Acts 29 calls to transform digital publications into living testimonies within communities

For one week, Costa Rica hosted the sixth edition of Hechos 29, a gathering that brought together missionaries and influencers from 20 countries to discuss the challenges of digital evangelization. The event concluded on Sunday, August 23, with a send-off Mass, while more than 1,500 people participated in the festival.

More than just a strategy for communicating the faith, Acts 29 proposed understanding the digital mission as a way of life. At the sending Mass, Father José Juan Montalvo, known as Father Borre, emphasized that “The digital missionary is not the one who shares content; it is the one who gives of himself.”

Starting with the Gospel question, “Who do you say that I am?”, the gathering focused on the people behind the screens. The conversations gradually shifted from content and algorithms to the stories, wounds, searches, and encounters that each participant carried with them.

Behind each profile and each publication appeared people with stories, wounds, and searches. That human encounter led the Father Borre to summarize the experience with a phrase: “This could have been Acts 29: discovering Jesus in the other.”

Reflections on a mission that extends from screens to face-to-face encounters were also supported by the Church. Monsignor Lucio Adrián Ruiz gave the final blessing and presented a compilation of Church documents on digital evangelization published between 2023 and 2025.

The missionaries also gained a broad perspective on how the Church is approaching evangelization on the internet. The compilation includes contributions from the Synod of Bishops, Pope Leo XIV’s message “Go and Repair the Networks,” and a report prepared with the participation of 1,618 digital missionaries from 67 countries, whose conclusions are summarized in 31 recommendations. In addition to this content, there is a message from Carlo Acutis’s mother to the missionaries of Latin America.

Participants described Acts 29 Costa Rica as an experience that transformed relationships built on screens, based on shared listening and openness.

The screens were the starting point, but not the end point. Acts 29 left Costa Rica with the challenge of transforming its digital presence into avenues for connection and closeness. The mission will continue in South Korea, which will host the next edition in 2027.