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
