At what point in any mobile ministry endeavor do we count it as being a success:

…While the comment has faced criticism from those in technology and education circles, it certainly made a splash. OLPC still makes a laptop (the XO 1.75), but the organization now has its eyes firmly set on its new tablet (the XO 3), a solar-powered device that the group describes as “unbreakable and without holes in it.”

But OLPC’s visions have never quite materialized. Negroponte’s “tablets from helicopters” comment was reminiscent of his earlier announcement at the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, where he proclaimed OLPC would sell a laptop for $100. Then in 2009, OLPC announced that its tablet would also break the $100 barrier, despite the fact that the original laptop project had never reached that price (it still hasn’t; the price remains about $185).

Negroponte originally hoped his organization would sell “tens of millions” of laptops and could get the price low by requiring each country that wanted the machines to buy a minimum of one million, a figure that never panned out…

Read the rest of Ars Technica’s Look at the OLPC Project and Its Influence on EduTech Initiatives

When I’m asking these questions about mobile minisyry – its viability, its potential, its challenges – I am also asking where success is defined. Generally, the ministry answer is that success equals the salvation and maturity of people who align themselves with Jesus Christ. But, I wonder if such aims are going too far, or if they are too broad to be of any impact.

Instead, I wonder if those whom are able to make plans towards that larger end are able to collect the smaller victories in their methods? If they are in fact able to keep that big picture goal in mind, but see whatever they are working on as being a part of something more than just the usual evangelism and colonization approach?

You’ve got challenges and successes; where do you stop and see what’s affirming your goals, and where do you continue to press forward when you don’t see what’s affirming that mission?