“It is not normal to have good, healthy Christian leadership transitions,” remarked Bob Osborne, the former executive director of Serge, a mission agency in the Reformed tradition. 

But Serge’s recent leadership transition – the one in which Osborne worked alongside Matt Allison in a year-long process to onboard Allison as Serge’s new executive director –  has been a healthy process, according to both Osborne and Allison.

“So often in Christian ministries, leaders struggle to believe their ministry will function without their leadership,” Allison said. “Bob, to his immense credit and really as a testament to God’s grace, is not one of those leaders.”

Founded in 1983 by Westminster Theological Seminary professor Jack Miller, Serge, has a “dual calling,” according to Allison. Serge aims “both to bring gospel to the world through preaching, healing, and equipping work, but also to renew the North American church in the gospel.”

Serge was formed when Miller, then the pastor of New Life Presbyterian Church in Glenside, Pennsylvania, sent congregants on a mission trip to Uganda. Seeing great need in rural Uganda in the wake of war, Miller’s congregants wanted to stay as missionaries, but Miller could find no missions agency that would work with them. Miller responded by forming his own agency, World Harvest Mission, now called Serge.  

Globally, Serge focuses on relational evangelism and on “sending people who have been really, deeply transformed by the gospel of grace,” according to Osborne.

Throughout its ministry, Serge has worked closely with Mission to the World and the PCA, and some Serge and MTW teams officially partner in various countries. Though Serge’s roots are in the PCA and it utilizes the Westminster Confession and a similar church-planting framework to the PCA, Serge is a non-denominational organization and partners with a variety of missionaries and denominations. 

Serge’s Sonship discipleship course represents its primary work in North America, but the curriculum is also used around the world. 

“Sonship is designed to help you take some of the glorious theological truths of the gospel, truths you may know in your head, and apply them to the nitty-gritty reality of daily life as a Christian,” according to Serge’s website. 

Allison himself tasted the fruit of Sonship long before working for Serge. Allison’s parents moved to Maryland to plant a church in the 1980s, and they quickly began to experience burnout. 

Allison described his parents as “classic ministry people of their generation … who were really fired up to do amazing things for God. They believed that if that just worked hard enough – if they were obedient enough – great things would happen.” 

Of course, Allison noted, life is more complicated than that. When his parents attended one of the first Sonship retreat weekends put on by Serge, the experience was transforming. Serge’s Sonship retreat refreshed his parents with the reality of God’s grace. As Allison recounted, the weekend had a “transforming effect on their marriage, their ministry, and their parenting of me.” 

As a result, many of the key insights that Serge highlights in their Sonship curriculum were central to Allison’s upbringing, such as God’s sovereignty and grace. Allison quoted the words of Serge’s founder Jack Miller: “Cheer up, you’re worse than you think;” and “cheer up, you’re more loved than you imagine.” 

Osborne summed up one of Serge’s core beliefs in this way: ”Mission leads to renewal, and renewal leads to missions.”

He continued, “Another way of saying that is, if you just do missions without your heart being renewed, it’s really Christian activism… And if you just camp out with your heart being renewed, then you are really caught in one of those popular Christian self-help eddies.”

Allison’s perspective has been formed by Serge’s understanding of renewal and God’s grace. He sees that the person he is today has been shaped by World Harvest and Serge. 

After graduating from Covenant College, Allison worked in Uganda as a teacher on a Serge team before serving in Serge’s home office. He then stepped away from Serge for five years while working on a doctoral degree in American history, believing that he was called to be an academic historian. 

God had other plans; as Allison neared the end of graduate school, he began to struggle with the solitude of being an academic. He realized, after some struggle, that God was calling him elsewhere. 

“At different points in your life there’s a story that you’re fighting to tell with your life, and you think it’s a good story,” he said. “But God appears to be telling a different story with your life. And the key struggle of our faith is, can we shift from fighting for the story we want to tell with our lives to seeing the story that God is actually telling – to believe in it and to move into that story with hope and with faith?”

For Allison, moving into God’s story meant returning to Serge in 2012, where he has led mobilization and directed operations over the last 12 years. 

For 10 of those years, Serge’s leadership was working on a ministry leadership succession plan. Serge’s board decided that a multi-year transition with Osborne would be the best course of action. 

Osborne, who has been with Serge for 23 years, serving as executive director for 20, will work for two more years with Serge, maintaining donor relationships and advising Serge’s leadership team.

Osborne himself came to Christ under the influence of missionaries he knew in Kenya when he was working there with the Peace Corps. Initially, Osborne said, he developed friendships with the missionaries to play volleyball and squash or eat American food, but he soon found himself compelled by the gospel message. After being baptized in Kenya, Osborne moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he ended up serving as director of missions and ministries at Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA). 

Through sending missionaries with Serge, Osborne became familiar with the organization, and he was eventually recruited to be the ministry’s U.S. Director in 2002. Osborne is proud of the healthy culture that he has created at Serge. 

“I really set out to hire good people, good staff, attract a strong board, and then really honed our mission, vision, and values… the hallmark of my leadership was really helping Serge be a kinder, gentler organization unified around mission, vision, and values,” Osborne said. 

Osborne also is proud of “stewarding Serge through growth.” When Osborne became executive director, Serge had a $7 million budget, 140 workers, and several hundred thousand dollars in debt; now Serge is a $35 million organization with over 350 workers. 

Allison hopes to continue stewarding Serge as he takes over as executive director. He wants to update Serge’s Sonship curriculum to be more accessible to today’s learners, welcome and mobilize Gen Z in mission, and send missionary teams into places with little access to the gospel and medical care. The countries in central and south Asia, as well as in Muslim areas of Africa, are key areas of interest.

In a video for Serge, Allison maintained, “Leading Serge is not a story about my competency or my giftedness or even my vision. It’s about, how do I try to steward this thing that God has given to me for the sake and flourishing of others?”