Ep 12 – The Journey Podcast
Guests: Jo Johnson, Hannes Wiesmann
Phil Prior
From the Wycliffe Global Alliance. Welcome again to The Journey Podcast. I’m Phil Prior, director for communication for the Alliance. And with me, as always, is Jim Killam, managing editor for the Alliance. Jim, you’re based near Chicago in the US, and I’m over here in the UK. Most of the time we meet electronically like this, but recently we got to sit in the same space together for a few days in, of all places, Nairobi in Kenya, where the Alliance leadership team was meeting.
Jim Killam
Yeah, and one of the great things about working with colleagues in the same place for a few days is that you get to sit at a picnic table and a warm African evening with the locusts buzzing, and do a podcast interview. So that’s been fun.
Phil Prior
And for this episode, you interviewed two people we know very well. One is Hannes Wiesmann, who serves as assistant to the executive director, and the other is Jo Johnson, who serves as a consultant for prayer advocacy.
Jim Killam
Yeah, they’ve come up with a new podcast unlike anything we have heard before, and you and I both listened to a lot of podcasts, but this one’s called In the Company of Travellers. It’s about Christlikeness. And OK, that’s not so unusual for a topic, but the difference is that this is about organisational Christlikeness. How can something we typically think about on an individual basis be evidenced in the culture and conduct of an entire organisation?
Phil Prior
And they are looking at this topic from many angles and also from many different parts of the world, as they talk with two organisational leaders at each time in each podcast. They’ve consciously paired people from completely different cultures and contexts.
Jim Killam
Yeah, I think the result of that is a much better collective view of the global body of Christ. Everyone brings different experiences and passions to these conversations. I can just imagine God smiling the whole time like, yeah, this is how it’s supposed to work. Well, we can let Hannes and Jo tell you and us more, because here then, is Jim’s conversation with the two of them from Nairobi.
Jim
First of all, thank you both for making the trip to Kenya just to do this interview. Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. We’re sitting out here near Nairobi on a beautiful African evening. And it’s, what, 65 degrees? Maybe in Fahrenheit. What is that in Celsius, I don’t know. Completely blank here.
Hannes
Yeah, about 20 maybe.
Jim
Anyway, you can probably hear some African crickets in the background, and it’s a beautiful night. So, this is a fun place to to do this. Maybe to start, let’s just hear from both of you about who you are and what you do in your day jobs. And then we’ll get to the podcast subject. So, Jo, why don’t you start?
Jo
Sure. I have the official title of consultant for Prayer Advocacy for the Wycliffe Global Alliance, which means that I’m here to support Alliance organisations as they seek to motivate prayer for the Bible Translation movement.
Hannes
Yeah, I serve as the assistant to the executive director, which means Stephen (Coertze) can pass on everything that he thinks I enjoy doing and can do well. So I have probably the best job on the team.
Jim
And where are you both from? And you know, a little bit about your backgrounds, too. Jo?
Jo
OK, so I’m from the UK. We have been part of Wycliffe since 1997, with my husband, Stewart. We served in the D.R. Congo and later on in Francophone Africa before moving back to the UK, working with Wycliffe UK before I moved to the Alliance.
Jim
So Kenya is not an unfamiliar spot for you. No, we used to live here. I’m always happy when I have the chance to come back and visit.
Hannes
Yeah, I’m happy to come back to Africa. Even though I served in West Africa together with my family for 12 years, we were in Burkina Faso. Then we went back to Switzerland, where I’m from. I served there as director for Switzerland for 10 years, and then area director for the Alliance for a number of years, and now for two or three years in my current role.
Jim
So we’re going to be talking about this podcast that the two of you are doing, called In the Company of Travellers. Can you explain the name?
Jo
One of the things that the Alliance is very strong on, and Hannes and I are both passionately agree about, and we don’t passionately agree about that much, is that we are not doing this life with with God and serving in the mission of God alone. But we are doing it alongside, I suppose, in community. And so the idea is that we’re on a spiritual journey, but we’re doing it in the company of other people. So In the Company of Travellers.
Jim
The spiritual journey part might not be a brand new thought for people, but what would be different about what you two are hoping to accomplish with this? Or what are you seeing maybe as some needs?
Hannes
So the company part probably came in because we thought it would be helpful to have conversations about how to live a spiritual life as a group, as a community, as an organisation. I mean, obviously, organisations don’t have lives per se. It’s the people in the organisation. But to reflect on the question how to lead, how to be in organizations informed by spirituality and maybe more precise, how to be Christ like as an organisation.
Jim
What do you think are some of the pitfalls for organisations where that might not be happening as much as people would desire, because everyone would desire this as a ministry organisation?
Hannes
I don’t know if I would call it a pitfall, but there is just not that much to our knowledge out there in terms of information or in terms of inspiration on that topic. When we talk with people, there is interest in cultivating personal spiritual life, but there is just not that much reflection that we have come across so far on the organizational level. So I think it’s about intentionality. Every organisation would say that prayer is important, but if you don’t intentionally plan to pray, it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t happen very often. And in the same way, I think we have to intentionally pursue Christlikeness, becoming more like Christ. It’s not something that just sort of happens vaguely. Then also, there is so much information and inspiration out there on how to lead an organisation that has nothing to do with the spiritual life. So how to do strategy, how to take care of your people, how to make decisions. You get almost bombarded with ideas from a secular voice and they are not necessarily bad or unhelpful. Not at all. But the specific spiritual approach that’s informed by the Gospels how Christ lived on this earth. Uh, no, there is not that much. So that’s something to discover together.
Jim
What have the two of you learned about organisational spirituality or organisational christlikeness? If we could, whichever term you prefer, I guess. But, you’re coming to this conversation with something to say.
Jo
I come more with questions. Yeah, well, for myself anyway, I saw I see lots of people in leadership roles who are worn out or close to burnout, who are trying desperately to hold everything together and lead their teams well and encourage their organisation. And I just saw a great need to maybe stop and reorder our values or our priorities. Because when you’re serving in the mission of God, then the serving can become the most important thing. But actually, if we’re not doing that in close relationship with God, then we’re missing the main point of it because God desires our hearts far more than he does our service.
Jim
And I think you both alluded to this, but this is an easier thing to visualise in an individual sense, rather than a corporate sense as an organisation or as a community. And maybe that’s especially in the West. I think maybe we think almost exclusively individually about things like this.
Hannes
I appreciate you, Jo, mentioning the values. I think that’s where much of this will actually be embedded or to go more broader, broader the culture of an organization. I guess if you can grow into cultures that glorify God and honor Christian biblical values, then an organisation will have will be on a good track. And I think what I’ve discovered through some of the conversations with different people is that there’s no one way to do this. Different cultures, different personality types are going to approach it from a different direction. So what we hope this podcast will bring is a whole host of food for thought and creative response.
Jim
What kinds of things have you heard from organisations that might indicate they’re on a spiritually healthy track together?
Jo
I think when I hear that there is intentional, intentional pursuing of the Father’s heart together, when I hear that they are taking time to discern God’s will together and listen together. Not just one or two people, but everyone is involved in that listening process. When I hear of community coming around. Well, for example, Wycliffe US had a hurricane go through and some of their staff had so much damage to their houses that they were homeless. In effect, until things could be mended. And it seems that many, many of them just went to live with colleagues. And that was the community responding to a community need.
Hannes
You touched on it, Jo. When an organisation has practices, when when it has rhythms that build in spiritual practices in their everyday life, I would say that’s a good, good first approach. It can be small things, you know, how do you begin the week or how do you begin the day? What do you do before you start a meeting? What do you do during meetings. Do you have rhythms that reconnect you with with God? To put it simply, and we know that many Alliance organisations do. So we were eager to to hear about those things. Yeah. Again, just to share that among our community as an alliance. But also, like you said, Jo, different cultural contexts, different things may work, but it’s like a list of things to try. Yeah. Or a list of ideas to say we would never even considered that before. Absolutely. Yeah.
Jo
And for me, it’s it’s one of the things that fascinates me and invigorates me in the Alliance that we have. We are a global community, so we can listen to people who are from totally different cultural backgrounds than we are. So Switzerland and UK probably similarly, we are very individualistic societies. So I know I have so much to learn from people with a more community oriented background, and that will play into it. And it’s actually to our detriment, I think, the the individualistic bias. So to hear people for whom this is more natural to have a communal life, I can so much learn from them. I personally was really challenged by some of the responses to some of the questions, because simply they were the guests were coming at the same subject from a completely different perspective. And that challenged me to not just have a narrow view of something, but to consider many different options, I suppose. And I think we’re richer for that. It’s not that we necessarily change how we do something, but if we’ve considered it from more perspectives, the thought of more ways of doing it, then I think that makes us richer.
Jim
Tell me a little bit about the format you’ve chosen for the podcast. You’re interviewing more than one person at a time, usually. What does that look like?
Hannes
So we wanted to have the whole globe represented and have have always two guests from different parts of the world, with one of us as a host. So we were hoping to stimulate conversations between the guests and for us to learn together. And then the other person between you and I will then introduce the episode where we are not the host.
Tell me a little bit about maybe some of the challenges you’re facing with a global group of guests. There’s got to be some language issues. All sorts of things. Right?
Jo
Yeah. We had at least two guests who not only English wasn’t their first language, I think it probably wasn’t their second or third language. And so there are some moments where the dialogues may be not as clear as it could be. We have tried to mitigate that by including a transcript in the show notes. It was tricky, but we just felt it was so important to have points of view that weren’t limited to people who spoke English as their first language.
Jim
So I guess we would encourage listeners that if you are having trouble with any of the guests in terms of comprehending everything, go look at the transcripts first because it’s going to be with the show notes, and that’ll be a way you can really catch everything that they were saying.
Jo
At the Global Gathering, we talked about linguistic hospitality, which was to bear with people who were having a hard time understanding or expressing themselves. And we—Hannes and I both— would encourage you to show our guests some linguistic hospitality. They all had worthwhile things to say, and I think it’s worth a listen.
Hannes
Another challenge that we had is just internet connectivity because we have had guests from parts of the world where the internet is just not very stable.
Jim
And again, I think if if we are presenting this in a podcast, we think it’s worth your while. And so if there are some hiccups in the audio or the internet, again, the transcript will help there. But we wouldn’t be putting this out there if we didn’t think it was valuable.
What’s been both of your experience within the Alliance and even the leadership team that we are here this week with? When you’ve got people from a vast array of cultures all together in in pursuit of this kind of Christlikeness together. Has it been a barrier or has it been kind of enriching to see it all come together?
Jo
I would say I have been enriched by being on this team and seeing different approaches to spirituality. As a team, one thing we’re trying this week is having one person has the right of interruption. To say we’re in the middle of a discussion, but we need to pray about that. So let’s stop. And it’s the first time I’ve ever done that, and I absolutely love it.
Hamnnes
I think for all of us here around the table, the Global Gathering, which happened end of 2024, was a moment where the communal spiritual life was a real experience. And I felt there was a great willingness also to explore or to try out new things. For example, we introduced a morning liturgy. Now, I’m not sure that we would use again the term liturgy, because for some that that’s a loaded term. But to come together and just pray, read together a prayer morning after morning, I felt it laid the groundwork for the rest of the day. It created a posture of dependence on God that was carried by. It was a good number. Not all participants were able or could participate in it, which was OK, but it was a good number of regular participants. So the willingness and the realisation that we need it. If we want to make a difference in God’s kingdom, if you want to serve God, to glorify his name, we need to invest in this relationship. Otherwise it will not happen.
Jim
Yeah. Those mornings in Johannesburg at the Global Gathering, I think you were not expecting the crowds that showed up at those, right? I think. Didn’t you have to move rooms?
Jo
Yeah. No. Very quickly we had to move rooms. And I think one morning we had about a third of the participants show up, which was much, much bigger than we thought. But it was very, very special praying with such a diverse group. Those were definitely a highlight for me.
Jim
Ppraying and worshiping together with people from different cultures. It’s just a kingdom experience, isn’t it?
Jo
Absolutely.
Jim
Are there other topics that you two have thought of together? That where you want to pursue in the coming episodes of the podcast? Anything you haven’t quite touched on yet or something that has triggered … maybe something’s come up in an interview or you said, Oh, we should look into that more.
Hannes
One thing I’d be interested in since we started and actually after we did the recordings, I listened to two podcasts that had nothing to do with with our podcasts and the Global Alliance— interviews with people who are actually committed to the topic also. And one of them has written a book that I read on the topic. So I’d love to get these guys on the podcast and learn from them in an interview. So that’s something I’d love to pursue. I would assume that they would be open to meeting with us. I’m assuming it’s a topic they’re passionate about. So for them to learn from an organisation like ours, global, that wants to pursue this, and I’m hopeful that we could have a very inspiring conversation with them.
Jim
And I know you would encourage anybody listening to the podcast or anybody within the Alliance, if they have ideas for episodes or topics, you would love to be contacted, right?
Jim
Absolutely. Using the email address info@wycliffe.net, but also at the end of every episode that we’ve done so far, there’s a question that the guests that we’ve been interviewing asks the Alliance community, and we would love to get that conversation going more broadly than just people we’re interviewing on the podcast.
Hannes
Yeah, it’s really a learning together podcast, and it will be so much more enriching— the more people participate with their questions, with their experience, whatever, so that we can grow together in that direction.
Phil Prior
Well, our thanks again to Hannes and Jo, not only for the interview, but for stepping out and trying something that’s a little, or maybe quite a bit outside of their comfort zones. We think their podcast, In the Company of Travellers, offers so much to Christian leaders around the world. So, Jim, maybe you can tell people how they can find it.
Jim Killam
There are a couple ways you can find it. One, if you go to Wycliffe.net, there’s a podcast page and it’s easy to click there and subscribe. And you can also find the written transcripts. And let me say too, that those written transcripts are in English. But there are so many ways to translate material now that we are trusting that our audience will be able to translate that into whatever they want, whatever language they want. Or you can simply go to Spotify or to Apple or wherever you get your podcasts and search for In the Company of Travellers, and you can subscribe that way.
Phil Prior
Yeah. So at any rate, we are glad to be able to tell you about it, and we hope you’ll give it a listen and take away from it what is beneficial to you. And of course, we also hope you will continue to join us here for The Journey Podcast where we talk about stories, strategies, trends among Bible translation movements around the world and many hosts of other things as well.
Jim Killam
So thanks for listening everyone, and we will see you next time.
Phil Prior
Goodbye.