Dr. John Edmund Haggai
A life devoted to raising up others for the work of the Gospel.
Pastor Haggai was the son of a Syrian immigrant who gave his life to Christ as a child and sensed God calling him to ministry. He attended Moody Bible Institute where he met his wife, Christine and began pastoring churches in South Carolina, Kentucky and here at WP.
After preaching on evangelism at the SBC one year, he received hundreds of invitations to speak at churches, and left the pastorate to become one of America’s most popular evangelists.
But it would be a mission trip to Lebanon that would forever alter the trajectory of his ministry. National Christian leaders asked him why western missionaries didn’t trust the national workers to reach their own people. That fateful conversation became the catalyst to a totally different ministry approach that would shape the rest of his life.
In 1969 he started his first Haggai Institute in Switzerland training 19 national leaders from four countries.
A second session followed, training 26 leaders in Thailand and then 80 in Iran. He quickly saw that equipping national workers was a far more effective strategy than sending American evangelists around the world. Because the greatest need was in Asia, he moved his family to Singapore and Haggai International was born.
Long before “Equipping the Saints” became the vision statement of WP in 1988, it was being lived out by one of our former pastors on a global scale.
