A Stellar Return on Investment

In August of this year, I helped man the John Stott Ministries (JSM) booth at the Presbyterian Global Fellowship’s 2008 Inside-Out Conference in Long Beach, California. Our new tabletop display featured a photographic image of one of JSM’s graduated scholars, Lok Bhandari from Nepal, preaching in front of thousands of people at an open-air gathering in his home country.

 

Well, guess who stopped by our booth on the final day of the conference? Lok! At first, I didn’t recognize him (and he probably didn’t recognize me!)—the passage of time has changed the physical appearance of both of us. But midway through his warm greeting, I remembered his familiar, huge smile and sensed the same joy in the Lord and enthusiasm for ministry that impressed me while he was a diligent Ph.D. student at Fuller Theological Seminary several years ago.

Ken Perez with Lok Bhandari at Presbyterian Global Fellowship

Since his time at Fuller, Lok has gone on to share the Gospel with literally thousands of people and train over 1,000 pastors who are ministering throughout the Himalayas—in Bhutan, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, and Tibet, often touching previously unreached people groups, planting churches and nurturing new believers toward maturity in Christ. Talk about a return on investment for the kingdom!

 

As I drove to the airport after the conference, I reflected on Lok’s ministry, how we in the U.S. couldn’t even envision the kind of ministry he has, much less carry it out. And that’s the beauty of the collaborative partnership between John Stott Ministries and the burgeoning church in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

 

Ken

 

On a human level

I’ve been fortunate to have spent much of the past dozen years serving as the vice president of marketing for a number of technology companies. Mastering the messaging of an organization, committing the value proposition, key facts and figures, and the telling competitive differentiators to memory and being able to smoothly deliver the so-called “elevator pitch” are essential tasks of a marketing executive.

 

And so it is with nonprofit organizations as well. For John Stott Ministries (JSM) and its parent organization, Langham Partnership International, there are some 280 JSM-Langham scholars around the world, 180 of whom have graduated and about 100 who are currently working on their Ph.D.s at theological institutions in the U.S., the U.K. and the developing world. Approximately 200,000 volumes of books are distributed each year through the Langham Literature program to thousands of pastors and theological students, and Langham Preaching seminars train roughly 3,000 pastors in some 40 countries each year. Those are the numbers, but it’s good to be reminded that they ultimately represent individual humans, each loaded with to potential to teach and lead others toward greater maturity in their faith.

 

On a plane flight in April, a passenger across the aisle noticed that I was reading the Bible and struck up a conversation with me. It turned out that he was a pastor, and he had just been to Africa, where he saw firsthand the tremendous growth of the church, but also a lack of training and resources for pastors. He shared with me a story about a 60-year old African pastor who had never received any training at all, yet he had spent all of his adult life endeavoring to lead his congregation toward greater maturity in Christ. Although I probably will never meet that African pastor, his faith and his needs provide some of the inspirational fuel for our ministry.

 

Ken

What’s in a name?

Welcome! The beginning of a blog is a bit like the birth of a child. One of the first things you do with a newborn baby is give it a name. A blog’s tagline is in some sense a name. The tagline of this blog, In Two Worlds, is a variation on the title of a book written by John Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today.

I chose In Two Worlds as the tagline for my blog because it describes two spheres of our society in which I work on a regular basis–the world of nonprofit ministry organizations and the world of for-profit commercial enterprises.

I am privileged to serve as the president of John Stott Ministries, the U.S. chapter of the Langham Partnership International, a network of three integrated, synergistic programs–Langham Scholars, Langham Literature and Langham Preaching–and six supporting national member movements. Having served for a long time as a high technology executive, I am also privileged to serve as a senior partner in a specialized consulting firm, Colabra, LLC, that works with corporate clients to optimize their go-to-market strategies. On a daily–sometimes even hourly–basis, I find myself bouncing back and forth between these two spheres.

So once again, welcome to my blog! I hope to provide you a window into my two worlds.

Ken