Mark Gillmore: Hello once again, and welcome to our Go Mission podcast. I’m Mark Gilmore, and today I’m privileged to be sitting here with Brother Matt. Welcome. Hello. It’s good to be together once again. We have fellowshiped in different venues through the years, and why don’t you just begin by sharing how God first began to give you His heart and His calling for you specifically into reaching the peoples of the world.

Brother Matt: I was in law school when the Lord really started a personal revival in my life. And this began with my parents and God’s work in their life that flowed over into me. And I started walking with the Lord and interacting with Him and His Word and prayer in a deeper way than I ever had before. And so when that happened, my desire was to go serve the Lord. I want to tell people about the Lord. And then here I am in law school and I’m having to study my law book. So I decided to study the Bible more than I studied my law books, and I still got good grades. So that was good. But then coming up to a holiness conference here in 2002, and responding to the invitation and spending time in prayer, and he’s had God’s clear call to go into global Great Commission work. And so I went to Pennsylvania and got trained there. In a local church. In a local church, yep, yep. Right. So capitalized on my Christian school upbringing and my Christian college Bible minor and then got trained in practical things in the church and then sent over to the Middle East. And it was there where I was burdened for particularly the country of Jordan. And I was asking the Lord, like the way you worded this, how did God work to get my heart for the nations, for the peoples of the world? Because I see Jordan, right? 97% Muslim, 95%, 97% Muslim. You’re watching people. You can stand in America and pretend like everybody can go to heaven, right? Because there’s churches everywhere and there’s Christian radio and Christian television and people are handing out tracts. And there’s all those things happening. You go to a country like Jordan and everyone you see is hellbound. It’s a dreadful thing. And so I start praying for Jordan and I start preparing to deliver the gospel in Arabic. And I’m doing all of that. And I’m wondering in myself, Lord, am I asking for something too big when I ask for this whole country, when I ask for everything from Umkais in the north to Aqaba in the south, from the Jordan River in the west and over to Azarak in the east? Am I asking for too much when I ask for this? And the answer in my heart was, I’m showing you, God says, I’m showing you just a little bit of my heart for all the nations. Right? And so that burden, obviously, as the Lord does that, I then get sick. And I’m having to leave Jordan, so I ask him another question. And I say, how are you going to reach Jordan when the people you send to do the work, you allow to get sick? And the answer to my heart at that moment was, watch me. And that’s been an amazing lesson to learn. It started when I go to the farewell meeting in Jordan, our church, and people were giving different testimonies and sharing stories about our time there with them and what it meant for them. And one guy stood up, one of the men in the church stood up, and he was a sharp man, PhD in physics from the University of Basra in Iraq. And he said something that blew my mind. It’s not at all what I thought anybody would say. But he said, as Iraqis, we think Americans are invincible. you go where you want you do what you want and when you’re done you go home he said matthew came here and matthew served us and got sick and then he said i can get sick so why don’t i serve and that blew my mind that he said that but then what was awesome was what he did following that was as I left the ministry there and came back to the States for treatment, he took over everything I was doing and more and did it better than I was doing it as an Iraqi man could. And I’m like, I wish I could get sick again so somebody else can, this is wonderful that God did this. I’m like, oh, that’s how you’re doing this. And now this is so amazing, Willie Gilmore, but I just, you know, I’ve thought about that story so many times and I’ve shared that story more than one time. And then I still wonder, how do you reach the whole country? How do we get people in that whole place of Jordan where there’s so many places where there aren’t believers and there’s so many pockets where there’s no gospel witness? And I’m over here and I’m not over there and I’m doing, I’m working with the nations here. And this summer I’m sitting at a campfire and I’m facing some disappointments in ministry and different things. And I’m talking to the Lord and the Lord brings this idea to mind about using the World Cup opportunity to reach the nations that are coming here. So I started thinking about it and praying about it and planning for it, doing all these things. And then I learned that this is the first year that Jordan has ever qualified for the World Cup. And so the country of Jordan is one of the 48 that will be coming to the world this year. The first time we’ve hosted it since I’ve come back from Jordan in America, they’re coming. And here’s what’s amazing. When all the different nations come, they set up training camps somewhere. And one of the potential training campsites is next door to a Baptist church just around the corner from where I live. And I don’t know if Jordan’s going to get there, but I’m sitting there thinking, watch me. Like, watch me do this. Watch me. Watch me put this together. Like, don’t give up on this. Don’t give it over. Don’t think it’s not going to happen. Don’t stop praying for it. Right? But watch me. Watch me show this to you. I’m going to show you how this works. I’m going to reveal to you in front of you in real time how these things happen. And now think of all the Jordanian people are going to be so excited. And they’re going to be right around churches that are listening to us now. People that are from Jordan living near you from June 11th to July 19th are going to be so excited about this. And it can be a great opportunity to reach out to them, to engage them, to give them the gospel. And they’re from not only Jordan, but from all over Jordan. So how can you reach the country of Jordan? You might just do it in America. and you might just do it through some crazy thing like a World Cup happening. And you might just watch me do these things that you can’t conceive of.

Mark Gillmore: That’s what God’s message to me was. Let’s come back to that at the end, just that World Cup opportunity and perhaps an email way for young listeners to connect. Yeah, for sure. But here you have just a comment there on your getting sick, your story God’s used in other lives as well. that making that sickness a weakness that in that mission context becomes an open door for others seeing the grace of God stepping in. Awesome. And just a reminder there, Paul said, when I’m weak, I’m strong, that God actually worked through our weakness to advance his gospel spread. So praise God for that. Amen. At first, it feels like it’s the death of something or the end of something, but it was not because God’s grace is there. And now you’re telling us this story. That’s just amazing. Now, as you arrived there, going back to your entry into Jordan, what language do they speak there? It’s Arabic. Arabic, which is a real challenging language to pick up and learn. But God’s given you an ability with language. You were speaking it in

Brother Matt: how much time? Yeah. So I was part of a great program there. It’s really, really amazing how do it. I was able to preach my first sermon in 13 months.

Mark Gillmore: Yeah. So within, and normally you’re talking about three years or four years, but, uh, so I,

Brother Matt: I love, well, some of that’s because of, of, you know, like you said, God gave me some ability. There’s a great program. And then I showed up to preach while the pastor was gone. He had me fill in and the, and the translator didn’t show up. So I either spoke or I sent him home. So I’m like, well, let’s just try it. And a lot of missions is like that, right? It’s like, this is not ideal, and so go ahead.

Mark Gillmore: Yeah, which is a reminder, like, the most important thing of missions is go, you know, and put your health in that context where you have to step out. But God has given you the ability with language and others as you got there. And now, speaking of language, and when I, I’m thinking that God has connected you with you, with an amazing language ability that is beyond human here. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. And, and when we think of our day, we’re living in a day of amazing technology. I mean, everyone is hyped about AI and the potential. Yep. And we’re aware of, we’re warned about its possible use for evil. And no doubt it’s going to be used that way. But the creator of all technology is actually God himself, and he wants to harness it and use it for good. Right. And recently you have just gone to something that probably a year ago was not even possible. Right. And now you’re employing that in a communication device that is multilingual and is designed for the communication of the gospel, especially in the context of churches. Exactly right. So tell us a little bit about this technology and how it works.

Brother Matt: Well, when the Lord called us to work with the nations here, I started wanting to tell pastors, hey, reach these nations that are around you. And the pastors, I’ll never forget one in a rural part of Illinois, he said, I hate handing out Spanish tracts. And I was surprised that he said that because I found people love getting tracts in Spanish if they speak Spanish. They’re like, oh, that’s our language. We like this. He said, I hate it because the moment I let go of that tract, I can do nothing else for that person. If he reads it and responds to it and comes back to my church, I can’t do anything. All I’ve got is that. And I thought, you know, you’ve worked cross-culturally and cross-language barriers, even not knowing the language. Like, you’ll find a way. You’ll draw pictures or you’ll do something like this. This is a comfort zone. Right. We’re okay.

Mark Gillmore: Right, right. So many other people. Sure.

Brother Matt: don’t know what to do. They don’t know what to do. So part of what I did is I went around and we started this seven years ago, making a simple platform where a pastor anywhere can post a sermon, get an instant machine translation of his notes, and then share that with people so that whatever you make, people around you can have. Like that was the idea behind that. Well, as we worked on that, refined that and try to get people in it, the real goal is to get to where a person could speak and then somebody could hear it in their language. And now with the advent of AI and those crazy, amazing algorithms, which, you know, just to help people know this, AI is complex algebra. It’s very complex, but that’s what it is. So if you’re worried about what’s behind this thing, it’s math. So if math is evil, then it’s math. So that’s the thing it is. So I think that kind of helps me as I think through this.

Mark Gillmore: What we think of is this humanoid intelligence.

Brother Matt: Right. It’s algebra.

Mark Gillmore: It’s not.

Brother Matt: It’s algebra. It’s y equals mx plus b. And then this equation one solves for new variables for equation two, three, four, five, ten, ten thousand. And it’s stacked algebra all in those kind of linear type things. And there’s other kinds of equations. But the point is, it’s just math. And I think people get away from that. Now, it’s so powerful and the processing so quick, it can do a lot of really cool things. And one of those is translate human languages quickly and easily. And so now we’ve added to our initial platform. We’ve just launched the speech-to-speech option. So somebody walks into your church, and we post the QR code in our bulletin. They can scan it, hit their language, put in an earbud, and then watch the preacher as they hear it in their own language.

Mark Gillmore: Okay, so say that again, because this is immediate speech translation from one language that the speaker is immediately into the hearer’s language.

Brother Matt: For the last two years, we’ve been doing speech to text. Right, speech to text. And that speech to text has been great because it’s so fast.

Mark Gillmore: Yes.

Brother Matt: In less than a second, usually. The person’s speaking, and then you’re seeing the transcription happening and the translation. It’s so fast, it’s amazing. Now, when you add the speech module, that’ll slow it down a little bit. So in our app, we’ve just now launched a new feature where there’s a speed control button. So what was happening the first couple weeks we ran this, the preacher would be preaching, the listener is listening and the preacher said the closing prayer and this, the listener still has two or three minutes of sermon to go. Right? So we’ve added a couple of buttons to help that experience, you know, what’s going to stop people from listening or following along. So we, we have a speed variable control. Now we have a go live button. So you can skip to the end if that’s where you are. Like there’s things like that that we’ve added to make the experience better, but it’s a very light program. The only kind of, um, the only sort of subscription needed is on the broadcaster side. So the church sets it up. The church puts the sound into a laptop. You can even use an iPad. I’ve done that on an iPad.

Mark Gillmore: Anything that’s got a microphone you can speak to or plug a microphone in, this thing works.

Brother Matt: It sends the sound up. It gets transcribed, translated, and distributed in about two or three seconds and sent out to all of your people whatever language they pick. What’s great about this is some churches like yours and mine, we have human translators for certain languages. We could do Spanish, French, Swahili, Russian, Arabic. We can do those on any given Sunday. but I don’t have Telugu. Yes. Right. I don’t have Thai. I don’t have Dutch. I don’t. But with this, I do. I hit the button. How many are there? How many languages? Well, we can add anything we know. Yeah. It can be 70 or more. Right now we’re doing, I’m doing as people ask for them. So, so I’ve added about 35 or so right now, but there’s more available and it’s a, it’s great because it’s a demand draw. So the, when the user comes in, he sees all the languages,

Mark Gillmore: selects the one that he wants. Right. And then he’s going. And you, you, in our service just the other night, we actually had a number of languages represented and you illustrated what was like. And, and so folks access this just through a smartphone. Right. And it’s not even an app

Brother Matt: to the viewer. It’s just in their browser. It’s just in the browser, uh, like a QR code or something

Mark Gillmore: like that. They access the live feed and select the language and across our auditorium there, folks selected any random language they cared to hear. And we had just multiple languages just being played on smartphones for a minute or so. It just was the coolest thing. It’s like a repeat of the day of Pentecost in reality, exactly what it is. And literally that, and even the day of Pentecost, why did God do that multilingual thing that day? Well, at the core of it is he wanted the gospel not to be hindered by language from day one. And that’s all God did. He just crossed the language barrier. That was the heart of it. It certainly was a supernatural sign of God using

Brother Matt: different languages to communicate the gospel. Yeah, I heard a professor call this anti-Babel, which I thought was great. So the curse of Babel, the judgment of Babel, reversed at Pentecost.

Mark Gillmore: It was reversed. Yeah, that’s what God did at Pentecost. Well, that’s like what is happening right now through AI. And if you think about it, that should be like one of the most exciting gospel breakthroughs ever. Like we have just overcome that language barrier. We know Satan wants to use that for evil. God wants to use it for the gospel. That’s what he does. That’s right. This is amazing.

Brother Matt: That’s right. And in fact, with recorded material, if you have videos that are recorded, there’s a group called Eleven Labs that can actually dub your voice into the foreign language. So it literally sounds like you speaking Chinese. It’s your voice. That’s crazy. Now, that can’t be done live yet, but that can be done with these other voices. So pretty amazing what can be done and great opportunity for gospel outreach.

Mark Gillmore: So in our show notes here, I think we can put a link to your program, right? Excellent. Yeah. So those listeners, I know some of you are teenagers in your church, but you could let your preacher know, your pastor know, your youth leader know. Look at this tool. Check out this link, and we’ll have that there available. This is really absolutely thrilling.

Brother Matt: Yeah, they can visit youconvert.com. That’s the letter U-K-O-N-V-E-R-T dot com, and they can learn more, start a free trial. What we’re trying to do, we’re trying to make the tool, and others are making tools now. When we first got started, there was nobody else in the space, which is why we got going, because who am I to start a technological platform? I mean, this is not. But the Lord put it together. I was at a Christmas party for Russian speakers, and I always share my ideas with everybody. And I’m telling this Russian guy, he goes, oh, you tell my brother. He’s a developer. He was 18 years old at the time, Maxim Vakarchuk. And I explained what I had. He goes, say it again. And he wireframes it out on his laptop. We’ve been working together ever since. And now we’re iterating so quickly. It’s been awesome to watch that.

Mark Gillmore: Well, let’s take just an ordinary young person, you know, approaching someone who has another language, speaks another language. What tools might be available or what means on just that one-on-one, maybe apart from this program, that could encourage me to cross that language barrier or enable me to cross that language barrier?

Brother Matt: Well, one of the things we did in our congregation to help with that initial touch, initial interaction with somebody, is I realized there’s a lot of uncertainty and fear, right? So can I even talk to this person? Can I communicate them to them? So what we did, and this is any church could do this using our platform or using even another platform, is we took our welcome tract and put it into convert, translated into all the languages spoken around us. And then we made a little business card that said welcome in the middle and then welcome in all the languages that we had at our church. So like 15 languages or so is on there. And then in the back is a QR code and a church address. So you walk into somebody, they can’t say a word of English. You scan it with your phone, show them how to do it. They scan it with their phone. They can now do it. Now they’ve got the gospel on their phone. It’s a great first touch, right? It’s a, it’s a wonderful way to kind of start things out. So creating tools like that are useful. I think it’s, you know, interactions with people, you know, especially if you’re peers, if you’re a young person and you’re listening to this, you know, approaching somebody who’s your age and just showing interest and saying hello. And, you know, soccer ball is a great way to make a friend, you know, easy things you could do to kind of, to kind of indicate, Hey, I can interact with you. We can have a friendship. And I think that’s a great touch point.

Mark Gillmore: Is, is something like Google translate work? Is that useful? Can you use that?

Brother Matt: Yeah. And those are changing all the time. I mean, thinking that technologically, Apple just announced the new AirPods that have AI built into the AirPod and that’s able to translate live and you hear it as it’s in the, I think it’s in six romance language pairings right now. So it’s kind of limited the number of languages. They’ll add them as they go. It’ll get better and better. But those are great. Google Translate has a divided screen where they can look at one side and you can look at another. And then you can go back and forth with the phone. That’s all good and useful. And certainly a lot that you can start with on there.

Mark Gillmore: Yeah. I would encourage you to try even that AI earpod, but also the Google Translate. I know a friend of mine right here in our local ministry is using the language of Bengali, I believe, and they’re just talking back and forth. And he’s witnessing, giving the gospel. So dive into that.

Brother Matt: Yeah, there’s a great group that has a tracked app. And I’m going to blank on the name of it. I think it’s called World Missionary Press. Have you heard of this? Yep. And they’ve got an app you put on your phone that has their main, one’s called Help From Above, I think, and it’s translated into a bunch of languages, and they’re on your phone. So you can easily ask the language, find the language, open it up. Another one that’s cool, we had visitors who came from China to our church, and they brought their little girl, and it was her second day in the country. She was maybe four or five years old, little Chinese girl, had never been away from her parents, and her parents put her in the nursery, in the kids’ church meeting for that age group. And she just sat there and just wept. She was crying so badly. And so they came and got me, and I went in there. And so I did a couple of things. I opened up Google Translate and I said, do you need a drink? And it said it in Chinese and she nodded yes. So we took her and got her a drink. And then I brought her back to the classroom and they were giving a lesson on something. And I had the Jesus Film app on my phone. So I opened that up. I found the same Bible study that they were doing, same topic in that film, put on the Chinese version. She sat there and got a lesson about the same thing everybody else was getting. There’s always a way to do this. When you have these human interactions in church, one of the things I tell the nursery workers is, They don’t know how to, these foreign names are difficult. So when you ask the parent, what’s the child’s name, open up your phone, get the voice recorder, and record the parent saying that name. So now when the kid’s crying, you can turn on the voice recorder and let them hear the parent’s voice and saying their name. And you can practice it and say it correctly. And little things like that you figure out along the way to try to make use of technology to help the ministry.

Mark Gillmore: Yes. So here’s a couple tools you just mentioned. One was at the World Missionary Press website, multi-language there. And I know those tracks are actually filled with a lot of direct scripture creation. That’s powerful. Another one that is God’s Simple Plan of Salvation. Yeah. Their website. I’m printing those out too. Has got like 70 languages or so. And you can print out. So that covers a lot of languages there. You can print those out and hand-hand that.

Brother Matt: One of the things I do when I do sermons that I’m trying to get into a language. Maybe I have the notes already. I want to put them in a different language. and I want to get a reliable Bible translation in that target language. Sometimes the bigger websites, Bible Hub, Bible Gateway, they have so many choices. How do you know which one to use? How do you know which one’s good or faithful or reliable? So in those cases, I like to go to wordproject.org. And wordproject.org is a cool site. I think it’s put out of China, actually, by some missionaries. But what’s neat about it is there’s one reliable translation for every language, and that’s it. So if you’re trying to think, I’m lost in this. I don’t know which one to use. If you know which one, great. Use the one that you’re supposed to use. But that was a helpful tool to me where I can pull up a language. I have no idea what the background is. And I’m given a reliable translation in that language.

Mark Gillmore: Oh, that’s exciting. Let’s end here just with that. You’ve got your burden is for the nations. And here’s this tool that enables us to reach the nations that have come right to our own community. And we just obviously in this recording want to encourage you to engage those nations right from here. Now, this coming summer is the World Cup. Right. That is an international highlight. Yeah. And the nations are going to come to our shores, to our cities. How many cities is it?

Brother Matt: 11 cities in the U.S., two in Canada, three in Mexico. 48 nations competing for the championship.

Mark Gillmore: Yes. And that is going to bring, you mentioned even folks from Jordan coming. Right. And you’re organizing that kind of outreach. What are you inviting folks to be a part of?

Brother Matt: Yeah, that’s great. So there’s a two-prong approach, and you can learn more about this at worldcup.nextdoornations.us. And the two prongs are things that we’re going to do evangelistically at matches, at sites. And we’re doing site surveys and finding those things and finding where can we be and how can we interact and how can we meaningfully do this? And then also where churches are not located near one of those 11 cities, that’s going to be most churches, you know, but if you have foreign populations near you, they’re going to be excited to watch their countries play. That could be a great opportunity to do an event for them, a mini World Cup tournament, seven on seven soccer, or to do something like a watch party. And then we’re going to provide at the halftime, we’ll provide videos of testimonies of believers from those countries that they can play at the halftime. So now let’s say Jordan is near you. You got Jordanians around here. Jordan’s playing in the World Cup. You do a watch party, get to halftime. And I’ve got Jordanian people, videos of them sharing how they came to know Jesus Christ as Savior in Arabic to Jordanians anywhere you are. It’s just a powerful idea. So we’re going to develop all these things, put them online. You go to worldcup.nextornations.us. You’ll be able to sign up as an individual who wants to help in some way or a church who wants to help in some way. And then we’ll use that website to be able to feed you information to get you what you need to do the work.

Mark Gillmore: So I’m just thinking that for us as Americans, World Cup is often kind of secondary. I think it’s growing in awareness of soccer and so forth. But we’ve got to realize that in the mindset of many of these other nationalities, World Cup is huge. It’s the thing, yep. And we need to enter into that mind and think, if you’ve got connections to individuals who have, you know, these, you know, international loyalties, get behind this and invite them and set up a big, you know, a big screen. Sure. Yeah. I suppose you could also, if you may not have those, you could know like there’s a neighborhood or something and we might be able to take a lot and put up a big thing or something and then set up this halftime.

Brother Matt: You know, and as the lawyers would like me to do, there are limits on FIFA. How many people can watch one screen at a time? So all these broadcasting things come in. All those resources will be available on our website. So nobody gets taken away and hauled off or anything like that. It’s usually if it’s over 100 people, you have to have a different screen. It’s for private viewing. Anyway, so we’ll iron out those details. But the main thing is to think, like you’re saying, think aggressively. Think of how we can use this. And the hope of all this isn’t that we just do an outreach at the World Cup. The hope is that in gearing up for that window from June 11th to July 19th, All these churches will say, wow, these nations are here. These people live next door to us. And this will be the spark for ongoing cross-cultural ministry right here in the United States. If churches want to get started and wonder, are there nations, dear me, that are related to the World Cup teams or other nations, you can go to statisticalatlas.com, type in your zip code, and then click on the word national origin over on the right, and you’ll get to see all the different nations that have representatives living in your zip code.

Mark Gillmore: And then that ties back into these ongoing connections. You think, well, how in the world can I keep an ongoing connection? Well, that comes back to your technology.

Brother Matt: Right.

Mark Gillmore: Now you can actually make your regular meetings multi-language just like that. And ongoing discipleship and ministry and church life is going to happen.

Brother Matt: You know, these churches are filled with grace and blessings. God’s filled our churches with all of these wonderful things. But when someone comes from another country, they can’t access it. It’s as if there’s a shell around it. And translation devices like Convert, platforms like Convert, allow you to crack that shell so that who’s ever near you can get whatever grace God has put in your church. We had a man this summer who came to a special Chinese badminton event that we did. And he had come to America for work. He’s determined to learn something about Christianity. He was a Buddhist, but he thought, I’m going to America. I want to learn something about Christianity. Just completely on his own. So when he landed in Indianapolis, it was in a certain part of the town. He found the nearest church and went there. He walked in. He couldn’t understand, and he walked out. Thankfully, he told his coworker, who was a friend and a believer, and said, why don’t you come to this event here? He came in. It was the first Sunday I had the AI speech-to-speech. I spoke. It came out in Chinese, and the man goes, now I understand. That’s amazing. It’s just awesome.

Mark Gillmore: So your website, your main for your technology is UConvert. Yeah, U-K-O-N-V-E-R-T. Okay, so it starts with a U and a K, then converts. Right, you got it. Com. Com. Yep. So go there. Well, thank you. Praise the Lord. I feel like we’re on the edge of a wave of gospel breakthrough through this kind of technology. That’s right. It’s amazing. Yep, praise the Lord. Like just a year or so ago, we couldn’t even have this conversation. God is good. I am absolutely convinced that in a world of 8.2 billion souls, God is doing more than ever to reach these nations. It’s not becoming less possible. It’s actually becoming more possible. Agreed. If we’ll have that kind of faith, if we’ll watch for what God’s doing through these open doors, including technology. Right. So praise the Lord for that. young people, God wants to use you as you respond to the open doors around you. And pray that some of these things we’ve said today and tools will be employed by you. So remember that in a world of turmoil and uncertainty, the only way to have peace is to stay on mission with Jesus in his go mission.

Mark Gillmore: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Thee Generation Podcast. If you have an issue you need help with, we have a resource that can help you. The Battle Plan for Victory is an online resource designed to help young people deal with personal sin issues through the Word of God and ultimately