I watched as a church building went up for sale. Months went by and soon a new tenant moved in and a new sign was installed out near the roadway. Atop the steeple, the cross had been replaced by a crescent moon. The church had been converted into a mosque.
Many years before, the church had raised funds, hired architects, paid contractors, and invested heavily to erect that church building. No doubt, when the church first opened its doors, the vision in everyone’s minds was the prospect of gospel ministry. That first Sunday, one can imagine, the pastor probably preached about the future ministry that would happen there. And indeed for many years that was the case. Then, for whatever reason, things changed. And the church building turned out to be more of a “building” than a “church.” The building was surprisingly adaptable to another purpose.
Likewise today, ministries must take a long-term perspective on the tech innovations they’re investing in — not just the ministry they dream of, but also how the technology may one day be repurposed. The “ministry technology” they invest in today may, decades down the road, turn out to be much more “technology” than “ministry.” The sacrificial giving and fundraising that is done today may advance technology just as much as it advances ministry. While the hope-filled dreams of ministry will drive that fundraising, some of the sacrifices will benefit the technology too. Finding the balance is a challenge, and leaders will do well to carefully consider what justifies such sacrifices. They will need to see both the benefits that will accrue to ministry as well as the benefits that will accrue to technology.
As Jesus said, count the cost before constructing a building or starting a battle. Today, we can account for that cost with more granularity, thanks to histories like HCJB’s and to data produced by today’s digital ministries.
Technology’s Reach
Radio transformed Christian ministry in the 20th century, and the Internet is doing much the same in the 21st. It not only transformed how the gospel message was transmitted — it also transformed how the ministries themselves were structured and what their daily work looked like. Beyond that, it transformed relational evangelism into organizational evangelism, at scales never seen before.
Today, HCJB’s systems of correspondence likely feel familiar to many contemporary ministries’, but organizations like HCJB pioneered these new systems and structures. Newer methods of organizational evangelism exist alongside long-standing relational ones. This is a profound, almost existential, shift in how Christians do evangelism. It may seem like a natural outgrowth of evolving ministry strategies but is indeed an unintended consequence of the radio technology itself.
As organizations take over more evangelism efforts, the nature of evangelism shifts in some unexpected ways. Where traditional missionaries built relationships with people, organizations begin to focus on creating “messaging” and connecting with “felt needs.”⁹ Where missionaries experienced people personally responding to the gospel, organizations track numeric response rates in the form of statistics: reach, engagement, follow-up, and faith decisions. And where traditional missionaries practiced faithful presence in particular places, today’s organizations see only those places and people that their systems can reach. They risk overlooking those who cannot access the system, whether that’s shortwave radio or today’s Internet — indeed the system can blind its broadcasters. No doubt, Christian ministries are still motivated to reach each unique person, but their systems work in ways that draw their attention away from persons and toward broader social metrics.¹⁰
In 2001 HCJB was celebrating the ministry’s 70-year legacy of broadcasting, but already the mission’s leadership knew that the organization’s days were numbered. With Quito’s growing population, the city’s new airport was about to land just 6 miles from ministry headquarters. This encroachment jeopardized their array of antennas, some reaching as high as 417 feet. Mission leaders discussed moving from their mountain campus to Ecuador’s coast, but by 2003 they had determined the energy costs would be too high. It seems their hydro-electric dams had indeed extended the life of the radio ministry.
By 2005, HCJB began dismantling the transmitters and redistributing them globally. Of the four 100-kilowatt transmitters, two were eventually relocated to Kununurra, Australia, which had already begun transmitting into India, China, and southeast Asia. The other two were shipped back to Elkhart, Indiana, in the United States, where they would be used for parts. Meanwhile, in Ecuador, HCJB had switched to local AM and FM broadcasting — including Ecuador’s first indigenous evangelical radio station, 101.7 FM “La Voz de AIIECH”. HCJB refocused its remaining shortwave efforts on Latin America. Another shortwave site, based in the UK, would target Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East.
From its perch in the Andes, HCJB had, at its zenith, transmitted around the clock in up to 18 languages a day. Then, on September 30, 2009, the site which had been broadcasting for 56 years went off the air for the last time.
While HCJB’s global shortwave ministry had officially ended in its Ecuadorian birthplace, its legacy continues today in the systems and structures that were built throughout its long history. By 2012, the staff of HCJB Global–Australia¹¹ in Kununurra reported that they had received mail from 60 countries in response to their broadcasts in more than 20 languages.
The status of HCJB’s two hydro-electric dams is uncertain. The power they generated served not only the mission of heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings, but also provided electricity to the inhabitants of the nearby town of Pifo. How those people may be using the electricity today is undoubtedly wide-ranging, from the sacred to the sacrilegious. Whether or not the electrical grid still exists, the power it bestowed certainly transformed the lives of the people and communities it reached.
Adam Graber co-hosts the Device & Virtue podcast. He consults on Digital Theology for FaithTech and Leadership Network, and is a coach at Wheaton College’s Center for Faith and Innovation. Connect with him on Twitter @AdamGraber.
¹ “They designed the Cubical Quad antenna to prevent electrical arcing at the tips of antenna wires and made that model available for personal, military and commercial use around the world” (source). Moore later spun off a tech company of his own. Crown International was eventually acquired by Harman, which today is owned by Samsung.
² Other organizations seek to connect respondents with local churches, but even those churches may not have the capacity. Some orgs have developed autoresponders or chatbots to “qualify” respondents and determine how open they are to the gospel. Besides raising the bar for those who respond, respondents’ wariness toward automation has raised another issue. Now when ministry staff or volunteers respond, the first question respondents ask is whether they are a real person or a virtual chatbot. Computers have gotten so good at sounding human that now humans have to prove they are not computers. That’s one thing HCJB never had to worry about.
³ The dam which came online in late 1982 coincided with Ecuador’s major uptick in hydropower starting in 1983.
⁴ Starting in the 1960s, the ministry began airing a program called “DX Party Line,” which grew into “one of the most popular DX programs ever aired” — “DX” being an amateur radio term for “long distance.” Shortwave seems to have increasingly become a hobbyist enterprise. One can imagine “DXers” today connecting through things like Facebook Groups.
⁵ That number would grow to 1.5 billion by 2002.
⁶ This range is admittedly a guess. If we take the 88,000 letters that HCJB says they received in 1979, and we estimate a response rate of about 2.5%, this would give us a figure of 3.5 million. A response rate of 1% would put the listenership around 8.8 million.
⁷ 25 people for every 100,000 impressions
⁸ 375 people for every 10 million impressions.
⁹ This shift also transforms the nature of the gospel that those people receive.
¹⁰ There’s nothing inherently wrong about tracking metrics and statistics, but they do draw our attention away from other types of information. The fact that we can determine a cost-per-conversion may strike some as a tasteless reduction of a spiritual process. And it is. But the fact that we can quantify and calculate such things is evidence of just how much these technical systems have come to frame today’s methods and mindset, not just in ministry, but in every facet of online life.
¹¹ Today, HCJB Global is known as Reach Beyond. Its technical arm continues in Elkhart, Indiana, as SonSet Solutions.
