Faith, Innovation, and the Church’s Future: Rethinking Tech and Ministry (Kevin Kim) Ep. #231

Dru Johnson (00:00)
What would happen if tech giants in Silicon Valley started thinking of their skills as gifts from God to be used for the church?

Well, join me as I talk with Kevin Kim, an outrageously gifted thinker, a pastor, and the head of an organization called Basil Tech that actually wrangles together volunteer coders and user interface people, all kinds of tech people from Google and Apple in the middle of Silicon Valley to do their work to the glory of God. It’s a fascinating project, a place that God has put this guy in life so that Kevin knows the right people who can pull the right strings.

so they can think about innovation and technology in responsible Christian ways rather than the loosely guided ⁓ incentives that lead in technology often. And, and he also has been gifted in that he thinks about exactly how this works out in the church and how it could benefit the church in missions and other places. So stay tuned.

Kevin (01:05)
was a part of a large church in Silicon Valley called Menlo Park at that time, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church. And this is really cool place because it’s situated right next to the Stanford campus. And so you have a lot of ⁓ really influential and brilliant minds that attended the church. And one of the guys that attended the church who’s now a friend and a business mentor of mine, his name’s Gary Hamill.

Dru Johnson (01:17)
Mm.

Kevin (01:32)
And he, you know, like Wall Street Journal, number one business thinker in the world, Forbes most influential business thinker, know, adjunct professor at the London Business School. And his specialty is innovation, particularly management innovation, you know. So he consults with, back then, Steve Jobs, know, Tim Cook, Michael Dell on these innovative companies. He helps them make their companies even more innovative. And so that’s like his jam.

Dru Johnson (01:47)
Hmm.

Kevin (02:02)
And he’s a believer. back in the day when Willow Creek had their leadership summit, I mean, I think they still do, but when it was like, you it was the thing, he gave a talk there on ⁓ like the need for creativity in the church. And so he’s bringing in all his insights from the business world. And so, I mean, just crushed it. But in attendance was another person that went to my church who was, you know,

Dru Johnson (02:07)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, when it was the thing, yeah.

Kevin (02:30)
⁓ very successful venture capitalist. And so, and who’s passionate about the kingdom. And so he said, man, like we gotta, we can’t just listen to this talk. We gotta do something about this. And so he got Gary and a few, ⁓ you know, ⁓ know, folks from the church who are like Gary together and said, I’m willing. And he said, I’m willing to like blank check this project around.

Innovation in the church and so Gary you got to head it up and then ⁓ one of the ⁓ people there was Tom Kelly who’s who he and his brother David Kelly founded Ideal and Ideal is one of the like the world’s most like renowned design companies innovation companies, know, and so, you You had these like head honcho gurus there and then this VC saying like I’ll like fund this project around

⁓ Creative Innovation for Mission and Ministry. And somehow through like the orchestration and grace of God, I got like plucked in and got to be a part of this like little project where we were working with the Stanford D School and you know folks were working in Google Ventures and IDEO around how do we take these ⁓ tools and wisdom from

these sectors, the sectors of technology and business and startup, and use them to think creatively about the church and the church’s mission. a lot of the pushback was, ⁓ that sounds like Ministry of Technique and Harvard Business School, and it’s got to be like prayer and fasting. And I’m like, yes, that’s absolutely. ⁓ But the question for us wasn’t like, could this

Dru Johnson (04:14)
Mm.

Kevin (04:23)
like replace prayer. The question for us was could we get a room full of people who are dependent on the Holy Spirit, humble prayer, listening to the Lord and have them go through and use like these like tools of common grace to think outside the box about the kingdom work that they do. And so it was a two year run and I felt like I got a free MBA out of it. And then it’s out of that that, you know, like all these like little

Dru Johnson (04:49)
Hmm.

Kevin (04:53)
projects and experiments around faith and technology kind of sprouted out of.

Dru Johnson (04:58)
I don’t think I’ve ever heard that story before. That’s good to know. I mean, maybe heard bits of it, but a lot of things make more sense now. I’ve heard that short coherent version of it. I just knew that. I knew you knew people. No, it’s just kind of like I get bits and pieces here. Like you knew people, you’re part of some kind of incubator for doing something innovative in the church. I think…

Kevin (05:01)
Really?

The long drunken meandering vision that I was telling you.

Dru Johnson (05:26)
Maybe you should separate out for people and use as few acronyms. It’s like talking to somebody in the military here. So VC is venture capitalist, D school is design school, I assume.

Kevin (05:35)
Yes.

They actually call it the D school, but yeah, it’s like their design school, yep.

Dru Johnson (05:40)
Okay, yeah. So

step out of Southern California for a second with the rest of us. sorry, sorry, sorry. I forgot. I’ve even been there to your house, so I should know better. ⁓

Kevin (05:46)
Northern California, we’re offended. How dare you couple me with the people

from LA.

Dru Johnson (05:57)
But ⁓ I think a lot of people will hear tech and design and innovation and they won’t be able to separate out what’s the difference between those things. They just think tech means phone means app. So when you say innovation, like what are maybe an example of what do you mean by something where like innovation really helped in a situation or really helped people break free from the logjam of ⁓ the ideas.

Kevin (06:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, the classic example that, you know, all these guys talk about in their books and I think, you know, it’s, it’s dated, but it’s helpful to, to do that. You know, ⁓ the distinguishing is, know, if you ask someone, ⁓ you know, whenever the model T came out and everybody was doing the horse and buggy deal for transportation, if you ask them, Hey,

What do you want? ⁓ what’s needed, ⁓ what they would have said was a faster horse and buggy, right? No one would have ever said like a combustion engine with wheels, right? And I think that’s the place of innovation where like there’s ⁓ like product and ideas ⁓ and services.

follow like this like curve, like a paradigm curve, right? And so it starts off, it gets like adoption, and then it reaches its kind of like ceiling where at that point, all the everything else is like iterative iPhone 13, 14, 15, 16, like relatively the same thing, right? But ⁓ every once in a while through, you know, God given creativity, ⁓ like it lets you jump to another curve, right? Like the

Dru Johnson (07:35)
Right, right.

Kevin (07:48)
the difference between horse and buggy ⁓ are categorically different, although they were like on the same line of like personal transportation, right? And so same thing as like your refrigerator, ⁓ if you kind of follow the trajectory of how people did food storage, like throughout civilization, you you move from like just chopping out big blocks of ice and then figuring out how to like personal refrigeration. And so

Dru Johnson (07:56)
Hmm.

Kevin (08:17)
⁓ I think innovation is that thing where ⁓ creativity comes in and then ⁓ pops the thing on another paradigm curve to yield an order of magnitude result, a value. And then technology is like the tools, the stuff. A hammer is a technology. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (08:35)
Yeah. Yeah. The various things that make it happen. Yeah.

So like a refrigerator, excuse me, you just have to have like the compressor technology in order to make the paradigm shift then require some tech to work it over. Yeah.

Kevin (08:49)
Right.

Right. And it

usually follows breakthroughs in the physical sciences, ⁓ chemistry and physics, and then it kind of shoots out from there.

Dru Johnson (09:19)
Yeah, I saw this in action with you walking through this process with somebody at Basil Tech, which we’ll talk about what Basil Tech is in here in a minute. where somebody just came in that you had known who worked in a, I’ll say, a closed Muslim country. And they were trying to figure out a way to get a whole high school education, like on a thumb drive. Do you remember this? Yeah.

Kevin (09:39)
⁓ I do vaguely. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (09:43)
Yeah, and it had kind of all the elements of how do you get like, and it had to kind of be secret because if the person got caught doing high school education, you know, it might be bad for them in that culture. ⁓ And so like, okay, do you create a bunch of videos at low compression? Do you just create a bunch of slideshows? Is it all audio? Should it just be PDFs or something like that? You were actually hashing out in real time.

Kevin (09:54)
Right.

Dru Johnson (10:08)
the different technologies and then you would every once in a we go like, okay, wait, let’s not think about the way we’ve done high school. Like let’s, if there’s some other way you could even do high school, you know. ⁓ What are some other examples like that in ministry? Cause I think a lot of people follow you on the model T and the horse. That’s a great example, but in ministry, what does this look like?

Kevin (10:15)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I think like one of the ways that you could think about, not that like ⁓ we’ve done this, or actually we were kind of doing it in our little house church model, right? Is you take these things ⁓ that are very familiar to us, like the sermon, right? And that we hold like very sacred in here and be like, like that’s the most essential part of like the church experience, the sermon. cannot mess with the sermon. That’s the sacred cow.

And then to ask the question, well, what is the purpose of it? And if you kind of disentangle all the things that the sermon is for and then say, could you reimagine, ⁓ what would a sermon look like 50 years from now? What would it look like?

in this group of people, would it look like in an ancient group of people? Like, you just kind of like mess around with it and you start to see like these, like, ⁓ one of the sayings is, form follows function, function never follows form, you know, where you say, here’s the function of this thing and the forms are the things that should adapt and change versus like, I think a lot of times in the Christian world, ⁓ function will follow form, will just inherit forms and just be like,

This is what we do always and don’t you dare touch it, you know, because it’s sacred right like I remember being at the church 30 minutes sermon one. I mean one was as ridiculous as ⁓ I was at this church and there’s this camp called like like blah blah blah something mud camp and they’re like we God has done so much at this camp over like when I was a kid

Dru Johnson (11:57)
30 minutes here, but no more, no less. Yeah.

Yes.

Kevin (12:20)
We have to go to the camp. And I’m like,

it’s like not there and it’s next to a gun shop. No, we have to do this camp because it’s the camp, you know, and it’s the, that the form kind of like driving the thing. And so for us, ⁓ and this could be super sacrilegious and we are church, ⁓ one approach was the democratization of the sermon where like the operating premise is that God doesn’t only speak to Francis Chan, you know, who’s kind of founded like God, the Holy Spirit, like,

Dru Johnson (12:27)
Right.

Kevin (12:50)
is it us and he speaks to us through his word. And so what would it look like if we were ⁓ all reading the same Bible reading plan together? And yeah, there’s like pastors and leaders that are guiding the discussion, but you know, to say, true, what’s the spirit saying to you and Kevin, what’s the spirit and Sally, what’s the spirit saying to you? so is that possible? And does that also help accomplish like, you know, one of the goals, one of the reasons why we did the whole like

that style versus Francis preaching was that we actually traced out, you know, the product of Francis preaching and we’re like, okay, when you trace it out over 10 years and you have a congregation that gets like Piper or Francis or Keller, like, are they more biblically fluent or are they better at systematic theology? And what we found is they’re better at systematic theology. They can tell you the biblical position on hope, prayer, like how to be a good father, da da da.

Dru Johnson (13:39)
Hmm.

Kevin (13:48)
topical things, but if you put them in Leviticus, they are lost, right? Because how do you get, I mean, you’re the, this is your specialty. How do you get better at being fluent in understanding and navigating law for yourself? You have to practice it in community, right? But you don’t get that through the sermon, right? And so those are kind of like the little ways that you’re like, hey, we could rethink worship. We can rethink like this thing, you know.

Dru Johnson (13:53)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Kevin (14:18)
And then missions is a whole different field. Missions needs like an overhaul. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (14:19)
Yeah. yeah, mission can go wild, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And I’ve talked with you about different mission strategies and especially on the funding side, which is where you also are very good as like, you know, we kind of have a ridiculous funding model for a lot of missions. And so innovation can happen not just on the technological side or the, you know, the form, the technological form that comes along should be, should be led in by the function.

Kevin (14:46)
Right.

Dru Johnson (14:49)
of what’s important. I mean, even something like sermons, because some people might be going like, I don’t know, this sounds a little crazy, re-imagining the sermon. And people might say, oh, I can’t imagine a true worship service without a sermon. And I’d say, oh, well, then you can’t imagine worshiping with the early church. Because as far as we know, they did not have a sermon. That was actually not part of the most early worship services. Or if they did, they didn’t talk about it ever.

Kevin (14:55)
Yeah.

Right.

Dru Johnson (15:15)
The sermon usually came from reading a sermon written by Paul, Peter, James, or somebody else. They just read the whole text out loud and that formed the sermon. And I’m sure there was commentary and I’m sure there was discussion. Like it was a community formed discussion as well. So in some ways, I think, cause I think what some people can hear is throw out the old and innovate something new. And I hear what I hear you saying, you correct me is sometimes the innovation is going back to ⁓

early innovations and functions of the Church.

Kevin (15:47)
Yeah, you know, by the way, Francis and I are on like opposite, like I work with him, but we are like, he’s.

Dru Johnson (15:58)
Yeah, we should clarify.

You kind of run a lot of Francis Chan’s ministries, crazy love ministries, right?

Kevin (16:03)
Yes, so yeah,

yeah. So part of my world is executive director of Crazy Love Industries with Francis and another part of my world is, you know, with Basil Tech and the space that Francis is in and I think it’s actually, I agree, I’m there with him. He’s like, we need to go back, like, there is better read, go back to the roots and like the ancient ways. I think there’s a lot of wisdom and truth in that. ⁓

I do hear his critique, and it’s a very valid one, where if you’re chasing new ideas and new technology, especially with regards to the church, it’s like horses and chariots. And the argument that he makes is like, yeah, the kingdom of God exploded and flourished and moved without Google.

Meta and YouTube and and so and how did it move forward? It was through the blood of the martyrs of the tears of the saints and and so there’s a part of me that says like like our over reliance on technology and a lot of this is influenced by the great writing of the and I’m sure you’ve read them right the French theologian sociologist Jacques Ellul right right his whole stuff the technological age I like 100 like agree with right

Dru Johnson (17:25)
Jacques Ellul yeah.

Kevin (17:33)
But that being said, ⁓ I do think there’s the development of God given development of culture and creativity and common grace like France, ⁓ Paul used letters, he printing. ⁓

Dru Johnson (17:50)
that traveled on Roman roads

that were recently built.

Kevin (17:53)
That’s right, infrastructure and I’d be hard pressed to believe that if Paul were living in our day, he would issue email. And so it’s like being able to put tools in their proper place ⁓ and have the right relationship to these things. I do think that, but Francis is right in that like our… ⁓

Dru Johnson (18:05)
Right. Right.

Kevin (18:22)
our attraction to power and technique, like we’re almost like helpless, like we just zap ourselves with it, you know, it’s just human nature. And you always have to be on guard against hubris and the babble, the spirit of babble. But I don’t know if the answer is like live in a cave, ⁓ live in Amish paradise. No, no hate to the Amish. We love the Amish, right? Yeah, I love Weird Al.

Dru Johnson (18:31)
Yeah.

Right. Right. Or we’re at All Yankovic.

Kevin (18:53)
Love Weird Al.

Dru Johnson (18:54)
Yeah, big fans. Yeah, no, that’s very good. And I think, again, I think most people have, most of us just have a very flat relationship to technology. It’s like, oh, that’s technology. And then we forget that like, well,

glasses are a technology, a pencil is a technology. It’s just a way of extending yourself out into the world or any kind of tool we pick up, we inhabit, and it becomes a part of our technological universe. And so what I hear you saying is, yeah, so let’s just do that better rather than worse in ways that God designed us to do it rather than our own narcissistic ways that will always suck us down.

Kevin (19:35)
You know what’s interesting though? think ⁓ more than like, or ⁓ filling out, do it better. Especially now with the conversation of AI. Never before has the power of technology, the conversation around the power of technology been more front and center of like everyday people. Not just like the nerdy techies in Silicon Valley, but like with like everyday people than now with

⁓ you know kind of ai the emergence of ai and a lot of the people that i’m talking to Even the ones who don’t believe in god who are working in ai Part of what’s needed and I think like Ellul gets to this is it is not like you cannot just throw out technology, ⁓ into like the world and you see a lot of this actually, ⁓ from Jonathan Haidt’s book

Dru Johnson (20:35)
Hmm. Yeah.

Kevin (20:35)
right? The anxious generation,

like the, there’s a responsibility to co-develop a ethic and like for us, a theology alongside the technology or else it will just consume it. It will be like the unleashed like beasts into the world, you know? And I think that’s the big, ⁓ like need right now is, ⁓ people like you, people, ⁓

Dru Johnson (20:46)
Right.

Yeah.

Kevin (21:05)
like your peers who are thinking through ethics, who are thinking through what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be made in the image of God? What are the like ⁓ ethics around ⁓ AI and you know, and then how do we guard ourselves from destroying ourselves and devouring ourselves? ⁓ But it’s tough because right now it’s like an arms race. Like the whole sentiment is like,

⁓ We’ll answer those important questions later. We just have to build it, release it, because if we don’t, Google will build it. If Google doesn’t, China will build it. And so we’re just racing. And that’s not great for humanity.

Dru Johnson (21:45)
Right.

No, never has been. It’s pretty obvious. It’s crazy how like, it’s not that even people have blinders on, it’s that they put them on so that they can just fly forward and create more and more, faster and faster.

Kevin (22:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It’s like that scene, ⁓ Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, when he’s like, like before Congress, he’s like, just because you can build it doesn’t mean that you should build it, you know?

Dru Johnson (22:06)
⁓

Right.

⁓ And here we are. ⁓ Well, we’ll see. We’ll see. I mean, I’ve heard so many different stories from technologists and the fear mongers and the not amongst us. I think what’s been interesting, and probably if I didn’t know you guys at Basil Tech, I wouldn’t have even been aware that there are people who are ready to pounce with AI and Bible interpretation, ⁓ which to me is like the worst idea in the world. ⁓ However, ⁓

It’s already happened, mean, whether we like it or not, it’s already happening. So again, I think you’re talking about the responsibility to guide as Christians, at least give Christians, if nobody else, sage advice from biblical roots. ⁓ But you have to know this technology fairly well to give any kind of reasonable advice as well. mean, if you don’t know it, you just say, don’t use AI because it’s poisonous or it’s doing your thinking for you. But…

Anything beyond that, you actually have to know what you’re talking about, which brings me to this collection of ⁓ odd toys that you’ve brought together in Basil Tech. It’s a tech nonprofit, and maybe you can describe how it works, but you basically have a lot of people who work in tech. They actually work at Apple and Google and box.com and all that stuff.

So what are you doing with these people? How does your organization work?

Kevin (23:47)
Yeah, so Basil comes from Exodus 35 30 like the character Bazalel, right? Am I saying that right? How do you say his? That’s a ⁓ yeah Which is so hard to say ⁓ But in exodus 35 30 he’s like this craftsman designer that god fills with his holy spirit and then god fills him with knowledge and wisdom and insight and skill to do the work that

Dru Johnson (23:55)
But that’s a well, yeah, yeah.

Kevin (24:16)
God wants him to do. And when we were thinking about what to call this little community of believers in tech, we had some embarrassingly stupid names, but we’re doing like our Bible reading and we came across this passage with these figures and our jaws just dropped. were like, yes, like we’re like designers and we’re builders that.

Want to serve the Lord with the education and skills that we have we want to be filled with the Holy Spirit and Going about doing this work. We want divine wisdom and skill and and we want to do the Lord’s work in this and so That’s all those just way too hard to say so we shorten it down to like basil tech All of our like passcodes are 35 30 like our internet passcode 35 30 door passcode So if you’re ever in town, you can break into my house with 35 30, you know

But ⁓ so it started maybe 13, 15 years ago where there was a group of us, ⁓ lot of it inspired by the faith and work movement out of Redeemer, early Keller, and saying, there’s gotta be a responsibility, a public responsibility for Christians in industry. We can’t say the ceiling of our imagination for our Christian life.

is private personal piety, right? Like just pray hard and like do good. It’s like, what does it mean? It should mean something that we’re in policy, which should mean something that we’re in education or in medicine or in law. And it should mean something that we have a group of believers in technology that’s touching like the world. And so we started gathering together at Google and Yahoo 15 years ago, asking ourselves, so what would it mean? And so Basil emerged out of that where it’s this, ⁓

Dru Johnson (25:43)
Great.

Kevin (26:09)
volunteers, believers who are working at some of the top tech companies in the world who are saying, I want deeper integration with my work and my faith and believing that the gospel changes everything. And so we want to reimagine technology in new heavens and new earth. And so we have designers from Apple and engineers from Google and product people and digital marketing and coming together. And we do three things. We help ministries and nonprofits.

through technology consulting and design sprints so that they don’t make terrible, stupid mistakes, which we’ve seen a lot of. We’re building our own product. And so our first project was with the Bible Project guys. And now we’re working on something that I told you about, which has been a headache to me. And then we just continue to cultivate the community of believers in tech. ⁓ yeah, it’s been a wild ride.

Dru Johnson (27:04)
Yeah, think so. You know, if you imagine that my old church where I was a pastor, there weren’t really, most people were blue collar. And so they would volunteer once a year, two weeks, go down to Mexico and build a church. And so they, you know, they didn’t, you know, maybe they weren’t preachers, but they all knew how to like lay brick and mix concrete and that kind of stuff. And so you’re doing something similar here, but with kind of like top, top shelf tech people who say like, I can give you so many hours a week.

know, knocking away on this project, designing, user interface, testing, all that stuff. Is that right?

Kevin (27:41)
Yeah, so what I talk what I tell our guys is like offer your non fungible gift and so if We’re Sang so our mutual friend Sang who’s like a 10x engineer out of cmu and dropbox, you know, you know, we say I say to Sang You ought to paint fences and you ought to serve food in the soup kitchen For your own the benefit of your own soul

But God gave you something that’s non fungible. Not everybody can like code like you do. And so like lay that before the Lord and say like, how can I be useful to people around me? One of the things that I like is our Basil mantra is saying we love helping amazing people do amazing things through technology. So we almost feel like we want to come alongside people who are working in anti-trafficking.

or orphan care or like evangelism or unreached people groups. And then whatever like is in our little bag of skills to offer that to help them do, ⁓ you know, what God has called them to do.

Dru Johnson (28:53)
Yeah, what’s that come, is it BASF that says we don’t make anything, we just make everything better? Yeah. Yeah, ⁓ it’s.

Kevin (29:00)
⁓ I might seal that. But we don’t make anything

better. We’ve made things worse at Basel.

Dru Johnson (29:08)
No, I think it’s… ⁓ Well, I wonder, do you run into Christians who are just like… They just have a very old school view of ministry. Even what you’re doing would be considered very innovative for a lot of Christians. Like, that’s not real ministry. You’re just doing business, basically.

Kevin (29:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. ⁓ yeah, and I think there’s like lots of space for that. I mean, that’s kind of like the beauty of ⁓ Yeah, I think the blessing of where I sit is that I can have one foot in the old school stuff with Francis where he’s like You guys just need to fast more and pray more and I’m like amen Like we do we do we do and then there’s this other world where you know

Dru Johnson (29:48)
Right.

Kevin (29:55)
Like one of the fun projects that I’m working on right now, we’re in this ⁓ community called East Palo Alto that used to be the murder capital of the US in murders per capita, right? Small little town. ⁓ The movie with Michelle Pfeiffer, Dangerous Minds, it was based off of EPA, right? And so we have like this little like community of people who are living there. And then it’s right next to Stanford. So you have these like all these Stanford kids.

Dru Johnson (30:13)
Okay.

Kevin (30:22)
that are attending our church in EPA, like high Tongan, high Samoan, high Hispanic population. part of ⁓ what we’re working on right now is to say, okay, here’s our little ⁓ compound where we’re doing ministry. And what we’re gonna do is a needs assessment, one block north, one block south, one block east, and one block west. Just talk to the community and find out what the big pain points are. So is it around joblessness? Is it around?

⁓ gangs is around education and then have this group of like Stanford kids who are trained in systems thinking say, all right, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go through the design thinking process. We’re gonna do a deep dive. We’re gonna do the research. We’re gonna ideate how might we move the ball forward on education in this little community. We don’t have to solve the city’s problems, but with this one block radius, how might the kingdom of God break forth through education?

And then like, here’s some prototypes. We’re going to like try some stuff out, some programs, some like services, some technologies to see if like it actually helps kids get like better at math or, or reading or whatever. And then if it takes traction here, the like things that we are going to apply to like scale that out from like one location to two locations, so four locations. And so all of that you can say, well, like let’s dismiss that as that’s just.

secular business thinking but I’m like on the back end of all that secular business thinking are a bunch of kids who are being loved on by these believers who are being served their families are being served well prayed for and Like the good news is shared with them Yeah, I’ll take the criticism if that’s what’s on the back end of of it, you know

Dru Johnson (32:03)
and

Yeah, it’s not one or the other. It’s like, let’s pull everything in that God’s given us and where he’s put us. I wonder for you, what’s odd about working with a bunch of tech people? You’re a pastor as well, pastors have to deal with all kinds of different people. But when you get a group of tech people together, what are the kinds of things you…

Kevin (32:09)
Right.

Dru Johnson (32:34)
experience, let’s put it politely. Because I’m assuming there’s good and bad and everything in between.

Kevin (32:37)
That’s great.

Yeah, there’s lots of good because they’re all like really quite wonderful people. ⁓ Here is like kind of like the dominant and I would say particularly for tech people in Silicon Valley where you’re 23 years old, you got recruited by Google.

Dru Johnson (33:02)
Mm.

Kevin (33:02)
You’re

getting paid $250,000 a year, obscene amounts of money. You show up to work whenever you want. They have like little massage chairs for you, little nap pods, little toilets that wipe your booty. know, like, this is all real. I am not even kidding. Like at Dropbox where Seng worked, like the quintessential story is, you know, they have like these Michelin star chefs that they employ at obscene amounts of money to like,

Dru Johnson (33:15)
Right. This is all real. is all these, yeah, the things you see in the TV shows, it’s real. Yeah.

Kevin (33:31)
cook free meals for the entire company all day. And so when I go there to visit him, I’m like, just like piles of food. And then, you know, I’m eating with Sang who’s like working there and he’s got this like peanut butter jelly sandwich. He’s like, ugh, I’m sick of sushi. I’m sick of lobster. I’m sick of filet mignon. It’s trash. Do you know what saying? And I was like, ⁓ like, like this thing is a formative experience. And I think that’s,

It’s actually like, it’s got this veneer of like, like, like it’s for you and whatever. But underneath it is actually dehumanizing. think like all this, like, and you know this, just like if you just, that’s not how human beings were meant to live. We were not meant to just consume, consume, consume and be elevated up. And we start to get formed in like very disproportionate ways.

Dru Johnson (34:13)
Mm.

Kevin (34:30)
And what needs to happen is, number one, they need to talk to people and be friends with people that are not like them, that didn’t graduate from Stanford and making like six figures out the gate. ⁓ If they don’t, they will be, it’s dehumanizing. They need to learn humility. like, they work hard, but they work hard in like a very techie way. And like, they actually need to like learn how to like.

joyfully clean toilets and ⁓ wash dishes and do the faithful stuff. They need to get the language of 10X. I won’t do anything. One of our guys, he’s Sang I love Sang but he’s like, it doesn’t deliver 10X value. And I’m like, maybe that’s not the point, bro. Maybe you should just shut up and sit there and be patient and listen. And that’s what God wants you to do.

Dru Johnson (35:00)
Hmm.

old thing. ⁓

Kevin (35:28)
And so I think there’s like this whole plethora of things that makes the discipleship of people in tech really, really important because it’s, and you said this, like when you came and visited us, you’re like, yo, this is not real life, man. Like this is not how like the majority of the world lives. And if we get disconnected from that, ⁓ it is to our detriment. And so that’s kind of been the big like work of discipleship in the Valley.

Dru Johnson (35:55)
Well, it’s a great task. I’m glad God has called you to it. You seem like perfectly cut for it. ⁓ And if people want to find out more about Basil Tech, give towards this venture, because it is a nonprofit and a lot of volunteered hours put towards it. Where can they find you guys?

Kevin (36:14)
Yeah, email Dru John. give all money to Center for Hebraic Thought. Yeah. They can just visit our website, Basiltech.org.

Dru Johnson (36:16)
Yeah, PayPal at my email. Yeah.

That’s great. Well, Kevin, Kim, thank you for your wisdom and your insight.

Kevin (36:29)
Hey man, it’s a pleasure always learning from the guru, Dr. Dru Johnson.

Dru Johnson (36:34)
All

right. See you later.

Kevin (36:38)
All right,