I came to realize that between church each week, many Christians were not feeding themselves spiritually any other day of the week. As we know, Sunday is not the only day we are called to spiritually nourish ourselves with the Word, prayer and fellowship. This often leads to lukewarmness, and many times eventually leads to people no longer deciding to go to church at all. 

2. Ministry Competition

Unfortunately, the culture we currently operate in promotes a competition among churches. From my own experience, I became aware that some churches are more focused on building their own kingdoms rather than the Kingdom of God, which has no fixed location, but is rather God's people around the world. It blew my mind to count how many different churches were on one street, let alone one city. It seemed isolation had won the war of division.  

3. Lack of Evangelism

I also came to see that although many churches had people within them, very few were actively sharing their faith with others. It seemed that so many people had lost contact with the early roots of sharing the Gospel with ready feet. Sure, many churches had great pastors, eloquent and sharp with their words, yet I barely witnessed any of the congregations go out of their way to bring people in. It seemed that the love had grown cold for most congregations.

After getting baptized I began to have "Quiet Times" every day. This is basically a time every day to read scripture, pray or take in some godly content. After doing some research, I found out statistically how few Christians actually strive to do this each day. I then thought about something that people usually do daily - drink coffee. Being a coffee lover myself, I could relate. I compared the percentage of Christians who drink coffee every day to the percentage of Christians who read their Bible every day and was astonished. It was not even close.

I thought to myself, “How can you combine both of these habits?” I was met with an idea. Merge them. Create coffee bags, Keurig Cups or mugs with a QR code that leads to a daily devotional every day. The hope was that as people drink their morning coffee, they are also reminded to consume some spiritual content with it. This led me to create a platform dedicated to showcasing Christian content. As people scan their QR code with their coffee, they would be brought to this platform and could see the daily Quiet Time or choose the category of Christian content they were interested in at that moment. My goal was simple - Help people form spiritual habits using the habits they already have in their everyday life.

After some more thinking, I realized that there was no need for me to make all this content on my own. Who am I to be the only one showing you what a relationship with God looks like? There were already so many others creating content for God’s glory and I personally knew the impact that these channels can make on a person’s journey of understanding the truth of Christ. I decided that I would partner with Christian content creators instead, spreading their content for people to see in their morning Quiet Times with coffee. This gave people a wide perspective on what it looks like to seek God, without the isolated bubble or echo chamber effect. It was collaboration, not isolation. It seemed that my first solution was taking shape. 

2. Ministry Collaboration

Next, I thought to myself, “How do people know which church is the right church for them”? An even better question is - What church is actually right in itself? This led me to more thinking, asking myself how I could utilize this platform to connect online people to local fellowship and faith-based communities. I realized that even many of the people consuming Christian content online still lacked a community in which they could fellowship with in person.

I decided to integrate another aspect to the platform. My goal was to connect people to local communities of faith by showcasing local churches, campus ministries, Christian businesses, organizations and events. This allowed people to not only start forming daily spiritual habits revolving around Quiet Times with God but also allowed people to find opportunities to meet other brothers and sisters in Christ and edify one another.

This aspect also allowed these faith-based communities to not only be found by others, but to also post upcoming events in order to spread word about opportunities for fellowship. Once again, I had discovered the power of collaboration over isolation. 

3. Abundant Evangelism

Lastly, I thought about collaboration in terms of evangelism. Being an anthropology major in college and a history nerd, a certain concept came to mind - The Silk Road. For anyone who does not know, the Silk Road was a vast interconnected network of trade routes which connected Rome all the way to China, touching base with many other empires in between. Through these routes, many ideas, inventions, and religions, specifically Christianity, were spread to the rest of the known world. Merchants became missionaries and their message traveled with them wherever their products went.

So what does this have to do with today? Well, the principles still stand, but now it's just a little different. The trade routes of today are spread out along the many roads on the internet. The Silk Road has now become the Silicon Road. However, we can follow the same blueprint as those who spread the Gospel thousands of years ago. I decided to take the concept of the QR code on the coffee bags, Keurig cups and mugs and expand it. I realized that any object you own can be converted into a seed of faith. Whether it be a QR code on your laptop, water bottle, notebook, shirt, or cup, you can carry not only the seed, but lead people to this platform, which serves as the soil for growth far after sowing.

As your seeds of faith travel and you share with others, the hope is that they can also form spiritual habits involving daily Quiet Times, considering they will be brought to the godly content on our channel. The other hope is that they can find local communities of faith and events near them to build their relationship with God through the fellowship of others. You may just simply plant the seed, but now others can water it, even brothers and sisters in Christ you may never know. My hope is that many will spread their own seeds of faith and join this lifestyle movement of taking God’s message everywhere you go. The power of collaboration once again showed itself as the answer.