After seven years of Indigitous #HACK, the event will pause for 2023. The following year, in coordination with the Lausanne Movement’s L4 journey, Indigitous plans to offer #HACK2024 as a significant opportunity for collaborative action of the global church.
#HACK is a global hackathon for missions where participants create and innovate to solve issues facing their communities. During this mass-collaboration event, Christians join together to bring positive impact, spark digital innovation, and strengthen the global church.
Since its debut in 2016, #HACK has been hosted in over 45 countries and 236 cities with over 7,000 participants completing 315 missional projects that directly impact their local communities. Among the top projects from #HACK2022 were a suite of voice products to report online sexual exploitation of children, created in partnership with International Justice Mission, and a strategy in partnership with Finishing the Task that leverages data about hotspots for suicides to find priority targets for prevention. Other top projects from last year included an app that gathers people to go on prayer walks together, a web platform to visualize missional gaps in Nigeria, and a platform to help people who relocate to a new area find a new church.
Helping followers of Jesus reach their world
With #HACK on pause during 2023, Indigitous will place a greater emphasis on facilitating the growth of Indigitous communities and growing its leadership base while supporting existing leaders.
“With 3 billion people who don’t know Jesus yet there is a tremendous opportunity for those in the Indigitous network to take the Gospel to new people, places and spaces,” says Russ Martin, managing director and cofounder of Indigitous. “Taking a pause from #HACK will allow us to focus on several priorities, including championing innovation of specific projects that bring the Gospel to the missional gaps.”
All Christians can make an impact in their own spheres of influence by using the talents and interests given to them by God. “To invite local and contextualized involvement of the individual Christian in fulfilling the Great Commission, Indigitous will be developing and testing an online journey that equips followers of Jesus to reach their world,” Russ says.
While no global hackathon will be organized this year, some local leaders will continue to host #HACK in their cities. More information on those local events will be available at hack.indigitous.org.