ABOUT HAGGAI
WHY WE BEGAN
Founded by Dr. John Edmund Haggai in the 1960s, Haggai International emerged in response to the limitations of the Western missionary movement. At the time, Western missionaries often faced restricted access to the places and people most in need of the Gospel. As Western colonization declined and nationalism rose, Dr. Haggai recognized the need for a new strategy.
In 1969, he launched the Haggai Leader Experience to equip national leaders to champion the love of Christ within their own cultures. By empowering locals, the mission could reach areas previously inaccessible to outsiders.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Haggai also recognized the need to include women — who were largely excluded from formal ministry training and organized missional work. Haggai International equipped its first cohort of women in 1977, long before it was culturally accepted to do so.
Today, both men and women trained through the Haggai Leader Experience continue to make a global impact across ministries and marketplaces. For six decades, Haggai International has equipped leaders to demonstrate and present the Gospel of Jesus Christ — and that work continues to grow and innovate.
OUR FOUNDER
John Edmund Haggai has been called a visionary, a Christian world statesman, an evangelist, and a master of the pulpit — all of which is true of this dynamic man of God.
Never content to follow the crowd, Dr. Haggai initiated a unique and forward-thinking mission plan in obedience to the Great Commission. A visit to Asia in the early 1960s convinced Haggai that changes in global geopolitics, brought about by the end of colonialism, required a new strategy for world evangelism. In 1969, after years of research, prayer, and development, he presided over the first advanced leadership seminar, designed to empower and mobilize nationals to reach their own people for Christ.
Haggai International has equipped and motivated more than 170,000+ Christian clergy and lay leaders working in almost all the non-Western countries of the world. They multiply their effectiveness significantly by passing on their training to an average of 100 other leaders.
An alumnus of Moody Bible Institute (where he was named “Alumnus of the Year”) and Furman University and the recipient of honorary doctorates on both sides of the Pacific, Dr. John Haggai lived unflinchingly by his own motto: Attempt something so great for God, it’s doomed to failure unless God be in it.
He authored more than a dozen books, including How to Win Over Worry, The Influential Leader, My Son Johnny (who died in 1975 in his 25th year) and Success Secrets of the Bible.
John Edmund Haggai was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the eldest son of a Syrian immigrant and a New Englander whose English ancestors settled in America during the 1600s. While at Moody, he met and married Christine Barker of Bristol, Virginia. Atlanta, Georgia, was their base of ministry since 1961. (Mrs. Haggai went to be with the Lord in August 2019, a week after their 74th wedding anniversary. John Haggai was reunited with her and their son, Johnny, in Heaven on November 18, 2020.)