This is part 1 of a series on our journey to start a new missions organization dedicated to digital missions called Lightworks. Follow along for the latest on our ministry and this startup journey, including lessons learned, vision of what’s to come (Lord willing), and ways you can pray.
For once in my life, I didn’t actually want to be a startup founder.
But God had better plans. Or at least I’m praying and working in faith that they’re better plans. We’re still in the thick of the story He’s writing. It’s challenging, humbling, and exciting, all at the same time.
Let me start by taking a step back.
In case we haven’t met, my name is Wes. I’m a Kentucky native, born to a family of Kentuckians who have lived there for 7 generations. I’m the second in my family to graduate college (my mom was the first with a computer science degree in the 70’s), but a third generation entrepreneur on both sides of the family.
I’ve always loved startups. My family would listen to Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast on roadtrips. My parents ran the family business for 25 years or so. When I got to college, I couldn’t decide between engineering and business, so I decided to cross-train in as many different ways as I could. I re-founded and ran the University of Kentucky’s Entrepreneurship Club for 3 years. I was invited to a team that received an NSF grant to learn how to commercialize scientific research at Stanford University. I worked in a small VC firm after graduating. I went to work at a marketing agency because I wanted to build things.
Startups and business have always been something I’ve loved and that seemed to come naturally to me.
But then, God intervened.
In 2015, I married my incredibly talented wife, Leah (also now my cofounder). 3 months into marriage, we attended the Urbana Missions conference. There, we heard a talk about “Hacking is Priestly Work” that changed the direction of both our lives, professionally and personally.
God used that talk to give us new language to describe a passion that the Lord had been growing in both our hearts since we had started dating - to use our skills in technology, engineering, and design for God. They called it “Digital Missions”.
There, we learned about a team at Cru that was paving the way to imagine how we could use digital to fulfill the great commission. And long story short, we felt the Lord calling us to leave our jobs working with Fortune 500’s and join Cru’s full-time missionary staff as Digital Missionaries.
There, we had the chance to work with some incredible people that were doing amazing things to help people all over the world hear about Jesus for the very first time. Like one team that used facebook ads to show the Jesus Film to 750,000 people, and in less than a month saw more than 20,000 make a profession of faith to follow Jesus.
We got to train local leaders using digital how to better reach their own communities. We got to dream up creative ways of giving people in some of the most closed communities access to discipleship. And we got to reimagine how we could equip believers to share their faith in every country of the world. We were incredibly blessed to be part of the team that did these incredible things.
But of course, in 2020, everything changed.
As the pandemic began it’s lethal assault across the globe, we pretty quickly began to feel the Lord prompting us to pray about how we should refocus our ministry efforts in this season as well. Over time, it became clear that He had wired both Leah and I to be passionate about building digital experiences that make disciples, and we longed to join a ministry dedicated to this work. So we began to explore which missions organizations or teams did exactly that.
To our surprise, we couldn’t find any missions organizations dedicated to using digital as a primary strategy for making disciples.
We were pleased to find several independent Christian products or companies out there, and even several nonprofits exploring how digital could serve their existing ministry strategies.
But we couldn’t find any organizations that were dedicated to exploring how digital could be used to make disciples—from evangelism, to discipleship, to building up new bodies of believers across the globe, to helping each believer live out their unique part of God’s mission.
The entrepreneurial itch, reignited.
God began using this search to put a fire in our bellies. We had conversation after conversation where people would tell us, “Wait. There’s not a missions organization dedicated to digital?”
Not yet!
While we were praying for direction from the Lord, we also did a deep dive to better understand how each of us were uniquely wired by God, and how He might use that in this new season of ministry. Through that process, I recognized that I had, sadly, put all of my entrepreneurial interests on the back-burner when I joined Cru as a digital missionary. But as our eyes began to be opened to the need for a new kind of missions organization, I began to wonder, “Maybe I don’t have to set part of me aside to serve God after all”.
Fast forward to 2022.
Since then, Leah and I took the leap of faith to start our own digital missions organization that we’re calling Lightworks. We left staff with Cru in spring 2021, welcomed our daughter, our first child, in July, spent a few months in parental leave, and have been laying the groundwork for this new ministry ever since. Now, we’re excitedly anxious to start to tell the story God is writing as we follow Him in faith to build a missions organization dedicated to harnessing the power of digital to make disciples so that every person with internet access would have the opportunity to become disciples of Jesus.
We have a long road ahead of us, and a TON to learn along the way. We’re actively praying for the dozens to hundreds of teams that, in faith, the Lord is already preparing to build and use new digital experiences that make disciples.
Follow along by subscribing as I share each step we take along the way. We long to be radically transparent in the way we build and operate Lightworks. We want to inspire a new generation of digital missionaries and help them learn from our mistakes. We want every donor and investor to see the impact of their work, prayers, and gifts, as well as to hold us accountable for each decision we make. And, we want to inspire the Church to see & praise God for how the Lord is redeeming technology and the internet for His good and for His glory.
I’m excited to share the adventure together with you. Won’t you join us?
Update: Want to read more of our vision? Read this post for a bit more about this new digital missions organization.