An encouraging journey of faith and mission
Johnny McClean joined us on Langham Live in April 2026 to share a vivid, inspiring testimony of how a young man from Northern Ireland found his calling and spent 31 years serving the church across Thailand and the wider region. From a childhood hearing the gospel in Sunday school to the life-changing moment at 17 when he realised, “I needed to have my life transformed by Jesus,” Johnny’s story is both deeply personal and widely applicable for anyone thinking about obedience, mission and faithful preaching.
Mark Armstrong chatted with Johnny about his role as Langham Preaching regional Coordinator for East Asia and learns about the amazing work God is doing throughout the region through Langham’s ministry.
Video Transcript
Thank you so much for being on Langham Live on Thursday. It’s Thursday night and as you’ll hear my very thick Northern Ireland accent, you’re going to have double trouble tonight because our guest this evening is also another Northern Ireland person and his name is Johnny McClean. Johnny, really great to see you this evening. Thank you for coming on this evening. We really appreciate it. Could you tell us where you’re calling from and what time it is with you at this particular moment?
Okay, so I am presently in Bangkok, although hoping to move up to the northeast of Thailand in another seven weeks’ time. So our house is in the process of changing. So I’ve been here in Thailand for 31 years and in Bangkok for the last 15. Yeah, obviously you’ve spent a, you’ve been there man and boy in Bangkok. But for those of you who don’t know and who are maybe not familiar with you, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you originally come from and also how you came to faith in Christ and a little bit about your family as well?
Yeah, so I’m originally from Northern Ireland. I come from a broken home. My father was Catholic from the Falls Road; my mother was Protestant from Carrickfergus. I grew up knowing about the problems that that brings. I grew up most of my life in Carrickfergus, about 10 miles outside of Belfast. Right from an early age, I heard the gospel every week—Sunday school, Christian Endeavour, Boys Brigade—every opportunity there were chances to hear the gospel. But it wasn’t until I was 17 and I went along to an evangelistic Bible study that things changed. The person leading the Bible study asked, “I don’t care if you’re the son of an elder or a deacon or whatever in the church. What I want to know is what is your relationship with Jesus Christ on a scale of 0 to 10?” I think it was the first time I actually admitted to myself that I didn’t have a relationship with Jesus Christ. By the end of that evening, just studying the Bible, I realised I needed to have my life transformed by Jesus. My life wasn’t right, and there were things which—if I died tonight—I would go to a lost eternity. So that’s where I became a Christian, and life changed massively since that time.
So tell us, are you married, kids, what sort of family life?
I’m married to Ann, who I met out on the mission field. She’s a teacher in a local American school teaching English, so please pray for her. We have three children, all grown up: one’s in Liverpool, one’s in Sheffield and one’s in Belfast.
Wonderful. Tell us how that story—sitting in Northern Ireland and looking out of my window I can almost see Carrickfergus where I’m sitting—it’s a massive journey in both miles and life to end up where you are, where you’re speaking from tonight. How did that journey pan out?
So I grew up, as I say, in a church where I heard the gospel every week. One of the things in Sunday school and Christian Endeavour was the missionary lesson—I don’t know if they still do it these days—but it would be Mary Slessor, David Livingstone, CEF flashcards or a flower graph about what missionaries were doing. I kind of grew up with mission in my DNA. The church was involved in Uganda and various places across the world, so missionaries and mission were part of our church life.
But it wasn’t until after I’d committed my life to the Lord that, about 12 months later, there was a thing called Mission Fest in Belfast. D*** and Rose Dysent—some of you might know them—D*** was the main speaker, and by the end of that evening, I filled in a card saying I was prepared to go wherever, whenever to serve the Lord in mission. That was the beginning of a 31-year journey. I worked for a Japanese company in Mallusk outside of Belfast for two years—that was my first ever experience meeting people from East Asia. That gave me my first opportunity to share the gospel with someone who wasn’t from my continent, and it put a burden in my heart to pray for East Asia and eventually to go. It’s just how the Lord prepares you, putting passion and love in your heart for what He has you to do later in life.
Well, obviously, you are now where you are, so give us a little flavour of the church which you’re part of and really about the country spiritually and the challenges as you see it at this particular time.
So I’m looking after countries in Asia from Mongolia in the north down to Singapore in the south. It’s a very diverse area—every country speaks its own language and the church has a different flavour and rate of growth even across neighbouring borders. When I first came to Thailand, missionaries were still taking the lead in doing things. Now, as I look across Asia, the churches have grown and are now the ones taking the lead; missionaries may still be involved if they can be, but it’s no longer the case that missionaries are the lone rangers doing the work.
I work under Dewey, who’s Indonesian. The leader of Langham Thailand is a Langham scholar, and I’m the only white face in the whole group, either in Chiang Mai or in Bangkok. So it’s very much locally led, and we’ve seen massive growth. In January, I was in Cambodia, known for the killing fields and the Khmer Rouge. Between the Khmer people, the local churches and the missionaries, they estimate maybe 2 to 4% of the country is now Christian—that’s huge compared to Thailand across the border, where we’re still less than 1% after 200 years of missionary work. So there can be massive growth in some places.
In other places, the church is still persecuted and underground. Last year, I visited a neighbouring country where they opened the first Christian bookshop since 1975. There are still no theological colleges allowed in that country, whereas in Thailand, we are an open country. That’s why I’m talking about where I am, and I’m wearing a Langham Thailand T-shirt. I have a missionary permit from the Thai government that says I can tell people about Jesus, teach the Bible and build up the church—that’s what the Thai Buddhist government have told me to do. I can’t be doing anything else.
Very different areas, even across local countries, but often the growth is threatened by a lack of depth. The church is growing, but it’s not necessarily growing down. We have a lot of false teaching, prosperity gospel, very active cults—not just Western cults but cults from places like Korea—that are moving in. Often, leadership is under-equipped and undertrained, and that can overwhelm the work. So we’ve got the weeds and the wheat growing together. The saddest sermon I ever had to preach was at the funeral of a former student who was killed by bad preaching because her pastor said, “You don’t need to take your diabetes medication, just pray.” Sadly, she died because she listened to bad preaching. That’s why I’m involved in Langham—because bad preaching kills.
That’s very dynamic and powerful what you’re saying there, Johnny. We can think about the prosperity gospel and bad preaching almost not just in abstract but as damage to an individual. One of the things I was thinking about was you being a Westerner—or the only Westerner, if you like—in an Asian setting. Is that a positive thing? Does that create challenges as you live and work in that region?
So I think in Asia, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And the longer you’re here—and in my case, the less hair you have—the more you can do. When we began, we would have people come from Australia to Thailand to start Langham preaching, and people from various places would come out to begin the work and try their best to build bridges. But now we are working with people who have been in those countries a long time and speak the language fluently. For example, we have a missionary from Australia who’s been in Indonesia for 20 years and speaks Bahasa fluently. I speak Thai fluently and preach in it every week. It’s not the case that we’re parachuting people in. Length of time in Asia is an important factor because there is a common culture from mainland Southeast Asia down to Indonesia—common cultural values, ways of thinking, even intertwined languages. I’m only one of three East Asia coordinators.
Johnny, talk to us a little bit about your role in Langham Preaching—what day-to-day looks like for you, what you’re involved in, what’s on your desk at this particular moment.
At the moment, I’m preparing to go to a neighbouring country in a team. There’ll be four of us, three from Thailand plus me, led by a 70-year-old senior pastor who’s had a burden for this neighbouring creative-access country. This is our second time going. We’ll be teaching the Old Testament in a church we can go into in the capital freely—praise God for gospel opportunities like that. Again, it came about from an Asian local leader having the vision. Just over the border, there’s another place that doesn’t have the training and opportunities that we have here, so we want to go.
The biggest challenge for me day to day is the scale and diversity of the area I’m looking after. A few months ago, the UN brought out statistics on the largest urban conurbation in the world, and it’s no longer in Japan—it’s Jakarta, which has 41 million people in the greater urban sprawl. Manila has 28 million, Bangkok has 18 million. But then, on the other hand, we have areas where we’re working with Manobo villagers up a mountain with no electricity and a dirt track. We’re being asked by pastors in some megacities how they should use ChatGPT in sermon preparation, and other pastors have only a primary school education and struggle to read the Bible in their own language. We have huge differences within countries and within the region.
We have Pastor Gopchai from Bangkok whose family, just during COVID, bought Selfridges for £4 billion. Then we have a pastor from Samar Island who’s a fisherman wearing flip flops. How can we give training that works across the region? Nowadays, it’s not so much someone like me giving the training—it’s nationals training nationals to be facilitators who will take the training to the ground level. In the Philippines, which only started three or four years ago, it’s huge—the whole thing has exploded across the country. They’re having trainings all the time and preaching clubs are happening all the time—hundreds of clubs, 60 of them meeting every week. It’s really deep.
So how can we adapt our training? How can we make our training simple? For example, in Thailand, we’ve developed the idea of the “okay preacher.” How can we remember the five aspects of Langham’s preaching? We have three skills: faithful, clear and relevant. You can tell within five minutes if a preacher is faithful, clear and relevant. But then, under the water, you have the heart of the preacher: Christlike in conviction, Christlike in character. Are they being like Jesus? Are they there to serve or to be served? Are they there to give or to take? And then confident in conviction—do they believe the Bible is the word of God? Do they believe preaching is the method God uses to transform his church?
In the Philippines, they have Oreo feedback. In Langham, we want to give positive feedback. The Filipinos say everyone loves Oreo cookies—the outer bit’s not the bit people want, they want the inner gooey bit. So you give positive feedback, then the value-added middle—suggestions for improvement—then positive again. If you just give criticism without the positive, people reject it. This creativity shows our training is being transformed as we learn from different areas. It’s not a mechanical thing of presenting a lesson on how to preach—it’s culturally sensitive and adaptive.
I really love the way you guys are thinking culturally about those who are sitting in the Langham preaching sessions, how to encourage and equip them. Langham Preaching also works alongside our other two programs, Scholars and Literature. How do the three work together in Asia?
In Asia, like our neighbouring country where we went to the bookshop, most books were from Thailand because there hasn’t been Christian publishing since 1975. Many of those books are from Langham Publishing or subsidised by Langham Literature and supported by the main publisher in Bangkok. Across the region, we have Langham scholars writing books in the local language. For example, in the last three years we’ve had two key books: one from Dr. Wia, who has written the first commentary on Revelation in Thai for Thai people; and the first systematic theology in Thai, written by a Thai, with a Thai flavour and perspective answering questions Thai people have. There’s a big difference between something translated and something written natively—illustrations and cultural references matter.
These are key if we want to move from being a foreign minority religion to something that’s from their country and culture. The three-strand cord from Ecclesiastes—scholars, preaching movement and literature—is not easily broken. Where you have the scholars, preaching and literature, you often see a very strong preaching movement, as in Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Thailand. Where we haven’t had scholars involved, it’s hard to find someone who can train pastors in the Old Testament or Revelation and other difficult passages. We need all three to achieve the goal.
One of the things for me, living in a small country called Northern Ireland, I can’t grasp the spans of the land where you’re working or how big Asia is. As I’ve listened to you this evening, I’m really struggling to grasp the spans of the need and the opportunities. It seems to me that the opportunities are endless to build the church and train Bible teachers to teach God’s word accurately and confidently.
We’re going to go to a time of prayer in a few moments. Johnny, you have prepared some prayer points for us. Is there any you want to highlight as we go to prayer?
I think pray particularly for the three parts of Langham to work together. In Thailand, we have 10 Langham scholars; every single scholar is involved in the preaching movement as well as their work in seminaries. In other countries, there are Langham scholars, but sometimes due to an idea that we only work with the top academic and not with pastors and preachers on the ground, there isn’t that connection. We want to change mindsets. It’s important to teach theology at a low level as well as at a high level, and also to publish more in local languages. I just had a meeting with someone from Malaysia who publishes in Hassan—if there’s stuff in English, there’s lots, but how can we get more into local languages? There’s still a lot of work to do on the three strands of Langham.
Another thing is a country very close to Thailand that is a creative-access nation. We’ve been going in since 2014–15, and we’re still needing to go in; it still requires foreigners to go in, and that’s the only place I really feel we need a DNA change. This last year, we’ve had some encouragements: I’ll call him Pastor H in the south and Pastor Blessings in the north—these are younger men who really have a burden to reach their own country and are an answer to prayer. We pray there will be more national leaders with a passion and burden to see a preaching movement within their own country.
Absolutely. One of the reasons I was so keen to have you on was that whenever we think about global mission and the majority world, our minds go to Africa and Latin America—but I think Asia doesn’t always come to mind quickly. Hopefully folks listening this evening have seen the work happening and the challenges as well as the blessings in that region. Johnny, I really want to thank you for taking time at one o’clock or half one in the morning your time to come and spend this evening with us.
Prayer Points
- Strength in Conflict: Pray for Sein Kyi and the preaching movement in his nation. Ask for God’s protection over leaders and for the Holy Spirit to grant resilience, courage, and peace as they serve amid ongoing conflict.
- Raising New Leaders: Pray for Pastor Blessings and Pastor Hy as they guide this steady work. Ask for wisdom, favour, and perseverance as they nurture growth in a challenging context.
- Thailand – United Ministry: Pray for Wiriya as she coordinates Preaching, Literature, and Scholars. Ask that these three areas work in harmony to strengthen a biblically grounded church in Thailand.
- Cross-Border Mission: Pray for Pastor Aphichat and his vision to see a preaching movement spread across borders. Ask God to bless his efforts and establish strong foundations in new leaders.
- Philippines – Humble Growth: Give thanks for the 60 weekly preaching groups. Pray that their culture of feedback fosters humility, excellence, and encouragement for pastors.
- Cambodia – Sustainable Future: Pray for Somnang and Vachana as they lead. Ask God to provide resources, creativity, and local support to build a lasting, self-sustaining movement.
You can watch more Langham Live videos and register for the next events online. Please continue to pray for Johnny and Ann and the team in Southeast Asia.