I built Wayfinder because I lived the problem it solves.
For more than fifteen years, missions has been my life. Ten of those years were spent in pastoral leadership. The rest were spent on the field — in Hawaii, in Australia, in Vanuatu, in Honduras, in Indonesia, in contexts that reached as far as the edges of North Korea, and in the slow, ordinary work of building communities that last.
I have raised support. I have stood in living rooms and church foyers and tried to explain, in two minutes, a calling that took years to understand. I have watched good people — generous people, people who would have said yes — quietly miss the work. Not because they didn't care. Because they couldn't see it.
That experience is the reason Wayfinder exists. So before I tell you what we do, let me tell you where it came from. The work only makes sense once you understand the wound underneath it — and the ocean that gave it its name.
Why "Wayfinder"
I live in Maui. I speak and teach ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, in public schools, private schools, and homeschool communities. And the longer I've lived in these islands, the more one idea has reshaped how I think about ministry: hoʻokele — wayfinding.
Long before compasses, sextants, or GPS, Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of miles of open ocean with no instruments at all. The hoʻokele — the navigator — read the stars, the swells, the wind, the flight of birds, the color of the water. He didn't control the ocean. He read it. He held the destination in his mind and corrected, constantly, for the drift that would otherwise carry the canoe off course.
That is the truest picture I know of faithful leadership in our moment. Because the enemy of every sent person isn't a storm. It's drift — the slow, unnoticed loss of bearings that happens when faithful people chase growth, visibility, and survival without a map. Mission drift. Family drift. Stewardship drift. You don't capsize. You just slowly end up somewhere you never meant to go.
Wayfinder exists to help Kingdom builders navigate the modern mission field without drifting from the things that matter most. That's the name. Now here's the story underneath it.
Every voyage needs a true north. Mine started in the Catholic tradition, where I first learned that God was real and worth following. The conviction sharpened at Calvary Chapel Bible College, where I gave my life to a simple aim: follow Jesus faithfully, and help others find purpose, identity, and relationship with God.
From there the field took over. Youth With A Mission. Surfing The Nations. Foursquare. Calvary Chapel. International House of Prayer. Apologetics training shaped by Reasonable Faith and thinkers like William Lane Craig. I was trained to give a reasoned defense of the faith — to think clearly, argue honestly, and take both Scripture and people's real questions seriously.
That training did something I didn't expect. It gave me a low tolerance for unclear. When the message is true and eternal, fumbling the communication of it isn't a small thing. It's a stewardship failure.
Then the field humbled all of it. In Vanuatu, in Honduras, in Indonesia, among young people in Australia, I learned the Gospel doesn't travel on the strength of my cleverness. It travels through relationship, through presence, through the slow work of showing up. And I started asking a question I still can't put down: Why are the people doing the most important work in the world so often the worst at telling the world about it?
The answer isn't laziness or pride. It's that the modern mission field now includes a digital one — and almost no one trained missionaries for it.
Paul had letters. The Reformers had the printing press. Hudson Taylor had the prayer card. Billy Graham had television. Every generation of the Church has had to learn the dominant medium of its day — not because the medium was holy, but because that's where the people were. In our day, the medium is digital. And the missionaries I love were being left behind by it. That's my North.
There's a moment most missionaries know by heart. You're at a support dinner. Someone asks, "So what do you actually do over there?" You open your mouth, and out comes thirty seconds of context, then a qualifier, then a story that needs three other stories to make sense. You watch their eyes go soft and kind and far away. They nod. You both quietly agree to move on.
I learned the most important lesson of my pastoral years from moments like that: communication is stewardship. People cannot support, join, or participate in a mission they do not understand. The calling was real. The fruit was real. But unclear is the same as invisible to the person who's never been where you've been.
People support what they understand. People trust what feels authentic. People join movements they can clearly see.
I saw it most clearly in Australia, working with young people across New South Wales. We didn't lead with a doctrine lecture. We led with skateboards, BMX, live events, and a lot of hours at skateparks. Most of those kids weren't looking for religion. They were looking for belonging. Transformation started with relationship — and relationship started with someone bothering to communicate in a language they could actually receive.
East on the compass is message. Can an outsider understand what you do? Can they explain it to someone else? Can they see themselves in it? If the answer is no, nothing else on the map matters yet.
Faith Begins Where Certainty Ends
Two moments taught me what's actually at stake in this work.
The first was in Honduras. A woman came to our team for prayer; she had been unable to conceive. We prayed together, and I went home and mostly forgot about it the way you do. A year later, on a return trip, she found me in a crowd — carrying her baby. She'd given birth. I still don't have tidy words for that. It just reset something in me about what ministry actually is: people, faith, hope, and the unexpected ways God moves when you simply show up.
The second was harder. I took part in cultural-exchange efforts that reached toward one of the most closed places on earth — building relationships through surfing, skateboarding, art, and worship in a context where the Gospel cannot simply be announced. Fear had every reason to make that decision for me. I chose to follow what I believed God was calling me toward instead.
"Faith often begins where certainty ends."
A hoʻokele leaves sight of land before he can prove the island is out there. So does every faithful missionary. So does anyone starting something new — including a missionary starting a studio with no client list and a deep conviction that the work matters.
The Question That Started a Family — and a Company
For years I could carry the tension alone. Then I started a family. And the question every missionary carries quietly stopped being theoretical: Do I follow the calling, or do I keep us sustainable?
I want to be honest about how heavy that question is, because if you're reading this, you already know. It's the one that wakes you at 3 a.m. It's the one you don't put in the prayer letter. You signed up to lose comfort. You did not sign up to make your spouse and children pay a hidden tax for your obedience. And yet the unspoken rule of missionary life often becomes exactly that: real faithfulness costs your family.
I don't believe that rule is from God. Scripture is direct. "If anyone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church?" (1 Timothy 3:5). The first ministry is the home. A spouse is not a ministry accessory. Children are not obstacles to the calling. The family is not what you sacrifice for the mission — the family is part of the mission.
This isn't theory for me. My wife and her business partner lead The Village Vessel, a women's community built to support women, mothers, healing, and legacy. My role there is the one I prize most — the husband standing behind the work, not in front of it. We've staked our own life on the conviction that ministry should strengthen a family, not consume it.
So I sat with a conviction that hardened into a mission: missionaries should not have to choose between their family, their sustainability, and their calling. Those were never meant to be enemies. The goal is integration, not fragmentation. That's why Wayfinder is a studio and not a side hustle.
Here's where ministry passion usually goes to die: it never gets built into anything that lasts. South on the compass is the unglamorous direction. It asks the questions nobody puts on a highlight reel: Can this survive? Can it scale? Can it support a family? Can it support the mission longer than your current burst of energy?
I learned to respect South the hard way. In Newcastle, Australia, I helped support a healing and training center that prepared international missionaries before they went to the field — including efforts connected to medical support for Papua New Guinea. What stuck with me wasn't a single dramatic moment. It was the systems: the unglamorous infrastructure that lets ordinary, sent people be effective for years instead of months.
And money — let's name it, because most Christian leaders won't. Many of us carry an unnecessary guilt around revenue. We've taken half a verse — "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6:10) — and turned it into a vague suspicion that needing resources is unspiritual. But the verse says the love of money. Money isn't the mission. Money supports the mission. A clear "give" button isn't a compromise. It's stewardship made practical.
When I build pages for missionaries, I'm not building decoration. I'm building systems: a way for the right person to find you, understand you in ten seconds instead of ten minutes, and turn goodwill into a recurring monthly partner instead of a one-time twinge of conscience that fades by Tuesday. That's the difference between a website and a wayfinding tool. One sits there. The other moves people from "I'm not sure what they do" to "where do I sign up."
For a long time I thought the answer to all of this was me — if I just got good enough at design, writing, and strategy, I could help the missionaries in front of me and call it a life well spent. West on the compass corrected that. West is community. It asks: How does this create belonging? How does this strengthen relationships? How does this build discipleship rather than just an audience?
Polynesian voyagers never sailed alone. A waʻa — a voyaging canoe — needs a crew. And the more I worked, the more I saw a future bigger than one guy with a laptop in a Maui coffee shop. What if the missionaries I was helping could one day do this work themselves? What if a family on the field could fund their own time there by writing, designing, and building for other ministries — staying exactly where God planted them, no longer forced to choose between the field and the budget?
That's the long horizon for Wayfinder: a global network of sent people who use communication, storytelling, design, and technology to support themselves while advancing the Gospel — a brotherhood and sisterhood who refuse to drift, who steward what they've been given, and who build something worth inheriting.