Greg Livingstone, Founder of Frontiers, 1940-2025
With great sadness, Frontiers has announced the passing of its beloved founder, Greg Livingstone, who died peacefully at home on Saturday 19 July. He was 85 and with his wife Sally and daughter-in-law Alma. Greg had been living with prostate cancer since his diagnosis in July 2016. He is survived by Sally, their sons Evan, David, and Paul, and seven grandchildren.
God’s sheepdog
Greg Livingstone changed mission history. When he started Frontiers, he created an organisation that was radically different from the norm at the time. We may take it for granted today, but those of us who are part of Frontiers today have inherited that legacy, including:
The scope: The entire Muslim world
The goal: Not just evangelising, but planting churches
The candidates: No formal theological training required – but an ongoing learning posture expected
The platform: Jobs, not missionary visas
The structure: Teams, not individuals; governed by the field, not the home office
His influence reverberated across the mission world, and leaders of other organisations have contacted our leaders in recent days to tell us of profound conversations with Greg that shaped their ministry.
Yet his earliest origins would not have suggested the impact he would have.
“My life proves God can use anybody,” Greg often said. He was unwanted by his unmarried mother. In fact, he mused that if he had been conceived in a different decade, his life would likely have been snuffed out before it began. In his early years, he and his mother traipsed from one town to the next as she fell in with one man after another and scraped together a living as a waitress, sometimes leaving him behind with a series of informal foster families. He later reflected that those nomadic early years bred in him the ability to move easily from one place to the next.
His life turned a sharp corner when he landed in Aspen, Colorado and a girl in his high school invited him to church – where he was introduced to Jesus and gained a new family. After high school, he moved to Wheaton College where he planned to train as a lawyer. Two people he met there particularly shaped the trajectory of his life: George Verwer, who later founded Operation Mobilisation; and the cute red-headed woman who was preparing to become a missionary doctor, Sarah (Sally) Coltman.
Throughout their married life, he and Sally lived in 32 homes in India, the Arab world, Europe, SE Asia, and North America. In all of those places, he said that his favourite endeavour for Christ’s kingdom was to be a sheepdog: “To recruit team leaders and team members for new church planting teams to minister long term where there is no church … or extremely few nationals who are able and willing to risk ministry to Muslims.”
In addition, Greg specialised in studying and writing about the history of missions to Muslims, convinced that effective discipling and church planting requires a thorough knowledge of past endeavours.
Greg thought much about that day – the day he experienced on Saturday. In fact, two years ago when a Southern California pastor friend of his died. Greg commented on our Frontline forum: “Jack Hayford went HOME … lucky guy!”
As part of the 25th Anniversary of Frontiers Greg spoke to the need he saw that prompted him to start Frontiers.
In his autobiography, he described how he envisioned his own eventual homegoing:
Two things have kept me going all of these years. One is that I keep focused on “that day” – that day when I’m going to meet the Lord Jesus face to face. As he was able to say to his father, I want to be able to say to him: “I’ve accomplished what you sent me to do.” That’s what keeps me focused. I feel like a marathon runner who just wants to fall into the coach’s arms at the finish line and see his big smile. I want to hear Jesus say those most wonderful words: “You’ve run the race to win. Well done, good and faithful servant.”
The other thing that has kept my life focused is an image from Jesus’s parable about the steward of a rich ruler in Luke 16:9. Jesus tells his disciples to make “friends … who will welcome you into eternal dwellings.” Here’s how I picture it. I think that when we reach heaven, we’ll all get a print out. (It’s the one place where all of the computers will work well!) On my print out will be a list of all of the people whom God used in my life – the girl who lured me into the Baptist church, her parents who took me home for chicken dinner, the pastor who steered me toward a Christian college, the father-figures at Wheaton and elsewhere, my fellow OMers – all of the people who nurtured me to follow the Lord Jesus with all my heart.
Why? So I can welcome them into eternal dwellings. Imagine everyone in heaven – a number that no one can count – and they’ve all got their print outs. I want my name on thousands of those print outs!
Those two pictures of being welcomed into heaven – by Jesus and by those whose lives we’ve touched – are what keep Sally and me going
(You’ve Got Libya, pp 309-310)
