Langham Partnership
Legal name: Langham Partnership USA, Inc., NFP · EIN 23-7417198
Langham states its mission as strengthening the ministry of the Word of God through three things, and it has run the same three for decades. Langham Preaching starts and supports national movements that teach local pastors to preach a Bible passage faithfully — seminars, then local preaching clubs, run by national coordinators. Langham Scholars funds doctorates for evangelical leaders from the Majority World on the understanding that they go home to teach; the 2025 report counts 103 PhD students from 46 countries and more than 350 graduates now serving. Langham Literature writes, publishes, translates and distributes evangelical books by Majority World authors, and sends books to Bible colleges that have none. The US entity, formerly John Stott Ministries, is one of eight national offices funding a single federation governed by an international council; it supplied about 40% of the federation’s income in the year to June 2025.
Global · Madagascar · Liberia · Peru · India
We pulled the spending and outcome counts out of the ministry’s audited statements or annual report ourselves and did the division in public.
Your gift
1,481 gifts of $10 cover one doctoral student supported for a year. Yours is 0.07% of one.
The division
- per doctoral student supported for a year
- $14,807
Only the spending on this program line is counted. Both halves are on Langham’s own 2025 annual report, and they are the one pair on it whose scope and period match. The numerator is the global federation’s Langham Scholars line for the year to 30 June 2025, $1,525,072 of $8,348,413 of federation program expenses. The denominator is the federation’s own statement that it "Supported 103 PhD students from 46 countries" — a roster of students enrolled during that year, not a cumulative total, which is why it can sit against a single year of spending when the 16,819 preachers cannot. Four things keep $14,807 an estimate. The 103 is identical in the 2024 and the 2025 report, which is consistent with a steady-state programme — 15 scholars graduated and a similar number started — but is also what a figure that was never updated would look like, and Langham does not say which. A scholarship does not cover the whole cost of a doctorate: the university, the supervisor and in many cases part of the fees belong to the host institution, so this is Langham’s contribution per student-year, not the price of a PhD. The line comes from the annual report’s federation table, which does not tie exactly to the audit printed beside it — four figures on the US side differ, by $464 on program expenses and $15,356 on the total — and no audited statement of the federation exists at all. And a student-year is not a graduate: at roughly 103 students and 15 graduations a year, the cost of one completed doctorate is nearer seven times this figure, and Langham publishes no cost or duration per scholar. We do not divide by the number the ministry leads with. The headline "16,819 preachers" is footnoted to a ten-year window on the same spread on which the body text calls it last year’s work, so it is ambiguous by about six times; it is in the alternates below with the Langham Preaching line it belongs to.
Other defensible denominators
- $9,918 each, dividing by the same 103 students, against the US entity’s own Langham Scholars line — About $9,918. This is the pot a US donor actually gives into, but it charges only US money against students the whole eight-office federation funds, so it reads cheaper than the work costs. The US office supplied about 40% of federation income.
- $96.25 each, dividing by the 16,819 preachers "equipped", against the federation’s Langham Preaching line of $1,618,746 — About $96, and the number Langham leads with. Its period is unknowable: the body text says "Last year" and the footnote on the same spread attributes the data to 2015–2025. If these are running totals the year’s work is closer to the 2,868 increase over the 2024 report, which would make $96 roughly six times too cheap. Nothing published says what "equipped" required of a preacher.
- $12.71 each, dividing by the 119,990 Bible students taught by Langham Scholars, against the same Langham Scholars line — About $12.71, and the most flattering figure available. It is barred as a primary denominator because the teaching happens inside seminaries that employ the scholars and pay for the classrooms, so it credits Langham with an output whose budget is not in the numerator. It is the right way to describe the multiplication and the wrong way to price it.
What the ministry advertises
“Equipped 16,819 preachers in 86 countries to teach God’s Word.”
“Last year, Langham trained 16,819 church leaders to teach God’s Word clearly, faithfully and relevantly.”
“Impact data from Radiant Global Insights (2015-2025).”
“13,951 Preachers and church leaders trained to teach God’s Word”
“*All impact data from outside agency Excellence in Giving, 2015-2024”
“Supported 103 PhD students from 46 countries.”
“119,990 Bible students were taught by Langham Scholars last year.”
“15 new scholars graduated, with 350+ Langham Scholars now serving in the Majority World.”
“1,262,560 people were taught by a Langham-trained preacher.”
“The number of church leaders who can explain a Bible passage more than doubles after training.”
Why this is the church’s work
Christ gave the church shepherds and teachers, and the reason given is functional: to equip the saints for the work of ministry. That makes the man in the pulpit an instrument rather than a terminus, and it makes his training a matter of whether the church under him is fed at all. Paul told Timothy to hand what he had received to men who would teach others, and told Titus that an elder must hold to sound doctrine well enough to instruct and to correct. Langham’s three programs are the three things that sentence requires — a preacher who can handle a text, a teacher who can train the preachers, and a book in the language they read.
“And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God.”
Ephesians 4:11–13
“And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”
2 Timothy 2:2
“He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.”
Titus 1:9
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
Hosea 4:6
Doctrinal position we read: Mission, Vision and Values, endorsing The Cape Town Commitment — Mission, Vision and Values
Our reservations
- The published impact numbers cannot be read. The 2025 report’s headline is "Equipped 16,819 preachers in 86 countries to teach God’s Word," the body text says "Last year, Langham trained 16,819 church leaders," and the footnote on the same spread says "Impact data from Radiant Global Insights (2015-2025)." The 2024 report put 13,951 in the same slot under the heading "2024 Impact Numbers" and footnoted it "All impact data from outside agency Excellence in Giving, 2015-2024." One reading makes 16,819 a year’s work; the other makes it a decade’s, and the two readings differ by roughly six times. That is the reason this page prices a doctoral scholarship rather than a preacher: Langham’s largest number is the one we cannot use.
- Fundraising cost. $1,273,019 of $6,949,871 in total expenses went to fundraising in the year to June 2025 — 18% — and $1,874,976 of $7,054,141 the year before, 27%. For a ministry whose whole case is that a dollar buys more in the Majority World, more than a sixth of the budget going to raise the next dollar is a material drag, and neither the audit nor the annual report addresses it.
- The US entity is spending down. Net assets fell from $5,708,051 to $4,301,775 in the year to June 2025, a 25% reduction, and the audit’s cash flow statement shows $673,744 of net cash used in operating activities. The annual report shows income and expenses both at $6,965,227, which reads as a balanced year.
- We found no article-by-article statement of faith on the US site. The values page is unmistakably evangelical — it commits the ministry to exalt Christ and promote the gospel of his grace, affirms the supreme authority of the Bible, and endorses The Cape Town Commitment by name — which is substantive doctrine by reference, but it is not a doctrinal statement a donor can read straight through.
- The outside agency that produced Langham’s impact numbers in 2024, Excellence in Giving, is also the body whose transparency recognition Langham advertises on its financials page. In 2025 the credit changed to Radiant Global Insights; we could not establish whether that is the same firm renamed. Either way the counter is engaged by the ministry, not independent of it.
A judgement about the work, not a measurement of its results. We do not score souls.
Why a dollar goes further here
Income per person in Madagascar is about 159× below the United States.
Every one of Langham’s three programs is designed so that the person funded goes on to teach people Langham never funds. A preaching movement is started by training a handful of national coordinators who then run seminars and local preaching groups themselves — the Madagascar movement in the 2025 report is led by two Malagasy pastors, Jeriah Rakotoson and Hari Josoa, and the Liberian one is coordinated by a Liberian pastor, Matthew Gonkerwon. A doctoral scholarship is the same lever over a longer horizon: it produces one teacher who then trains pastors for a career, in a seminary that already exists. And the books are written by Majority World authors and published in the languages people actually read, so the cost of producing them is set by a Peruvian or Indian economy, not an American one. Income per person in Madagascar is roughly 160 times below the United States and in Liberia roughly 107 times, which is what a seminar, a coordinator’s salary and a print run are priced against.
What creates the leverage
- Multiplies without more money — The thing funded goes on to produce more of itself — a church that plants churches, a leader who trains leaders — so later results are not paid for again.
- Local workers, not sent staff — The work is done by believers who already live there. No relocation, no expatriate salary, no home-country cost of living to cover.
- Low local cost base — Wages, rent, fuel and materials are priced to the local economy, so the same work costs a fraction of what it costs in a high-income country.
- Rides an existing network — Delivery runs through churches, schools or clinics that already exist and are already staffed, so the gift is not paying to build the channel.
The cost base, country by country
| Country | Income per person | Below United States |
|---|---|---|
| Madagascar | $560 | 159× |
| Liberia | $830 | 107× |
| India | $2,760 | 32× |
| Peru | $8,430 | 11× |
GNI per capita, Atlas method, current US dollars · World Bank · read 2026-09-19
This is a cost-of-living ratio, not a measure of how well the ministry spends. It tells you what a local wage or a bag of cement costs, and nothing about whether the work is any good — the rest of this page is for that.
Desk review
11 of 15
- Gospel centrality
- The mission is the ministry of the Word and nothing else. The values page commits the ministry to exalt the name and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ and to promote the gospel of his grace, affirms the supreme authority of the Bible, calls for theological education to re-centre Scripture as the core discipline, and specifies "qualified evangelical teachers" in the mission statement itself. Marked at 3 despite the absence of a formal statement of faith because the doctrinal commitment is explicit rather than implied.
- Is the gospel named and central, rather than implied by the ministry’s history?
- Local leadership
- The values page says programs are undertaken "only at the invitation of local and national church leaders, in consultation with them, and wherever possible under local leadership," and the rest of the report is consistent with it: the international council’s members represent Kenya, India, the Philippines, Israel, Singapore, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK; the preaching movements named are run by nationals; scholarships are for Majority World leaders who return home; the books are by Majority World authors. The US board, which governs the entity a US donor gives to, is entirely US-based.
- Is the work led and staffed by believers from the place it serves?
- Financial transparency
- Eight consecutive years of audited statements, Form 990s and annual reports are posted on its own site, and the annual report breaks program spending into five lines for the US entity and the global federation side by side — better disclosure than almost anything else in this directory. Marked down to 2 because the annual report’s own table does not tie to the audit it sits beside: program expenses $5,167,044 against $5,166,580, fundraising $1,287,910 against $1,273,019, total expenses $6,965,227 against $6,949,871, none of it explained.
- Can an outsider find audited statements, a Form 990, and accreditation?
- Evidence of outcomes
- Langham publishes more counts than most ministries and most of them are less usable. One spread mixes a standing roster ("350+ Langham Scholars now serving"), a two-year-unchanged snapshot (103 PhD students in both 2024 and 2025), an explicitly annual figure ("119,990 Bible students were taught by Langham Scholars last year") and the 16,819 preachers, all under a single year heading and a single ten-year footnote. Nothing defines what "equipped" required of a preacher. The 103 scholars is the one figure whose scope and period are clear enough to divide, and it is the one this page uses; a single usable number out of nine does not raise the score.
- Does the ministry publish counts of what was delivered, defined clearly enough to check?
- Cost per outcome is computable
- The scholars line is the one place where both halves have the same scope and the same twelve months: federation spending of $1,525,072 on Langham Scholars against the 103 PhD students the federation reports supporting. Held at 2 because the numerator comes from the annual report’s own table rather than from an audit — no audited federation statement exists, and the US figures in that table do not tie to the audit beside them — and because the preaching programme, which is the larger part of the work and the ministry’s headline, still cannot be divided at all.
- Are both a spending figure and an outcome count published, so cost per outcome can be divided out?
What we have not verified
- Whether 16,819 preachers is one year of work or ten. The body text of the 2025 report says "Last year"; the footnote on the statistics spread attributes the data to a ten-year window. If these are running totals, the year’s work is closer to the 2,868 increase over the 2024 report’s 13,951, and any cost per preacher built on 16,819 is roughly six times too cheap. Langham does not say which reading is correct, and we did not guess.
- Which entity each count belongs to. The 16,819 covers 86 countries — the whole federation. The audited $5,166,580 of program spending is Langham Partnership USA alone, which supplied 40% of federation income and about 62% of federation program expense in the same year. Setting those two against each other would credit a US gift with the whole federation’s output, which is why the figure on this page pairs the federation’s scholars spending with the federation’s scholars, and puts the US-only version in the alternates instead.
- Whether the 103 PhD students is a current count. The 2024 and 2025 reports both give 103. Fifteen scholars graduated in the year, and the graduate roster does move — 343 in 2024, "350+" in 2025 — so a stable enrolment is plausible. But an identical figure in two consecutive reports is also what a number nobody updated looks like, and Langham does not say when it was counted.
- What Langham’s share of a doctorate is. The scholars line is $1,525,072 across 103 students, but a PhD also consumes a university, a supervisor and often part of the fees, none of which is in that figure and none of which Langham publishes. Nor does it publish how long a scholarship runs or what one completed doctorate costs. At roughly 15 graduations a year against 103 enrolments, the cost of a finished degree is several times the cost of a student-year.
- What the federation table is. The income and expense comparison for the federation is printed in the annual report and nowhere else. There is no audited statement for Langham Partnership International, no consolidated Form 990, and no note explaining how the eight national offices’ figures are combined or whether transfers between them are eliminated.
- Whether the federation double-counts. Eight national offices fund the same three programs. Nothing published says whether a preacher trained in Madagascar with UK, Australian and US money is counted once federation-wide or once by each office that reports.
- What "equipped" or "trained" required. There is no minimum number of hours, no curriculum length, no completion standard and no distinction in the total between a pastor who attended one Langham Preaching seminar and a scholar who finished a funded doctorate. Both sit inside the same idea of a trained leader.
- Why the annual report and the audit disagree. Four figures differ — program expenses by $464, fundraising by $14,891, administrative by $1 and total expenses by $15,356. The differences are small, but an unexplained gap between a ministry’s own two documents is the kind of thing that should be explained.
- Why the annual report shows a balanced year. It reports total income and campaign funds of $6,965,227 against total expenses of $6,965,227, reaching that figure by adding $1,381,632 of "Growth Campaign Funds Released to Programs" and $40,000 of endowment to the $5,543,595 of revenue the audit reports. Money released from a prior year’s restriction is not this year’s income. The audit shows net assets falling by $1,406,276. A donor reading only the annual report would not know that.
- Why contributions fell 30%, from $7,522,652 in the year to June 2024 to $5,276,214 in the year to June 2025. Neither document comments on it. Fundraising expense fell by $601,957 over the same period.
- Who counted. The impact figures are attributed to an outside agency in both years — Excellence in Giving in 2024, Radiant Global Insights in 2025 — and Excellence in Giving is also the body whose transparency recognition Langham displays. No methodology, sample or instrument is published for any of the figures.
- "The number of church leaders who can explain a Bible passage more than doubles after training" and "After training, pastors preach sermons that change lives and prompt people to serve their neighbors." These are before-and-after claims with no published measurement behind them. We did not verify them, and changed lives are not something we count.
- The financials page cites "the CRA" — the Canada Revenue Agency — while describing what a US donor can see, so at least part of the transparency page is copy shared between national offices rather than written for the entity being described. Minor in itself, and the same root cause as the numerator-and-denominator problem above.
Accreditation seen
- Member, Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability
- Recognized by Excellence in Giving for transparency
Displayed by the ministry on its own pages. We have not re-checked each seal with the accrediting body.
Worth knowing
- The figure on this page is a doctoral student, not a preacher, and the reason is worth stating plainly. Pricing the preacher would have been the easy division: the program spending and the headline count of 16,819 preachers are a click apart on Langham’s own site. But that count’s period is ambiguous by a factor of about six — the report does not say whether it is a year, a triennium or a cumulative total — and its scope is the federation rather than the US entity, so the division would have produced a confident-looking number with a sixfold error bar and a scope error on top. For the record, the same 16,819 divided into the three defensible numerators — the federation Langham Preaching line of $1,618,746, the US Langham Preaching line of $575,087, and all US program spending of $5,166,580 — lands at roughly $96, $34 and $307 per preacher. A ninefold spread from choosing a pot of money, before you even settle what the count means. That spread is the finding, and it is why the scholars line, where a federation count and a federation spending line cover the same twelve months, is the only one we divide.
- The program-line disclosure is genuinely unusual and worth reading. For the year to June 2025 the annual report gives, for the US entity and the federation: Langham Scholars $1,021,586 and $1,525,072; Langham Literature $976,023 and $2,284,641; Langham Preaching $575,087 and $1,618,746; LPI Ministry and Services $812,599 and $945,925; International Ministry Support $1,781,749 and $1,974,029. Very few ministries publish enough for a reader to see which of their programs actually costs the money.
- International Ministry Support is the largest single line in the US budget at $1,781,749, larger than any of the three named programs. The annual report does not say what it buys.
- The US entity was formerly John Stott Ministries, which is why the same three programs — preaching, literature and doctoral scholarship — have been running unchanged for so long. It is now one member of an international federation alongside Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK and Ireland.
- The 2025 annual report is the file Langham published in 2026; its own cover reads "LANGHAM PARTNERSHIP USA 2025 ANNUAL REPORT" and its figures are for the fiscal year ended 30 June 2025.
Sources
- Homepage
Ministry website · Langham Partnership USA · read 2026-09-18
- Mission, Vision and Values
Ministry website · Langham Partnership USA · read 2026-09-18
Source of the three-part mission statement and of the doctrinal commitments: the supreme authority of the Bible, the endorsement of The Cape Town Commitment, and the requirement that programs run under local leadership wherever possible.
- Financials
Ministry website · Langham Partnership USA · read 2026-09-18
Links audited statements, Form 990s and annual reports for 2018 through 2025, and states the ECFA membership and the Excellence in Giving recognition.
- Audited financial statements, year ended 30 June 2025
Audited financial statements · Langham Partnership USA · 2025 · read 2026-09-18
Program services $5,166,580, management and general $510,272, fundraising $1,273,019, total functional expenses $6,949,871 on total support and revenue of $5,543,595. Net assets fell from $5,708,051 to $4,301,775; net cash used in operating activities $673,744. Prior-year comparatives for the year to June 2024 are in the same statements.
- Form 990 for the tax year 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025
IRS Form 990 · Langham Partnership USA · 2025 · read 2026-09-18
Source of the EIN and the fiscal year boundaries. The return contains no count of preachers trained, scholars supported or books distributed.
- 2025 Annual Report
Annual report · Langham Partnership USA · 2025 · read 2026-09-18
Source of the 2025 Key Statistics and of the fiscal year 2025 income and expense table comparing the US entity with the global federation. The key statistics are set as graphics; we rendered the page and read the figures from the image rather than from extracted text, which is also how we caught that the Radiant Global Insights footnote sits on the same spread as the headline.
- 2024 Annual Report
Annual report · Langham Partnership USA · 2024 · read 2026-09-18
Read only to date the impact figures. Its "2024 Impact Numbers" block gives 13,951 preachers and church leaders trained, 1,116,080 people who sat under a Langham-trained pastor, 115,730 Bible students taught by Langham Scholars, 343 graduated scholars and 103 scholars currently in a PhD program, footnoted "All impact data from outside agency Excellence in Giving, 2015-2024".