Mark's Blog

Oklahoma Christian University - First Home of LST

Just before the end of the 1980s, several things came together that allowed Let’s Start Talking to grow from 58 workers in 1989 to 325 workers in 1999.

First you have to understand our organization for the first decade—none! It was just Mark and Sherrylee and the kids! We were members at the Dayspring Church of Christ in Edmond, Oklahoma, and the ministry we did fell naturally then under their oversight. The church contributed to the work, but it was just 150 members, so mostly they prayed for us and watched our back legally.

I was teaching English full-time, coaching kid’s soccer, working on my doctorate, and leading at church. Sherrylee was being a mom, eventually going to work at a dental office, then working as an assistant librarian in an Edmond high school.

In 1989, we asked the Dayspring elders if Sherrylee could become an employee of the ministry, which they approved. Then we asked Oklahoma Christian if we could clean out a small storage room on the second floor of the library and use it for an office—which they also graciously allowed! They even allowed us to be a part of the telephone and the emerging computer network—all of which were great advantages to us—and all at no cost initially.

About the same time, Oklahoma Christian added an Engineering program and brought in either semi-retired or retired engineers from industry as the first professors. Among these were Lynn and Martha Nored, Jerald and Verna Lee Parker, and Joe and Glenda Watson, great men and women of God as well as outstanding leaders. Both of these families immediately sought us out and desired to serve with LST.  These families provided a level of maturity, leadership, and vision that added immensely to the ministry’s potential.  (I’m so glad to say that they are both still involved with LST today!)

With a little more structure and with additional leadership, I believe God was preparing the ministry for opportunities undreamed of in the previous ten years.

The world saw the fall of the Berlin wall in late 1989. The collapse of the Soviet Union began in 1990 and so did the work of LST in the countries now open to us.  As American churches began to fathom the opportunities in Eastern Europe, they also realized that almost no one was prepared in the languages of these countries. Working through interpreters who had no knowledge of Christianity—sometimes even biases against—was not really an adequate solution either.

LST Team in Moscow

LST had been working in non-English speaking countries for a decade, so our telephone began to ring with invitations to go very early into Yugoslavia, Russia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Other ministries bought our materials, imitated our strategy (or some version of it) and so a great deal of the early work done in this whole region was using the desire to learn English as the point of contact with people who had been cut off by and indoctrinated with godless Communism for almost half a century.

Each of these eastern bloc countries has its own extraordinarily interesting story, but I’ll save that for the full history some day!  I will give you, however, the story of our work in Mother Russia!

Next:  To Russia and Japan and the ends of the Earth!