David J. Collum, CEO of The Pocket Testament League, joins Greg Leith to discuss the global movement that helps believers like you share the Gospel.
Hear examples of how other business owners use this easy tool to share the Gospel. Be encouraged as David and Greg share how God blesses the seeds planted over the rich history of The Pocket Testament League, and learn how you can be part of accelerating the deployment of the Gospel around the world!
To learn more about David Collum and The Pocket Testament League, head to: ptl.org
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Read, Carry, And Share God’s Hope With The Globe With David J. Collum
David, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us. I’m very excited to be with you.
It’s great to be with you, especially fresh back from your trip.
Somebody asked me what my biggest takeaway was from Israel. It’s not very theological. My answer was only one word, which was geography. It was then that I finally understood the proximity of some of these places to each other. That was great. For people who don’t know you, I’m a raving fan of you, but I’m a raving fan of your background. You have a Mechanical Engineering degree with an MBA, a Master’s in Theology, and a diploma in Anglican Studies. You worked in Corporate America, leading an organization that cared for nuclear power plants for the fleet of nuclear submarines. Here you are, leading The Pocket Testament League.
God has a funny plan for my life. I can’t wait to see what else is in store. I’ve been blessed. I’ve always worked with great people. I got to work with the men and women of our United States Navy, who are remarkable people. I’ve been blessed to work with other folks at the League and in the church. It has been great.
Convene & The Pocket Testament League: Empowering Leaders, Sharing Faith
For those of you reading who are not familiar with Convene, we are a comprehensive leadership organization. We help leaders to grow and thrive as business leaders, as family members, and as humans created in the image of God. We have a network of consultants, coaches, and peer-to-peer networking groups.
You can find out more about us at ConveneNow.com, and you can find out more about The Pocket Testament League at PTL.org. Many of our audience, if they know about The Pocket Testament League, know about these little guys, these things that are in my backpack at all times, which I give out to taxi drivers and airline attendants. That is not necessarily the only part of the League. Take us from here to.
Thank you. The League, at its most basic level, is about helping Jesus’ followers share their faith. That’s at our core. Most of us struggle to do that. We can get frustrated about it. We can even feel a little bit overwhelmed. Some people even feel guilty. At the League, we get that. That’s why we’ve got this simple, repeatable process by offering somebody the word of God. I say to let the word of God do the heavy lifting of the human heart rather than my arguing by sharing the Gospel of John. People typically see us as the Gospel of John folks.
Let the word of God do the heavy lifting of the human heart. Share on XWe’ve taught millions of people. We’ve done it about 150 million times around the world. The way we do that, though, is that there are three lanes. There are three ways that happens. We have members, about 30,000 of them, who will reach 1.2 million people in North America, the United States, and in a place called Canada that Greg knows something about. They’re saints of the Lord, and they’re sharing their faith.
We also share gospels digitally. We launched a digital app in November 2020. We are in all but sixteen countries in the world. The number one country downloading the Gospel of John is Iran. The top countries are in the 10/40 Window. Many people know what that is. If you look at a box of a map, it goes across North Africa into the Middle East, and into Southeast Asia. They have tough living conditions and some of the more difficult governments where religious freedom is very limited. About 14,000 people will download the Gospel of John app on their phone, and it’s remarkable to see that. People don’t often think about us in that kind of space, but that will reach four million people.
Finally, we’ve got partners, which we love. Our partners are our ministry partners. They’re churches and businesses like Convene businesses. For example, we’ve got partners in Ukraine. We are printing in Kiev, for which we’re praying for safety. You referred to my business background. We could have printed those gospels somewhere else and shipped them in, but I thought, “Let’s put hard currency into a business so people can buy bread for their families. We’re still going to get the gospels into people’s hands.” That’s the beauty of an economy.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, in Ukraine and in surrounding countries, over 1 million people have been invited. The Pocket Testament League has twelve people in it, so how do we do that? We do that by connecting hearts. We’ve got people in the United States who love the word of God see what’s going on in the Ukraine, and are torn up with that.
We’ve got mission agencies on the ground who tell us they can’t do their job without a gospel. We connect the two. Those are our partners. We also have great businesses that have all sorts of creative ways in which they want to get involved with the mission. Some of our strongest partners in the business lane are in our Convene companies. It’s why you and I are chatting.
Business As A Vehicle For The Kingdom: Partnering For Impact
I find that so many business executives want to use their company as a vehicle for the Kingdom of God in addition to the good, true, and beautiful work they do, doing work they do, whether they make picture frames, create software, make food products, or work in foreign countries. Whatever the work they do, you know from your theological background that God smiles on that period.
In addition, people might say, “I want to use my platform of influence as the leader of my company to do something about bringing people in touch with the message of the gospel.” Whether it’s digital or good old-fashioned paper, people can do that. You’ve talked about partnering and how people can partner with you. We feel this intense kinship and work together with you. For somebody who’s reading who says, “I’m a manufacturing business in the middle of some state,” what can they do?
We very intentionally use that word partner. People give glory to God by doing their jobs with excellence. Making the best picture frames or software, God smiles on that. CEOs are so busy. They have to do revenue generation. They have to deal with quality. They have to operate with efficiency and government regulations. The list goes on. You create a thriving culture for your employees after you find the best employees that you can find.
People give glory to God by doing their jobs with excellence. Share on XThey don’t need another sermon about the great commission. They don’t need another lecture about the unique position that God has put them in. I thought, “What if somebody gave them some help?” For helping them, I think that’s a partner. We think there are four key factors there, which get us to the answer to your question.
The first is to have a partner who I want to come in and complement what they want to do, versus showing up and saying, “Support me, my ministry, and my goals.” You’re trying to use your business. You feel a responsibility for that. It’s like, “What do you want to run at? Let me complement that.” Second, can I be agile enough that I could go from a full turnkey solution to letting somebody roll up their sleeves and completely redesign my process? They’re that kind of CEOs. They come in all shapes and sizes.
Third, we’ve got a dearth of experience, because we’ve been blessed to work with lots of Convene companies. We’re like, “Here are 100 other companies. Here are the solutions they’ve used.” I’m a big fan of best practices. Let’s not reinvent the wheel if we don’t have to. Finally, be serious about goals. If somebody comes alongside and says, “David, we want to work to achieve this. Would you partner with us?” I’d be like, “That’s my goal. I’m going to own it. I’m going to report back to you. I’m going to be accountable for the way the business operates.” That’s what we’re trying to do. That’s why we use the word partner very specifically. We try to come in and help companies do that.
Let me give you two examples. They’re two ends of the spectrum. I’ve got a company that wants to reach a million people for Christ, and they think The Pocket Testament League is an extremely efficient way to do that. I’m like, “What area of the world has the Lord put your heart on?” We run at that. I give them a quarterly report when I show up. The last time, they dragged me back and said, “Let’s brief the employees about what our company’s doing.” I’m like a staff person for them, almost. It’s great. I love it.
The other end of the spectrum is I’ve got a person who wants to witness their faith. We sat down, designed a custom gospel, the classic paper partner gospel, and talked about using it in the hiring process. He wrote a little blurb on the inside of the cover, which said, “Thanks for even considering coming to work for our company. I’m trying to run this company by following the principles of Jesus.” I love the next sentence that he wrote. He said, “I fail at it all the time,” which is great humility.
He said, “We’re trying to do that. We didn’t want you to be surprised. We wanted to be transparent about that. It’s not going to affect our hiring practices or salaries.” It was all the things in terms of, “You don’t have to join our cult. You can think about that.” It was their heart to be transparent with the people they were selecting.
That’s the two ends of the spectrum in terms of rolling up their sleeves to say, “David, how do we do this?” It’s like, “Let’s sit down, write that out, talk to the human resource people, and pull in another one of your great resources, Pacific Justice Institute, to make sure we got all the words right and we’re on the right legal ground.” That’s an example of, “What do you want to do, CEO? Let’s sit down and put that together. I want to serve you and be your partner.”
Getting Your Evangelistic Hands Dirty: Beyond Giving To Doing
I love that. It reminds me of this strange dichotomy that I see happening often, which is that we like to give to organizations that do something, but we don’t want to get our hands dirty. There’s nothing wrong with this. We want to give to an organization that feeds homeless people, but we don’t want to go and feed homeless people. We want to give to an organization that digs water wells, but we don’t want to go and dig a water well.
I was talking to somebody who said, “We’re doing well as an organization. I’m so excited to say that our work has produced revenue and net income. We’ve given away a lot of money. We gave it to an organization where a lot of people came to faith in Christ.” I would say, “That’s great,” but there’s something about saying to the employee, the taxi driver, or the flight attendant, “This is important to me. Can I give it to you?”
It could also be sending an email to somebody that you know as a friend who’s not a Christ follower and sending them the digital version of The Pocket Testament League. I love how that story you told is getting your evangelistic hands dirty, if I can put it that way, because you’re in the soup, making it, instead of giving money to somebody else to make soup. Does that make any sense?
It does. What I see over and over again is the Lord blessing that. God knows when any of us takes a step of faith. He wants to bless that. It’s the classic when you first come to faith, you’ll experience thoughts of things, and then over time, you experience less because the Lord is trying to grow you up in your faith. He’s going to show you the results early on, but then you’re going to labor a little bit because you’ve got to have faith, even if you don’t see Him working.
God knows when any of us takes a step of faith. He wants to bless that. Share on XWhen a business leader steps out in faith, the Lord does bless them and show them some results. That excites them because they have a gillion things to do. It would be easy to justify not getting your hands dirty. When they make it a priority for themselves, God honors that. We get great stories about these guys. One guy called me up. He goes, “I gave my first gospel out.” He was all excited. He was from Staten Island.
He had that heavy accent. I’m from New York. He’s from Staten Island. He goes, “These things are like gospel butter.” I loved it. He goes, “Do you know they work?” I was like, “I’m talking to a fellow New Yorker,” so I said, “They work? I didn’t know that.” I was like, “Let me use sarcasm.” He was so excited. I smiled the whole way because he had a great conversation with a wait staff person.
Somebody reading might be thinking, “I know those guys at The Pocket Testament League. I knew them twenty years ago.” Talk about the countries that you’re in that might be a little surprising for people to know.
We are in all but sixteen countries slash territories. Google tends to break up the world by positions. While American Samoa is part of the United States, it would be listed a little bit separately, so they can track it. Google has 242 countries and territories in the world. We’re in all but sixteen. We’re not in North Korea and whatnot.
The stunning thing is that between print and digital, we’ve got pretty remarkable coverage. If a person has a real burden for a specific area, we’re working in it, most likely. Digitally, it’s the 10/40 Window, which is stunning to see how that’s happening, but even digitally in Eastern Europe with Ukraine and things like that with supply lines. The digital space is quite expansive around the globe.
Our large areas in print are the United States, North America, and Eastern Europe. We’re very committed to that. We’ve been there for a while. We’re legally in China. We’re in India. With the continent of Africa, a fascinating thing is that by 2050, they’re projecting that about half of the planet’s population is going to be on that continent. We’re trying to get there.
We are in South Africa, West Africa, and East Africa. We’re on the ground, working with organizations using printed gospels of Jonathan. Northern Africa is largely digital. We’re in what we call the Greater Middle East. We work with some pretty amazing people in places like Pakistan, on the border of Afghanistan, and a few other places. That’s where we’re working.
We’re trying to reach 130 million people between 2019 and 2028. We will be reaching 25 million people a year. It’s a ramp-up to try to build the capacity of the organization. It’s a classic business thing, which is why I love hanging out with Convene guys. I’m like, “How do I scale this thing? I want to do this the right way.” You broke it down into a bite-sized morsel of ‘21, ‘22, and ‘23. It’s those years. 30 million in 3 is our tagline. We’re halfway in. My board, which is full of Convene CEOs, will say, “We’re halfway in. Where are you?”
Where are we?
We’re more than halfway there. We’ll cross twenty million here in another month. All this happens by God’s grace. It could be 35 million people. Globally, the stunning thing, and that includes the United States, is that there’s a spiritual hunger. Digitally, we take ads out on Google and put Find Hope in Jesus. We do our due diligence. We do AB testing like good marketing people, so we have two taglines, which are Find Hope and Find Hope in Jesus.
If you put the name Jesus in a Google ad in Arabic, it will outperform the other ad by about 20:1. There’s a spiritual hunger. In the United States, we see a lot of disillusionment, and you have to come at it a little bit differently. You and I both know the root issue is that it’s a spiritual disease. They’re looking for meaning. In the US, we use words like meaning, purpose, and identity. The gospel answers those questions. We have to approach it a little bit differently. It’s an amazing time, and the Lord is doing amazing work.
Digital Discipleship: Sharing The Gospel In The Modern Age
Let’s go back for a second to the digital pathway. Somebody is reading, and they say, “I’m not a person who’s going to carry the gospels. I’m not going to give it to people. It’s not who I am.” I don’t agree with that, but there are people like that. What would you say to them if they want to be a digital person and email somebody they’ve met or a friend of theirs with The Pocket Testament League, a genre of evangelism? What do they do?
There are two ways to do that. They can go to PTL.org. On there is a QR code. They hold their phone up, and the QR code will take them either to the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. It will say, “Get the app.” The app’s name is Read Carry Share. They can go to our website, or they can go to the Google Play Store or the Apple Store and search Read Carry Share.
We specifically use those words because it doesn’t load with a cross or anything. There are lots of countries where it’s pretty dangerous to have the word of God on your phone. The app is a little bit nondescript, but that’s intentional. It doesn’t say Holy Bible if somebody were to look at a person’s phone in Pakistan. Those are two ways to do it.
Real-World Impact: Inspiring Stories From The Public Square
We’ve been talking about the concept, and it’s fun, but let’s talk about people who are pulling this off in the public square. We’ve talked before about some of our favorite examples, the Chevrolet dealership owner and Blessings of Hope. Which one would you love to talk about at the moment to tell people, “You can do this, too.”
Let’s talk about Blessings of Hope a little bit. They’re a great organization. I’ve got one of their gospels here. This is a Ukrainian Gospel. For folks who don’t know, Blessings of Hope is an organization that feeds people. They provide food. They’re brilliant in the way they do it. They look for surpluses. Lots of farmers have surpluses and things that can’t necessarily be shipped. They take that and match it to needs. They largely use volunteers to pack this. They put the Gospel of John in every food box. That’s their way to do it.
We started with six containers going to Ukraine. By the time it transpired, there were eleven containers that went. I forgot how many mission agencies they partnered with. We get stories back. You think, “The Gospel of John in the box.” It has multiple effects because it brings volunteers to pack the boxes. They’re putting in all this food, and in goes the Gospel of John. Some of those volunteers are employees from other companies. Companies have volunteer work days, if you’d like to go do three hours down at the local food pantry or whatever. Those people get exposed to it.
We got a story. It was in Washington, DC. They had done some work in Washington, DC. A person read the Gospel of John, opened it up, received the Lord, and called us to let us know that. We see the effectiveness of that. It’s remarkable. At the scale that they’re doing it at, it would be easy for them to say, “We don’t have the time or the capital. We’ve got to get these boxes of food out. This is an optional extra. That’s not their approach.” For me, their approach is, “There needs to be a gospel in every box.”
In case somebody is reading and thinks, “A food bank, I know what that is. That’s a little hole in the wall at a cheap rent location where a few volunteers come and give away extra bottles of Aunt Jemima syrup or something like that,” not Blessings of Hope. They receive food from 120 sources. They’ve distributed 12 million pounds of food to 1,000 ministry partners. They serve 65,000 meals a day. They have 15,000 volunteers. They’ve distributed $200 million worth of food. All of that, plus what you said, equals an intentional focus on the gospel being germane to the business you are in. We’re not just in the food business. We’re in the food business, and we talk about faith in God.
It’s what motivates them to do that. They have a great story. You mentioned one of our favorite Chevrolet dealer owners. He puts the Gospel of John in the glove box of every car. He has a number of them, but my favorite story is a woman who had purchased the car, called him, and said, “I purchased this car, and the Gospel of John was in the glove box. Thank you. I’ve read it.” She had read it and accepted the Lord.
He’s on his computer, saying, “I didn’t sell you that car.” She goes, “I bought it from so-and-so.” She was the second owner. She was buying a used car. He goes on his database and says, “I didn’t sell that guy that car.” She goes, “The car was originally bought by Billy Smith.” He’s like, “I did sell to Billy.” It sat in the glove box for three owners, but at the right time. That’s the God part of it. The nice thing is we plant the seed, and then you get to see God do the work. That’s exciting, too.
The nice thing is we plant the seed, and then you get to see God do the work. Share on XA Greg Story: Unexpected Encounters And Shared Faith
I have to tell you a Greg story, even though this is not about me. You talked about Ukraine. I’m driving to the airport in an Uber. This person, who’s about 25 years old, is not very talkative and is not conversant in English. I said, “Where are you from?” He said, “I’m from Russia.” I said, “What are you doing here?” He said, “I won one of the lotteries and got a green card.” I said, “That’s fascinating. What do you think about the conflict in Ukraine?” He talked about the fact that he wasn’t a fan of Putin, and he didn’t like what was going on there. He said, “What about you? Where are you from?” I said, “I’m Ukrainian.” That’s my grandmother’s roots.
I didn’t know that.
Here we are, this Ukrainian roots guy in the backseat, and this Russian guy in the front seat. I said, “Did you go to the Orthodox church?” He says, “My grandmother dragged me there all the time.” I said, “What do you think about Jesus?” He said, “Nobody has ever asked me that,” and started talking. We had an hour-long ride, and he didn’t stop talking for 45 minutes about faith. He’s not a Christian. He says all those other religions. I said, “Can I give you something?”
There you go.
It’s as simple as that. For those who are reading, if I can do it, you can do it. If a Chevrolet car dealer can do it, you can do it. If a food bank can do it, you can do it.
Amen.
We’re at the end of our time. If people want to find out more about The Pocket Testament League, they can go to PTL.org, and they’ll find out more. Anything else in closing you’d like to mention?
I want to thank you and thank Convene. We are blessed by having a relationship with Convene in part because it makes the ministry better. I joke around about how a not-for-profit business is still a business. I need to run this organization well for the glory of God by the way I treat employees and the way we manage supplies by paper. We’re blessed to be running with people who are about excellence in an integrated way. They’re running in excellence in their faith, how they show up, do their jobs, and what they create. We’re blessed by that. I want to say thank you to you and also to all the Convene folks because they make us better. Thank you so much.
Thanks. It’s our joy to partner with you and accelerate the deployment of the gospel around the world. Thanks for what you’re doing.
You’re welcome.
