Barefoot Blog

John Henry has a contagious love and passion for Jesus and his call to make disciples of all nations. John will inform and challenge your group to re-align your vision and programs toward God’s plan and purposes. His high content and inspirational presentations will help every participant focus on what is really important in life, love, and learning.

Through carefully customized presentations designed to meet your group’s specific needs, John will help emphasize God’s calling for any audience, aligning career goals with God’s purposes.

In addition to being a mission mobilizer, John has been a frequent guest speaker in churches, conferences, seminars and workshops around the world. John is the founder and international director of the University of the Nations’ Student Mobilization Centre. The Centre was first commissioned internationally at the UofN Workshop in Korea in 1997. John serves a growing network of over seventy YWAM university ministries in over thirty countries.



Following the Youth With A Mission foundational value of “first do, then teach,” John brings nearly 25 years experience “doing” what he teaches. Since 1985, John has been a faith-missionary with experience in many different aspects of church, missions, and leadership, especially among university students.

Since 1989, John has learned many essentials for spiritual formation and leadership emergence as he has coordinated, equipped, and mobilized seventy-five student teams from over 100 colleges and universities from nine nations to serve and learn alongside long term field projects on short-term internships in over thirty countries.

Through various lecture and activity presentations, John not only shows people what to do, he teaches and models how to think Christianly and listen to God’s heart. If you want a tested witness of God’s faithfulness in Christian ministry and mission with experience in over 30 countries who approaches learning from an integrated relational perspective, invite John to come share his life with your group.


John and his wife, Mary, have three children, two boys, and one girl adopted from China. As a Christian parent with active involvement in his family’s education and local congregation, John is also in touch with the daily challenges confronting families, young people, and churches. John is able to share through experience what works, what doesn’t, and what makes the difference in your family, your Church, or ministry group.


Education: MA Global Leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary. 


Experience: Speaker (Since 1983) Short-term Outreach Leader/Trainer (Since 1987) Church/Mission Consultant (Since 1989). 


Keywords of all John’s messages include: Faith, Calling, Mission, Learning, and Leadership

General Topics include: Careers, Ministerial Training, Education, Culture, and Leadership & Motivation.

Most Requested Topics:

1. Call to Relationship: Hearing and Responding to God

The heart of every relationship is found in four essential elements. Without a working familiarity with these elements, relationships eventually break down. Listening to God is urgently necessary if we are going to understand our value, our identity, and our purpose in life. Until we have that relationship with our Creator, we will struggle in virtually every other relationship. This most vital relationship is not merely for our own benefit, however. It is necessary to have a living relationship with God in order to have a living relationship with our families, our friends, our neighbors, our leaders, our teachers, our church community, and every aspect of our world, including our physical surroundings.

This message will penetrate through the non-essentials to help participants respond to God’s initiative of grace in relationships.

2. A Biblical Christian Worldview

Worldview is more than what we see; it’s how we see. John will surprise your group as he leads you into a worldview learning experience. He will help you discover how learning happens and how to understand worldview and how it influences every area of our lives. John leads his audience into a path of discovery, emphasizing the role of personal relationship in the learning experience. John will explore revelation, paradigms, and the four basic questions of worldview. However, this lecture is not a presentation of a simple reduction of philosophical concepts; it is an exposition of the breadth of worldviews, from materialism to spiritism, in contrast with a Christian worldview. Your group will discover together, through small group discussions, the relational nature of learning and the impact worldview has on every sphere of society.

3. Leadership and Collaboration: State of the Church in the 21st Century

The world has changed. Have you noticed? John brings his experience, his travels and ministry in thirty countries in four continents over the past twenty-five years, to his message on Leadership and Collaboration. His studies of culture, theology, and the history of the church will be obvious as he leads your group a thoroughly engaging discovery of the major waves of mission advance during the past 200 hundred years including global shifts which have occurred during the twentieth century. Your group will examine the implications of the significant shifts of the Western Church and the Church of the Global South. In so doing, he will present the need for a new kind of leadership for the Church, and the need for partnership and collaboration in the 21st century.

4. Being Sure about God’s Calling

Where do you fit in God’s unswerving plan to make disciples of all nations?

God is calling you to do kingdom works that he has planned and prepared for you and your community. The Creator of the universe desires you to work alongside him as he crafts his work on planet earth. In this lecture, John Henry shares about finding your place in fulfilling God’s plans for your community and for the nations.