Lauren Libby: From Kansas Farm Boy to World Mission Leader

Lauren Libby began serving as TWR president and CEO in 2008, the fourth person to do so in the ministry's over-seven-decade lifetime.

They call it the “train story.”

June Hofer got on the train in Mount Prospect, Illinois, for the ride to her job in Chicago’s Loop. It was her usual train, but it was crowded. Everything was delayed because of flooding on the tracks.

By the time the train reached Des Plaines, about 40 minutes from the Loop, no seats were left. A stranger stood in the aisle next to her. He was wearing a three-piece suit, with a Wall Street Journal under his arm.

The man read the paper for a while and then pulled out a leather packet with little cards in it. She recognized it right away. “My goodness,” June thought, “This guy’s been around The Navigators. He’s memorizing Scripture.”

June knew the Christian discipleship ministry well. She had been a member of The Navigators while a student at South Dakota State University. She continued to watch as the stranger put the cards away and began to engage the businessman next to him in conversation. “I know where he’s going with this,” she thought, certain the casual chat would soon turn to Jesus.

When they both got off in the Loop, June worked up her courage and introduced herself to the man. They learned that the offices they worked in were within two blocks of each other. They learned they both had found work in the city because of Navigators alumni ministry that began in the early 1970s in a few U.S. cities, including Chicago.

The man’s name was Lauren Libby.

That encounter on the train began a journey that would bring them both to serve with The Navigators in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as Lauren and June Libby, and in 2008 to Cary, North Carolina, when Lauren became the fourth president of TWR.

‘Lasting fruit’

During the next 16 years, Lauren would lead a growing worldwide ministry with a resolute mission to, as he would say at every opportunity, “reach the world for Christ by mass media so that lasting fruit is produced.”

To be more specific, in just those 16 years, TWR would:

• See its donor base grow from 13,700 to nearly 24,000.
• Launch new media initiatives such as TWR MOTION, telling the story of Jesus through animated video to people from Muslim and Buddhist worldviews.
• Adopt and globalize Every Man A Warrior, a discipleship ministry for men.
• Invest in new or upgraded broadcast infrastructure on Guam and Bonaire, in West Africa and Eswatini and in Central Asia.
• Add a new affiliate in Batam, Indonesia, with a potential audience of 7 million in Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia.
• Sign the agreement with Brazilian scholar Luiz Sayão that is bringing the audio Bible survey Mission 66 to multiple languages.
• See Lifted, TWR’s first full-length documentary, produced in conjunction with bringing Christian radio to the Wayana and Trio tribes of Suriname.

But the list of accomplishments only partially tells the story of what Lauren brought to TWR.

In 2008, the ministry was “at a crossroads,” said Dan Blakely, who was on the search committee then and still is a TWR board member. “We were not unified, and hence we were very concerned about that. … A big thing [Lauren] brought was unity.”

Jeff Jones, a TWR board member since 2011 and current board chairman, said Libby has given TWR a growth mindset. “We are fiscally sound, we are growing. He’s a great fundraiser,” Jones said. “Lauren was able to put the face on Trans World Radio and be the communicator and the voice that really spread us at a whole different level.”

From farm to university 

All of this from someone who grew up on a cattle farm in northern Kansas, feeding the cows by the time he was 5 years old. How did young Lauren learn about the bigger world outside of the Kansas plains? Through radio.

He would listen to stations from Kansas City and Omaha, Nebraska, and become a lifelong aficionado of ham radio. He was fascinated by “the fact that you could talk to people from thousands of miles away” and other countries, he said.

By the time he was in high school, Lauren was working for regional radio stations, a practice he continued after entering Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. He was studying agricultural economics but also had developed a passion for politics. He was running for student body president when a woman he was dating told Lauren about the Bible study she was attending. Through her, “I got to know three or four people, and that’s how I found out that I needed to accept Jesus,” he recalled.

Lauren was now a Jesus follower, but he didn’t yet know what a walk with Jesus looked like. That’s where Dave Gras came in. As The Navigators representative at Kansas State at the time, Gras suggested that Lauren meet with him at 6 in the morning. When they got together, Gras showed him how to have a quiet time, walking through Psalm 1 with his new disciple. He introduced Lauren to memorizing Scripture, using the cards that June Hofer would notice on that train to the Loop. Later, Dave taught Lauren how to share Jesus with people. Lauren soon was telling his fraternity brothers about Jesus.

Gras and other Christian leaders in the community had been praying for a movement to Christ among Kansas State’s fraternities and sororities, and it was happening.

“That was a time when, boy, God was doing a work,” said Dave Gras, now 83 and retired in Kansas City after a 50-year career with The Navigators. “It was unbelievable. It was amazing. And Lauren became a part of that whole thing.”

Lauren quickly began discipling other students, including Kris Kimple, whom Lauren would invite on evangelistic outreaches. “[Lauren] was always kind, respectful, gracious and humble, a model of discipleship I was slowly wanting to emulate,” Kimple, now a retired physician, wrote in a 2025 email to Gras.

Winning souls in Chicago

After graduating and moving to Chicago, Libby worked as an economist. He also stayed involved in radio, broadcasting grain prices on a network of 45 small radio stations established by the Chicago AM superstation WGN.

Meanwhile, he invited men he encountered – lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, business people – “to a very exclusive discussion on who Jesus was,” Lauren said. They met at the back of the Jolly Chef Restaurant on LaSalle Street, and over three years about 20 men came to faith in Christ.

Then Lauren was invited to Colorado Springs, to work as the assistant to The Navigators International President Lorne Sanny. He would, for the first time and for the rest of his life, be a missionary. He undertook the task of raising support, and among his early supporters was June Hofer.

“You’ve got to be careful,” Lauren jokes today. “You know, you can’t marry your donor base, because then your donor base goes away.” 

For three years, Lauren served in Colorado Springs while June remained in Chicago. “I got tired of buying plane tickets to Chicago,” Lauren said.

Then June was appointed to a Navigators position in Colorado Springs, and eight months later the couple married. That marriage reached its 46th anniversary in April 2025.

The ‘go-for’ 

Meanwhile, Lauren was serving, he said in a recent interview, as Lorne Sanny’s “go-for. Go for this, go for that.” He also was traveling with Sanny and learning principles of leadership from a master. 

“He was closer to me than my father,” Lauren said of Sanny. “Here I am, you know, 24, 25, and we’re writing the 10-year strategy for The Navigators. There aren’t many people my age then who’d be involved in stuff like that. … To this day, I sit in meetings, and I still remember how Lorne would handle situations.”

Sanny instilled in Lauren the habit of bringing TWR’s mission statement to bear at every opportunity. “That was Lorne Sanny,” Lauren said. “He always stood up with The Navigators and said, ‘The harvest is plentiful. The laborers are few. Our goal is to do something about the labor shortage that Jesus has in the world.’”

Lauren would go on to hold a number of high-level positions with The Navigators, including chief operating officer. He also set up a network of Christian radio stations in Colorado and co-founded New Horizons Foundation, which assists mission entrepreneurs and donors wishing to give to charitable causes. Somehow, he found time to earn his MBA from Regis University in Denver.

Lauren and June have one son, Grant, who serves today as a deputy district attorney and homicide prosecutor.

The clear choice

By the mid-2000s, recruiters were calling on Lauren. One offer especially intrigued him: A college wanted him to be their president. He also got a call from TWR.

The search committee at the time had a number of good candidates, Blakely said. Their assignment was to bring their two leading choices to the board. But Lauren Libby so clearly rose to the top that they decided to propose only his name.

Ross Campbell, a TWR board member then and now, wasn’t on the search committee but had seen the resumes and already had come to the same conclusion. “As I was praying over the names, Lauren just seemed so very far ahead of the other candidates,” Campbell said.

The board quickly agreed to offer Lauren the position. The only one who wasn’t yet convinced was Lauren. He hadn’t heard from the Lord.

During that time, Lauren went for a walk, praying to the Lord, asking him if he should take a position in education, stay with The Navigators or come to TWR. He looked up and saw an aluminum container holding a speed-indicator display. Someone had spray-painted graffiti on the box. The letters were

T W R.

He went to get June, and she saw it, too. The next day, the letters had been painted over.

‘Indefatigable’

But the decision had been made. Lauren and June moved to Cary, and he began the work of growing TWR.

“Organizations that don’t grow don’t survive,” he said recently. “We began to work on recruiting donors, new donors. We did a whole bunch of things, went out and did radio campaigns, spent money on direct mail. And you know what? We’ve doubled it.”

As the leader of a worldwide organization, Lauren was willing to travel worldwide, often, and he did so at a stunning pace.

“He was relentless in his travel,” Jones said. “The word is indefatigable. He doesn’t wear out. He just keeps going. … He will be the guy who gets up at 3 o’clock in the morning to be part of the India board meeting or will be up until midnight for the breakfast meeting in Singapore.”

As TWR president, Lauren is automatically a member of the TWR Canada board, said Campbell, who lives in Calgary, Alberta, and chairs that board while also serving on the international board. Lauren never missed one of their meetings, Campbell said, even if it meant flying to Canada immediately after returning from an overseas trip.

All three of the board members who were interviewed for this article said they tried to get Lauren to travel less. “But there was no holding Lauren down,” Campbell said.

The next leaders

Lauren always focused on eight global priorities, said Branko Bjelajac, TWR international vice president for Europe, CAMENA (Central Asia, Middle East, North Africa) and Africa. One of those was developing the next generation of leaders.

“He always wanted to invest in people,” Bjelajac said. “Young leaders, they always … need someone to trust in them. And actually, this is what he did.”

Lauren tapped Bjelajac to lead two major leadership-training initiatives: Emergence and Convergence. The former involved 35 emerging Christian media leaders who attended five eight-day sessions over five years on five different continents.

“Fast forward five-six years later and you see that almost everyone now is in a leadership position in our organization,” Bjelajac said.

Convergence came at Lauren’s direction just within the past 15 months, Bjelajac said. “Basically, look at the benchmark next-generation leaders and try to converge them into one spot in the future.”

This involved a smaller group meeting online every couple of months, Bjelajac said. It concluded with an in-person gathering in the TWR Cary offices in February. “I think this was very valuable,” he said. “And the results of this we will see in the next 10 years.

“These are the people who will be just after us. … That was Lauren’s vision.”

 The mission continues

A life-altering stroke on Aug. 26, 2024, finally slowed Lauren down, causing him to step aside as TWR president and limiting his horizons, at least for now.

But it’s not keeping him from thinking about the mission of TWR.

Asked what TWR needs to do going forward, he was quick to respond: “Number one, a clear emphasis on mission, on what our calling is. Number two is people to accomplish that. And number three is money. If you don’t have those three things, you’ll never do anything.”

Lauren was much slower to respond when asked what he would want to be remembered for, saying it didn’t matter to him how people remembered him. Then he started to recite some of the key promises of Scripture that have been foundational to his life’s work: Psalm 2:8, Isaiah 49:6, Isaiah 54:2-4.

Lauren summarized his life so far this way: “He was some farm kid from Kansas who believed God for a few promises and saw it come true.”

Images: (top, banner) Lauren Libby records in one of TWR's studios at their offices in Cary, North Carolina, (middle, right) Lauren and June Libby at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the island of Bonaire, (bottom, left) Lauren Libby (left) and RTM Brazil's Luiz Sayão (right).