Barnabas Keynote: Kn Moy - A Renewed Change Paradigm for the Global Church

Keynote Speaker, Kn Moy - Presented August 26, 2025

Good morning, friends, saints, and sinners alike. Thank you for letting me join you. Today I want to focus on the big picture: how we as the church respond to the greatest convergence of crises in our history, and how marketplace leaders like you are essential to what comes next.

The global church is in historic decline — not just in numbers, but in influence, credibility, and cultural relevance. Christianity, once top of mind in communities across the globe, is now often an afterthought. In places like Germany, only 11% of citizens say the church matters to them. In Latin America, the Catholic Church no longer defines identity. Even among students discipled through ministries like Campus Crusade, most drift away within a decade.

Peter Drucker — the father of modern management and a follower of Christ — once told me, “Churches find it very difficult to respond to change. The most powerful organizations in the world today are not churches, but marketplace enterprises, because they know how to respond to and lead change.” His words ring truer today than ever.

A Death of a Paradigm

The church is undergoing what Harvard calls a 'death of a paradigm' — when everything breaks at once. Twenty thousand churches in the U.S. are closing their doors every year, and two-thirds are financially insolvent. The leading reasons? People walking away from what they perceive as a hypocritical, judgmental, and uncaring church.

Billy Graham himself pointed the way. Weeks before his passing, he said: “Marketplace leaders will be to the 21st century what missionaries were to the previous centuries.” Those words became the foundation of my work with the Lausanne Movement.

Rediscovering Partnership

Marketplace leaders are, today, the most underutilized force for God in the global church. You are the best educated, most experienced at launching and scaling, most networked, and most capable of working together across generations. And in this unique moment, five generations are actually collaborating in the workplace — something that’s never happened before in history.

Building an Innovation Engine

My role with Lausanne was to build an innovation engine — what I call the Minimum Viable Innovation Framework (MVIF). It’s a simple, four-phase process:

1. Define mission-critical innovation buckets.
2. Zero in on a few strategic opportunities.
3. Form small, rapid-prototyping teams.
4. Create an innovation superstructure to shepherd and greenlight projects.

From this, we launched eight global initiatives, with two already underway. More than 150 marketplace leaders are engaged worldwide, and the structure is intentionally built outside Lausanne’s institutional walls — because you can’t evolve the old into the new. Here’s the vision: to harness the most underutilized force for good in the global church today — marketplace leaders — and unleash you as a grassroots global movement of changemaking teams. Together, we can reshape the trajectory of Christianity in this century.

The future is already here. You’re a part of it. Let’s embrace it with courage, creativity, and conviction.

About The Speaker: Kn Moy

Kenneth “Kn” Moy has nearly four decades of experience as a strategist with a focus on “what’s next.” Today, Kn helps decision-makers in Christian organizations grapple with the uncertainty and complexity of change, by innovating solutions to shape a better and more sustainable future. 

Kn readily acknowledges that Christian ministries must harness the most underutilized resource in the Global Church today ... marketplace leaders … the largest and most influential cohort of change makers and change leaders in our world.