What to Do When You Can't Google It

Have you used Google or another internet search engine in the last week?

What were you looking for? Breaking news? The weather forecast? Shopping? Entertainment? Information to make decisions? It seems more and more that we are all becoming information junkies.

But what needs to happen in the background for Google to work?

For you to find the information you want on the internet, someone first had to anticipate your question, gather data, organize it into a useful format, and publish it on the World Wide Web. (We will not go into the technological advances of the last 25 years that enable us to access all the information on the World Wide Web with a smart phone that you can hold in your hand.) If someone has not taken these steps, your search would not turn up anything relevant.

The Global Research Team of One Challenge specializes in finding out information about world mission that you can’t find with Google.

For an example, let’s consider the topic “God at work...”

Google “God at Work” and you won’t find much. But this is the type of question we delight to search out ( See Psalm 111:2 for our inspiration). How do we go about this?

First, we need to identify the types of things that God does. For this, we turn to the scriptures, where God reveals what he is doing. For example, in Matthew 16:18 Jesus says, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” So, to find out where God is at work, we would then look for evidence for where the church is growing.

Fore example, earlier this year we prepared the Annual Ministry Report for the OC Global Alliance. The OC Global Alliance consists of OC International in the United States and 13 other Mobilization Centers around the world. The “hottest spot” within the Global Alliance is one particualr Disciple Making Movement in Asia. Last year this movement established over 10,000 new churches and saw over 57,000 people become followers of Jesus Christ. This movement has spread into 45 Unreached People Groups in 17 Countries, and evidences exponential growth since 2010. And, oh, I should add that this is taking place in a large, Muslim majority nation. Now that is God at work!

Truly Jesus is building his church and the Gates of Hades are not prevailing against it! This is just one of over 650 other similar movements in the world today among Muslim Peoples, Hindus, Buddhists and even officially atheistic countries– something inconceivable 25 years ago. Certainly, God is at work in the world today!

So if you are facing a ministry challenge that you can't solve with Google, contact us. We'd love to explore how we might work together to discover God's breakthrough for your situation.