Big-data Missionary Work

On 26 December 2021, the NY Times published an article titled "Churches Target New Members, With Help From Big Data."  As a UCI student you can get free access to the NY Times, but you will probably need to use the UCI VPN if accessing it from home.

The gist of the article is that a small company, Gloo, analyzes online data to identify individuals who might be most likely to respond positively to churches' missionary outreach.  And just what does the analysis identify as indicators of possible positive responsiveness to outreach?  People dealing with physical and mental-health challenges, for starters, although the company no longer uses mental-health data.  But tens of thousands of churches are using Gloo's services, so a large number of religious leaders evidently see this use of big data as a promising way to court new members.

Companies in many industries use online data in their advertising efforts, so this is not really a new idea in and of itself.  Perhaps this is one of the earliest applications to evangelizing, but I cannot really say for sure.  I can say that this is one of many examples of how churches will use a variety of methods that perceive to be useful to pursue their missions, even when those methods are copied from secular businesses.  Indeed, churches have historically been some of the earliest adopters of new technologies (think of the printing press!).