Build ‘Discipleship Infrastructure’
The world has been rigged to make sin feel natural. What can we build to make it easier to walk Christ's narrow path?
I've spent years thinking about foundational technologies and what future we're actually building. As an engineer and advisor to other engineers, as well as capital providers, I've been asking: What deserves funding, given that it serves as foundational infrastructure to the civilization we should build?
When I launched this blog at the end of 2022, I cast a vision for something like a secular utopia. That was misguided.
I’ve learned a lot in the past 3 years. And as I state in "God Calls On You To Refound America", I now believe we should build toward a Christofuturist society.
I've come to Christ. I've come to learn that the most important thing is that we are saved by the time that we die. Different denominations may quibble over what that means exactly, but largely it looks like declaring faith in Christ and living a life that models and exhibits that your spirit has been changed—that you were reborn. But it's not easy to keep your spirit alive and keep your Godlink strong. It's very easy to be tempted to conform to the world and lose your connection to God—even go so far as many music artists do and quite literally make a deal with the devil.
That's where I'm coming from. That's why I no longer think the purpose of society is the "pursuit of happiness." I think it's the pursuit of righteousness—the pursuit of salvation.
The society I envision we ought to build toward is not one that violates separation of church and state, but one where unapologetically Christian businesses thrive, where Christian values guide our elected representatives, where believers boldly and courageously evolve our systems in a way that God would want us to.
I want villages and townships and digital realms where staying on the narrow path feels natural instead of heroic. This sounds impossibly far away, I know. People will call it wishful thinking. But what else does God want us doing in this temporary realm before eternal life?
The Problem: We're Swimming in Sinfrastructure
Why you might be skeptical of this vision is that our status quo is diabolic. Many of the most successful businesses in the world—from Instagram to OnlyFans to fast food chains—represent an investment in human vice. From a secular/amoral/immoral perspective, this makes sense! The seven deadly sins have unlimited monetization potential because people are sinful by nature. Pride, lust, gluttony, greed, etc—there's infinite demand for these and infinite money to be made feeding them.
We're surrounded by what I now call "satanic infrastructure", or "sinfrastructure"—systems designed to make it easy to create businesses and content that pull people toward sin and away from God.
Consider the surveillance technologies like those created by Palantir that make it easier and more impersonal to monitor, target, and even kill other human beings. Or take the gambling laws that have been passed to make it possible for people to gamble from their phones and become addicts—cryptocurrency, sports betting apps that turn our devices into portable casinos. In the name of "freedom," we've made it easier and easier for people to destroy their lives. While there can be debate about regulation, we should be ashamed of companies that proliferate pornography and gambling addiction as business models.
None of this darkness is accidental. When you let anti-Christians take God out of schools and pour billions into the proliferation of anti-Christian culture, so that entrepreneurs know nothing but optimizing purely for profit in a fallen world, business ends up serving the forces that want to destroy human souls.
But we don't have to accept this status quo.
The Solution: Build Discipleship Infrastructure
How can we counteract this sinfrastructure?
The answer is scalable, replicable infrastructure that helps people stay on the narrow path.
Discipleship infrastructure—which can be physical or digital—makes it easier for people to choose Christ and stay faithful to him. Not just churches, though churches matter.
This includes:
- Open-source platforms and frameworks that make it easy to create Christian media, educational content, and community tools
- Shared legal and business model templates that help believers launch faith-driven ventures without reinventing organizational structures
- Standardized curricula and pedagogical frameworks that can be adapted across different Christian educational contexts
- Digital distribution and funding mechanisms that connect Christian creators with audiences and sustainable revenue streams
- Community-building protocols and technologies that help believers form authentic fellowship both locally and globally
Christianity spread because our church fathers understood infrastructure. The Bible itself—in its different translations, formats, and distributions—has been the most important discipleship infrastructure in history. From handwritten scrolls to printed Bibles to digital apps, each incarnation made God's word more accessible.
Love them or hate them, denominations created systems for discipleship. The Catholic Church built universities, publishing houses, and organizational structures that helped people grow deeper in faith—whether you believe it's the true church of Christ or not, it's undeniably effective infrastructure for spiritual formation. The Knights Templar created the world's first international banking system, establishing secure financial infrastructure that enabled pilgrims to travel safely to the Holy Land while simultaneously funding the Crusades—demonstrating how Christians can build practical systems that serve both spiritual missions and broader societal needs.
This pattern of building infrastructure for God's purposes traces back to Scripture itself. Nehemiah didn't just rebuild Jerusalem's walls for protection—he created the physical infrastructure necessary for proper worship, community governance, and spiritual renewal (Nehemiah 8-10). The Apostle Paul established more than individual churches; he built a network of interconnected communities with shared practices, communication systems, and support structures that could sustain and multiply the gospel across the Roman Empire. The early church in Acts created economic infrastructure (communal sharing), educational infrastructure (apostolic teaching), and organizational infrastructure (appointing deacons and elders) that enabled rapid growth and enduring faith formation.
These biblical leaders understood that sustaining spiritual life requires more than individual conviction—it requires systems that make faithfulness sustainable and reproducible at scale.
The printing press revolutionized Christian discipleship by making Scripture and theological works accessible to ordinary people. Today's equivalent is digital platforms. Angel Studios pioneered one example of modern discipleship infrastructure. Their app / online platform created funding and distribution mechanisms for stories that awaken people to Christ's glory rather than corrupt their imagination. But can they open-source their software?
If Christ could return at any time, and Angel Studios chose to keep their infrastructure hidden so they remained a gatekeeper of independent Christian media, how would God view that decision? As amazing as the Angel team is, they need a lot of help to spread the gospel around the world.
Discipleship infrastructure is not just about individual instances of technology, or an individual church or business that makes disciples, but open-source, open-heart Lego pieces that make creating these instances easier. The goal isn't one Reach Records, but dozens of Reach Records using shared playbooks that detail legal structures, distribution models, and funding mechanisms; as well as the technology that makes it easy to spin up these instances. Are there tech platforms that make it easy to spin up gospel music distribution that fairly distributes payments to artists?
What if Christians with engineering capabilities, funding capacity, and creative gifts asked themselves: Am I building something that makes discipleship easier or harder? Am I creating systems that help people choose righteousness or that profit from their weaknesses?
Take faith-based education. Individual Christian schools matter, but what about the hidden infrastructure that makes it easy to create new schools or homeschool according to Christian principles? Where are the open-source curricula that integrate faith and learning? Where are the educational technology platforms designed specifically to help kids master fundamentals while growing in Christ?
The infrastructure is the hidden layer beneath what we see—that empowers the daycare where we drop our kids, the content we read and watch, and the workplace where we spend our days. All of it should make following Christ's narrow path feel natural rather than heroic.
We want Christianity to flowingly and lovingly spread around the world in a way that respects people's free will. We want the best versions of Christianity—the most loving versions of Christianity while maintaining Truth—to eat the world in the same way that, as Marc Andreessen said, software has eaten the world. So how did it happen? And what can we Christians learn from how software ate the world?
Think about how the entire software world operates today. Every app, every platform, every digital product is built on the backs of people who contributed to open source libraries, who built the open source Android framework, who created the foundational protocols and open standards that power the internet itself. The proliferation and adoption of software products globally happened because brilliant people chose to make their work freely (or nearly freely) available for others to build upon.
The same thinking that spread software adoption should guide how we spread discipleship. What is the equivalent of open source software for discipleship? It includes but is not limited to actual open source software—it's open curricula, shared legal frameworks, replicable business models, proven methodologies, and yes, the underlying technology platforms that make it all easier to deploy.
Learning from Successful Discipleship Infrastructure
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has built the most effective missionary system in modern history. While you may disagree with LDS theology, their infrastructure provides a compelling case study in systematic discipleship.
The numbers: 74,000 full-time missionaries across 450 missions worldwide, supported by 11 training centers. This represents the largest proselyting force of any religious denomination globally, generating 300,000+ annual conversions at peak periods.
The infrastructure: Standardized training curriculum, systematic organizational templates, self-funding models, technology platforms, and proven supervision structures. They built replicable systems that make it easier to launch and manage missionary efforts anywhere in the world.
But here's what I want to emphasize: the best discipleship infrastructure should be open infrastructure.
Imagine if these proven systems were available as open-source frameworks that any Christian denomination could adapt. A Baptist congregation, a non-denominational church, and a Pentecostal ministry could all use shared infrastructure for their evangelization networks, faith-based schools, and content distribution systems.
Open discipleship infrastructure means shared tools, not enforced theology. Different denominations would adapt the infrastructure to serve their distinct theological convictions without reinventing the fundamental building blocks.
Tools For All Denominations
The same foundational tools can serve radically different theological traditions. Just as the internet's underlying protocols enable everything from banking to entertainment, discipleship infrastructure can support diverse expressions of Christian faith.
Consider what denominations actually share at the practical level: Legal templates for starting Christian schools face identical regulatory requirements whether Catholic or Presbyterian. Educational technology that helps students master reading works the same in Lutheran schools or Baptist homeschool networks. Content distribution systems that fairly compensate Christian artists don't care if they're creating worship music for Pentecostals or liturgical music for Anglicans.
These shared tools enable smaller denominations to access sophisticated infrastructure currently available only to large organizations. A rural Presbyterian church could launch digital ministry using proven frameworks that megachurches use, adapted to their specific theological tradition.
This operational efficiency all goes to serve the Great Commission.
Who Should Build Discipleship Infrastructure?
Before we discuss funding and implementation, we must address a critical question: Who is actually ready to build discipleship infrastructure?
The answer is not "anyone with technical skills and good intentions."
Building systems that help others walk the narrow path requires builders who have already spent years walking that path themselves. This means people who have undergone intentional, hard transformation—who have genuinely repented, who have developed their own "heart infrastructure" through deep relationship with God, and who have been tested and refined through seasons of spiritual formation.
Just as you wouldn't want someone who has never built a house to design the foundational systems for an entire neighborhood, we shouldn't want Christians who are still early in their own discipleship journey to create the infrastructure that will shape other believers' spiritual formation.
The best discipleship infrastructure will be built by those who have already been discipled well. People who have spiritual fathers or mentors who can honestly assess their readiness. People who have learned to hear God's voice clearly, who understand the difference between building for their own ego versus building for God's kingdom, and who have been purified of the entrepreneurial impulse to "move fast and break things" when it comes to spiritual matters.
This isn't about perfection—none of us are perfect this side of heaven. But there's a meaningful difference between someone who is actively growing in Christ while building versus someone who is still figuring out what it means to follow Christ in the first place.
The infrastructure we build will inevitably reflect the spiritual maturity of its builders. If we want systems that truly help people draw closer to God rather than systems that simply feel Christian on the surface, we need builders who themselves know what deep relationship with God actually looks like.
The Challenge: Funding Open Infrastructure
Now that we've addressed who should build discipleship infrastructure, here's the critical question that the open source software community continues to struggle with: How do we fund the people who build valuable, open infrastructure?
The secular world has experimented with venture capital, corporate sponsorship, and freemium models to sustain open source development, but this remains largely an unsolved problem. Most critical open source infrastructure projects are chronically underfunded, maintained by volunteers burning out, or dependent on the whims of big tech companies. The "tragedy of the commons" persists—everyone benefits from the infrastructure, but few want to pay for it.
But here's where discipleship infrastructure might actually have more hope than secular open source: Christians are already called to sacrificial giving for eternal purposes.
If we believe discipleship infrastructure is essential for spreading the gospel and helping believers stay faithful, then funding it becomes a sacred calling, not just a business decision.
God-focused financiers should take note and answer this call. The same way Linux Foundation and other organizations emerged to sustain critical open source projects, we need equivalent or better structures for discipleship infrastructure. This isn't charity (which Christians are also called to support), but rather investment in the fundamental, scalable, replicable systems that help people find and follow Christ.
The world already has enough ways to keep people in despair. To keep them fallen. People have already built enough highways and trains to hell.
So let's build the infrastructure that supports our salvation—and find ways to sustain the builders who make it possible.
Conclusion: The Time to Build is Now
We stand at a unique moment in history. The same technologies that have enabled unprecedented global connection and knowledge sharing can either be used to build more sophisticated sinfrastructure—or become the foundation for the most effective discipleship infrastructure the world has ever seen.
The early church transformed the Roman Empire with far less sophisticated tools than we have today. They had scrolls; we have global digital networks. They had foot messengers; we have instant communication. They had local communities; we can build worldwide fellowship networks that transcend geography while strengthening local bonds.
What would it look like if Christian technologists, entrepreneurs, and financiers approached their work with the same systematic thinking that built the internet itself? If we created open-source frameworks that made launching Christian schools as straightforward as launching websites? If we built distribution platforms that helped gospel-centered content reach global audiences as efficiently as entertainment media reaches them today?
The infrastructure layer is where lasting change happens. Individual Christian businesses and ministries matter immensely, but the systems that make it easy to create more of them—that's where movements scale.
Here's how you can contribute:
First and most importantly: Before building anything, invest deeply in your own discipleship. Spend time in God's word, develop your prayer life, seek out spiritual mentors, and allow God to transform your heart infrastructure. Only when you have been faithfully walking the narrow path yourself should you attempt to build systems that help others do the same.
Once you have that foundation—and ideally the confirmation of spiritual fathers or mentors that you're ready—then:
If you're a technologist, build foundational tools that make it easier for other Christians to create educational platforms, media distribution systems, and community networks. For example, open-source Bible apps like YouVersion's API or adaptations of AI-powered adaptive tutors like Squirrel AI (with over 24 million students across China, using granular knowledge points for personalization).
If you're an entrepreneur, choose open frameworks over proprietary solutions and open-source the operational elements of your work that others could adapt.
If you have capital, fund infrastructure work—the legal templates, educational frameworks, and technical platforms that enable other ministries to scale.
If you're in ministry, identify operational challenges you share with other churches, as these common pain points are infrastructure opportunities.
The Kingdom of God advances through both individual transformation and systemic change. We need both the evangelist sharing the gospel one-on-one and the infrastructure builder creating systems that make discipleship easier for millions.
Christ calls us to be the salt and the light in this world. What if we could build infrastructure that makes it easier for every believer to fulfill that calling?
That's not wishful thinking. That's applying our engineering minds to help as many people spend an eternity with our Father.