Transcript of the Langham Live Event 26th September 2025
Guest: Colin Macpherson (Director of Publisher Development, Langham Literature)
Interviewer: John Libby (Langham Partnership UK and Ireland National Director)
Welcome to Colin McPherson. And Colin, it is so good to have you with us. And I won’t try and big your introduction, which does not need any help at all, but just straight in. Whereabouts are you speaking from this morning?
Well, hello everyone. Good morning. I’m speaking from the far north of Scotland, north of Inverness, but south of the Arctic Circle. This is where I was born and brought up and returned to my later life.
So very civilised, beautiful part of the world. I look forward with interest to asking you how easy is it to get to all the corners of the globe that you do get to from north of Inverness, but before the Arctic Circle. But let’s leave that for a moment and tell us, what family have you got up there.
Yeah. Yes, I have two teenage girls, one of whom’s just left for university. The other one is rumbling around upstairs somewhere. So I’ve been based here since my late 20s. I’ve come back and yeah, my immediate family is quite small, but very supportive.
Well, and somewhere in that journey you met with Jesus.
Indeed. Very grateful that the Lord planted me in a Christian home with strong Christian parents who were not too overly pushy, but who demonstrated the love of Christ. So as a child, I never doubted the existence of God nor his love for me. Read my Bible, said my prayers. Good boy. But then the teenage years kick in and you start to question things. And I never questioned the truths, but I started to realise that it wasn’t enough simply to believe in this God, but I had to follow him, I had to trust Him. And that was a decision I came to a few years later through a lot of teenage angst and a bit of stress with family and school and. And by age 14, I went to a conference and the speaker said to me very clearly, I felt it was coming to me. “It’s not just our earthly parents that we grieve. When we are out of tune with what God wants, we grieve his holy spirit.” And it just clicked with me that God was saddened by my failure to put him in the driving seat of my life. So that night I said, “Please take over the steering wheel.” Hallelujah.
And then some time after that, you came across the word Langham?
Yes, a little bit there. Firstly, I came across the word Evangelical Literature Trust. I was working post-university as an economic researcher consultant. And I was invited to take a sabbatical in that by a mission organisation. I was needing a bit of a change, so I went to live in Albania in the post-communist mess. And that was an interesting experience. It was a country in chaos and a mission society in chaos.
But in the doing of that, I made a very good, strong Albanian friend who was an amazing character, Rolls Royce of a brain, theologically, linguistically, very argumentative. Somehow he thought that because I was a Scot, I must be a theologian. So he would pick my brains and very quickly find there wasn’t much there. And at the end of every argument, I would say, “Romeo, I don’t know the answer to that, but I think I have a book on the subject.” So one by one, my library became his library.
Until the day when he was pretty desperate in his economic circumstances. Top professional man, earning nothing, needing another job. He was going to give up his job and become a worker in the amusement arcade. The new amusement arcade, emptying slot machines paid three times as much as his professional job. And I said to him, “Brother, in an ideal world, what would you like to do?” Because this seemed to me like a total waste of a man’s abilities. And he said, “Oh, that’s an easy question. If I’m allowed to dream those dreams, that’s an easy question to answer. This pile of books that you’ve given to me, which I can read, which have blessed me, I would like to make them available in Albanian.”
And I thought, wow, that really makes sense. So I said, “Why don’t you?” He says, “I can’t. It costs money.” So we prayed about it, we thought about it, and I said, “Okay, Romeo, you make it happen. I’ll go home to Scotland and we’ll find some money.” And that was the birth of a very naive publishing ministry that made a lot of mistakes. But in the doing of that, I came across a friend who, a colleague of John Stott’s, who said, “We could help you. There’s an Evangelical Literature Trust thing that gives grants to emerging publishers.” So I got connected with the forerunner of Langham Literature that way.
And then later in life, a few years later, maybe eight or nine years later, we merged with Langham. The board of the ministry I was with before overlapped with Langham’s board. And they said, “We think this is a global approach to ministry publisher planting, publisher development, not just in Eastern Europe, but around the globe.” So Langham merged in 2008 with ELAC.
Is that your background then? Economics? Did you say?
And yeah, yes, economics, small business, quantitative techniques, things like that. Operational research, a bit of a mixture, but that was my background. And some of that I can bring to bear into the work that I do now, because publishing is a spiritual ministry but it’s delivered on the vehicle of a small business. Every publisher is a small business so I can help with that side of it.
So expand if you don’t mind on your Langham role and what’s on your desk at the moment in terms of as publishing director.
Okay, well what we do is we try and get alongside emerging publishers, birthing publishers or long-established publishers if they’re needing help, to help them to be stronger as a ministry, more impactful, stronger as a business. We’re looking for resilience, self-support because we want them to be there for the decades. And I believe strongly that the best route to delivering Bible opening material is in the local heart language by the local people who know what the needs are.
So we try and stimulate and help local publishers sometimes to get started. Sometimes like my friend Romeo, others will come along and say we really want to see more literature in this country. And I’ll say to them, “Well what are you going to do about it?” And we, you know, see if there’s a germ of a publishing house there. On a day-to-day basis, it’s a matter of trying to serve them in any way we can. That can mean funding, capital funding to get started or to grow or for particular titles. But largely it’s walking with them over a 10, 10, 15-year period, giving advice, reassuring, talking about sales, pricing, print runs, all those nitty-gritty things.
But you know this, the thing that is most important I have found is to just stand with them and encourage them because it’s a very wearying job, it’s very discouraging. You never see your audience. It’s not like a preacher who can see the people falling asleep or eyes opening. A publisher prints into a vacuum and doesn’t always know what impact he’s having or she’s having. So encouragement, praying with them, telling them it’s okay, that others have gone through this before and that the publisher in the country next door is in a similar slough of despond. It is a helpful thing and I can connect them to each other and I can point them to training, point them to answers to their questions. Relational kind of ministry.
I guess one of my questions now is that you alluded to finding out whether there’s the germ of a publisher there. So I mean you’re there in a foreign country, you’re talking having in English or do you have the range of global languages that you’re and you’re having a conversation. I don’t know in an office or in a coffee shop. What gives you the clues as to whether there is that germ there?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yes, I have some English, but that’s about it. So I’m dependent upon either English-speaking or…
That’s not a French accent you’re speaking to us in then?
No, and I don’t speak Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic, anyway.
Well, I guess there’s a degree of discernment and also experience you bring to bear because very often an aspiring publisher will have no real clue about what they’re taking on, but they have a passion or a burning to see more literature. Also, when you sit down with a publisher, a birthing publisher, they don’t know the story, they don’t know what it’s going to involve. So I have to try to explain to them what steps might be needed, how that might look in their situation. We explore that and if there is a genuine calling there, then we can do something. What I have discovered is it’s no point in trying to push somebody into that job unless it’s their job. We don’t recruit publishers. We recognise publishers. It’s very different.
So you’ve spotted that germ or seed and have encouraged it and then you move into a sort of advice and nurture kind of mode that you alluded to. What’s give us a common issue or question that publishers really want to talk to you about, whatever their different cultures or whatever.
Yeah, okay. I would pick two things. Firstly, a publisher is always faced with the question, what do we print? What do we publish next? What is needed? So the whole area of title selection, content, listening to the need of the local church, finding somebody who can write into that or translate into that, that’s always big on the mind. What’s our next priority idea for publishing? And that’s a ministry question as well as a slightly market-oriented question.
The other biggie, which everybody suffers with, including Langham Publishing and Zondervan and IVP, is how to make it work financially. Because it’s not easy. And even in the West we’ve seen a lot of the Western publishers have to be rescued. So it’s a constant survival technique. And in each country there’s a different model that might answer that. You might be able to sell editing skills, you might be able to, you know, do some other things, you might be able to raise funds, you might be able to set up, you know, regular giving things. So we just have to investigate that culturally in every different context. How do we make this work financially, year on year, decade on decade and that’s an ongoing challenge.
I’m just curious as to, as you look at the map of the world, so to speak, from your chair, how many countries have you sort of gone through that process with?
Yeah, probably about over the last 30 years, probably 40 or 50 at the moment. We juggle a portfolio maybe of about 25, some much bigger time absorbers than others. And the hope would be that as time goes on, occasionally somebody gets to the point where they don’t need any help anymore. They grow up, they fledge. So Langham would generally aim to take on one new major development project a year. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you add that into a 10 or a 15-year trajectory, that’s all we can take in.
I say about 40 or 50. That’s probably 40 or 50 languages. I mean, we’ve got a friend from Yangon there this morning and he’ll tell you there’s over 100 languages in Myanmar alone, many of which have no Christian publisher. We’re helping in three or four of those. But there are 6,000 to 7,000 world languages. About 10% of those have the Bible in its entirety. Maybe 30% have New Testament. That’s escalating.
Our generation, well, my daughter’s generation will be the first probably after 2000 years to see the Bible available in all languages thanks to, you know, computer translation and AI. Now that’s a landmark. Now, every country that gets, or every language group that gets a Bible today, it’s a Christian publisher to follow it up with all those books that will help preachers to preach it. So the job of Langham in trying to feed these languages is mushrooming like an explosion. I say, I can take on one new language a year. Well, we’re going to need hundreds. It’s a huge task.
So do you have, obviously you’re working on a current project probably for this year. Can you share anything in detail about that particular project and how’s that going yet?
The biggest, newest thing at the moment is our work in Ethiopia. There are somewhere near 30 million Christians in Ethiopia. It’s a huge population. There are no indigenous Christian publishers until one year ago when, by providence, I was approached for a completely different thing, for a writer’s grant by a friend from Ethiopia. He’d been working as a consultant to Wycliffe and he was writing some commentaries in Ethiopian with a focus on Ethiopian preaching. And he came to me looking for a writer’s grant.
And I say, well, I always say to writers, “Well, you need a publisher.” And the answer comes back, “But we don’t have a publisher.” However, he said, “I’ve had a 20-year dream to be a publisher. It’s just not possible yet. So I’m writing instead.” So I asked him about his dream for publishing and eventually went and met the guy and it was one of those God moments where you realise this is somebody who’s got it in here and in here.
So Langham drew alongside and said, “Okay, let’s look at what do we have to do to make that happen.” And we’re still asking those questions. But a year later he’s launched about eight or nine Bible commentaries and it’s going very well. And I’m going out there next month to their one-year anniversary and we’ll look at all the sales data and their feedback and the accounts and we’ll say great, oh dear. And we’ll start to see how we can learn from that first year for the next year.
Well, let me ask you the question that I hinted at right at the beginning. There you are north of Inverness and you get to Addis presumably or whatever. What’s that journey like?
I don’t mind it. And Inverness is connected to Heathrow and Gatwick and so you go into Inverness, Amsterdam. Yes. You can fly out of Edinburgh, Glasgow also. It’s better connected than Carlisle, I would argue.
Yes. Which is where I’m speaking from for those that… and where our international service centre is. Yeah, yeah. I mean the Ethiopia work seems on a very successful trajectory. Hallelujah. From what you’re sharing. What about as you look back over the last few years, you know, talk us through some of the not so good and responses there. Do you ever have to take the decision that this actually although we’ve given everything we can undergone, it’s just not the way we’re being called or you know?
Yes. The decision to stop publishing would not be mine or Langham’s. It would be a publishing partner. So we serve them. There are some who will give up eventually, either retirement or very few actually have given up because it’s not been possible. I’m amazed at how tenacious they have been. They have found a way. Sometimes they’ve scaled back down to two books per year. Like in Serbia, with very small population, Christian population, just a labour of love, without wages, without employment, two books a year.
Other publishers have found that they can survive better by publishing books into the seeker market, the general market. So there’s ways and means. There are publishers, I won’t name any. There’s one that we’ve walked with for many years, but has failed to grasp the nettle of book-selling. Because if you don’t sell a book, you don’t have income for the next one and you continue to be dependent upon funding from outside.
Now, that’s maybe not a terrible thing, except that where funding comes from the outside, it usually comes with strings attached. And you can get money if you publish what Zondervan wants you to publish, or what, you know, MacArthur wants you to publish, so you can get money. But it comes with an editorial agenda.
So Langham tries to buy freedom for our publishers and say this particular publisher, I said to their board, “If you had freedom to choose your own titles, what would you publish?” And they looked around the room and they said, “Wow, that would be really exciting. We could choose the books we want to publish rather than just serving somebody else.” And they have.
However, they’ve still not weaned themselves off the drug of Western money. So, you know, it’s been a rocky road there. They’re still going strong. They’re still the leading publisher in their country.
And I mean, again, forgive my naivety in the area, but if you are a publisher, presumably they are trying to find authors, commission them and hold their hand through the publishing process. Is that the way it works?
Yeah, very important. Most of them would start out translating, and in some countries there are no credible authors. In Albania, when we were there, in first-generation churches, Turkey, it’s very difficult to find credible authors. So you translate.
Now, that’s a bit of a treadmill because translation is not hitting the mark quite as well, maybe as a good national writer. So part of my job is to try and make that transition over a decade or so, increasing the number of authors, finding national authors.
The world would not have heard probably of the name John Stott or J.I. Packer were it not for the CEO of IVP, because he spotted these students who could write well in the magazine, student magazine, and he went to them and he said, “Would you like to write some more?” So a publisher is actually the kingmaker or the finder of tomorrow’s authors.
And I tell publishers that story about John Stott or J.I. Packer. The lights go on and they think, gosh, we could have a Stott for Vietnam. Yes, you could go and find them and here’s how you would maybe work with them in order to hone their skills.
Gosh, Colin, thank you very much for the insight on your role and Langham’s in the publishing area. But just before we divide, people will have your prayer topics that you kindly gave us. They’ll be available in the chat box shortly. But I just wonder whether with this particular group, whether there’s anything you’d like to share just that’s on your heart either for a particular issue or problem or Thanksgiving for Langham at the moment in your neck of the woods, or for your family or and for your family before we divide.
Certainly I can’t remember what I had in those topics, but I would ask that we pray for more publisher planters and supporters servants. There’s a huge need as I’ve said, and it’s mushrooming and yet there are only a handful of people that I know of like myself and other organisations who are dedicated to supporting the model of indigenous publishing. We need many more and hey, in the next coming years I need to be replaced as well. So I would love to find those people any day now. But do pray for more.
And a thing that I’m consciously aware of is that we do need the Lord’s supernatural connecting for us to the most important, most impactful cases that we can help. Those always come along but finding them and being connected properly is what we need. So those two things for myself, yes.
And as I said last night, I have two teenage daughters, lovely girls. One’s just off to university. It’s our nail-biting time for a father. She’s doing great but they need to find their way in the world. Christian friends, the right church. These kinds of things are always on my heart.
Prayer Points
- Pray that God would raise up more heart language publishers and writers, people with a calling and passion to serve and open up scripture, especially in those languages where nothing exists yet.
- Pray that God would bring Langham into contact with those He wants us to serve and give us discernment that we would know who to get behind and how best to help.
- Pray for the financial resources that are needed to establish and strengthen publishing ministries so that they may be more sustainable, durable, and impactful for the years ahead.
- Pray that the Lord would impact mightily through the resources produced by heart language publishers – reaching the minds and heart of readers, preachers, students, church leaders, believers and seekers.
- For publishers:
- Pray for encouragement, vision, perseverance, sensitivity to local needs, wisdom in addressing local needs, business skills, and committed and skilled workers.
- Pray for safety and protection for those who publish in places of persecution and pressure
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