How a Discipleship Ministry Turned Months of Work Into a Decade Saved, Then Gave It Away

There are about seven thousand languages in the world. Nearly ninety percent of them don't have a Bible available yet, and the vast majority have almost nothing for discipleship.

That's the problem Josh Mueller's team went after, and what stands out is that they didn't need permission, a research budget, or a bigger engineering team to do it.

Josh is on the executive leadership team at Waha, an organization that has spent about five years building and distributing a discovery Bible study app and curriculum. The whole product suite exists to make it simple for anyone, anywhere, to make disciples. They're about to hit ninety thousand meetings held through the app around the world.

Five Hundred Lessons, One Language at a Time

Waha's curriculum consists of five hundred lessons, and every new language means editing all five hundred by hand.

At the time of the Gloo AI Hackathon, that took months and months. It also took a specific kind of person: someone who knew the language and knew enough about technology to do the editing. Which meant the bottleneck wasn't just time; it was the same handful of people. "Often the people who are doing the editing are also the ones who, once it's done, use the tools to go and make disciples," Josh says.

So every month spent editing was a month not spent on the actual mission. Josh's team looked at that and asked, "Is there a way for AI to help with this?"

They built it at the 2024 Gloo AI Hackathon. 

AI was in its infancy then, and it took most of the event to build, deploy, and get it working. Josh estimates the tool has saved close to a decade of manual labor since. Waha has gone from just north of twenty languages at the time of that Hackathon to sixty-one today.

"It was only two years ago," Josh says, "but it feels like a different world."

Everyone's a Builder. Because We Were Created to Create.

Ask Josh what gives him the right to build, and he doesn't point at his résumé. He points at page one of Genesis.

"If you start reading the Bible and you stop at the end of page one, we know basically two things," he says. "One is that we're created by a creator, and two is that we're created in his image. And so the implication of that is that we were created to create."

That's the deepest floor anyone in this series has put under the claim. Troy said not all builders are created equal. TJ said you don't have to be a rock star coder. Josh goes further back than either: building isn't a credential you earn; it's a thing you were made for.

And he sees exactly how strange this moment is. "God spoke the universe into existence. And now there are these tools that we can literally speak to and bring into existence tools that didn't exist before, apps that didn't exist before." He's even watched it extend to workflows where you speak, and a 3D printer starts moving. "I think there are a lot of people that are scared of that," he says, "but I think it's an opportunity for us to show up and to show the world Jesus."

The Part Where They Gave It Away

Waha open-sourced what they built. Then it came back to them in a way Josh didn't expect.

At a later Hackathon, he got talking with engineers from YouVersion, whose app carries thousands of Bibles. They recognized his team immediately. "You guys are the timestamp audio guys?" they asked. "We've actually taken your code and used it on all of our Bibles now."

Waha built something that solved their own problem, then handed it over, and it went on to serve thousands of Bibles they'll never touch themselves.

Josh credits Hackathon for that. "It's always just such an amazing atmosphere being around other people who are building towards the same vision," he says, "seeing God's kingdom advance and seeing human flourishing take place all over the world." Like-minded, but genuinely diverse: people from secular tech, people from ministry, and everything across that spectrum. The relationships his team made at both Gloo Hackathons have kept paying off since.

His word for it is camaraderie. What he actually describes is what happens when nobody's protecting their code.

What Community Could You Be the Hero Of?

If everyone is a builder, the claim is simple. You have a part to play.

Josh makes a strong case: "If you look around yourself right now, unless you're sitting in a forest, probably everything in your line of sight came about because someone had an idea at some point." Your life has been shaped by other people's ideas. Plenty of ideas went nowhere. Some of them built the room you're in.

"If you have an idea, if you have something that you want to build," he says, "maybe you have that idea so that by building it you can grow and become more the person who you've been created to be. But there's a decent chance that you have that idea so that when you build it, it transforms other people's lives."

Josh's part was five hundred lessons, sixty-one languages, and a decade of work he refused to let stay manual. What's yours? What community, cause, or mission could you be the hero of this year?

His advice is simple. "It's never been easier to get started. So just start."