Episode 28 - The Fall of Communism and the Rise of Faith Driven Investing with Malcolm Johnston
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Today’s podcast has us traveling all the way across the pond to Belfast, Ireland. Malcolm Johnston is the Executive Director at Angello Capital, where he and his team are working to provide sustainable social transformation by investing in enterprise-led development.
He talked to us about the work that he did during a time when unemployment in Ireland had hit 65% and how God called him to use his understanding of business to help the community around him.
Our conversation with Malcolm is a reminder that Faith Driven Investing has hands moving in every corner of the globe and as faithful men and women steward what God has given them, lives change…
Episode Transcript
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Henry Kaestner: So welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We've got a special guest with us today. We have Malcolm with us online, Malcolm Johnston from Northern Ireland. I was going to ask you why you talk with that funny accent. But now we all know and Malcolm, I've gotten to know you over the course of the last year or so and just been so impressed by the way that you process what God has put in front of you. You've got a great story and some really interesting places. So I'm really grateful for you to be able to be on our podcast with us to share some of those. Welcome.
Malcolm Johnston: Thank think it's great to be here. And I hope that you can get my accent. I didn't realize I had an accent until somebody told me. I hope you can get what I say.
Henry Kaestner: Yes. No, I think it's phenomenal. It's an awesome accent. I think it may be one of the best ones, maybe probably the best one we've ever had on the FDI podcast. And yet there's a great story behind it, too. It's more than an accent. It represents a culture and a great country and a society that had really been in the news when you and I were growing up. You were living it.
I was in the United States growing up in the 70s and always hearing about Northern Ireland and the troubles. And you're in the midst of that. You now, as part of what you do, you go to places where there are troubles and you bring in light and you bring in investment and you bring in training for entrepreneurs. But you grew up at a time in a place where there were some troubles. Tell us about that. What was it like growing up in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s?
Malcolm Johnston: I think probably it was more influential than probably we thought at the time. It's your normal that you kind of learn to live with it. But yeah, I was born in 1962 and the Troubles kicked off in 69. So it was very much part of my life. And the restrictions that we had and school and going into the city, a constant news flow that was pretty depressing, but effectively just tribal conflict and then a very small country. And yeah, it definitely shaped. And I find ways, I guess. Bit by bit to find out how to be salt and light in the middle of that trouble. And so apart from, you know, going into business fairly early on in life, the business I went down to was a family business. I joined my father and it was a wealth management and financial planning business. So we were advising wealthy people about their money, building their investment portfolios, helping turn a wealthy and successful people to try to think through some kind of purpose and objectives for themselves. But the thing was, probably more shipping was getting involved in inner city Belfast and very socially deprived communities politically of young people, and in many ways were the castoff ghettos that grew in the city because of the troubles.
Henry Kaestner: And let's take just a quick step back, because I realize that you and I were born in the 60s. And I understand you say, by the way, that the troubles began in 1969 and I happen to be born in 1969. I like to think that you're talking about two different things. But many people, listeners may not understand what were the troubles. I want you to tell us what was it all about, the IRA, etc..
Malcolm Johnston: Well, it's complicated. I guess, that you'd find this when you go around the world that the conflicts in most places are not straightforward and very often they're the consequence of depending whether you look back 10 years or 50 years or 200 years, and Ireland's very much like that.
It's been a place of amazing richness, but also a place where a lot of conflict and ultimately the conflict, I would say, was racial and tribal. It just happened to be called Protestant and Catholic, but it was basically two tribes of people whose background was a bit different, whose allegiance was a bit different to sense of national identity, was a bit different. And it happened to be called Protestant, Catholic, but it really wasn't a religious difference. It was more about allegiance and flags. And it very much created a black and white divide in Northern Ireland, which erupted. It went way back that the conflict between Palestinian Catholic communities went way back. And then it erupted at the end of the 60s due to a series of events that just brought to a head and exploded and the IRA became weaponized to fight a war or a battle. And then the communities just polarized. It was pretty much a civil war that was called Protestant and Catholic, and it shaped everything. Everybody knew where they stood in that conflict and that defined community set defined borders and boundaries and parts of the city. And it was very much a coming to the head of years and years of history that went way back. And where you stood, everybody stood somewhere or not, depending on how far you look back in history.
Henry Kaestner: OK, good. So I want to come back to that in a little bit, but less than talking about the history, but talking about that as a platform that makes you uniquely equipped to do the amazing work that you're doing right now. But I interrupted you during your biographical sketch. You're talking about work in the family business, working with your dad, working and wealth management. So bring us through to the point in time where you really felt that God had really called you out of that. But what's that process?.
Malcolm Johnston: Yes, I got involved in business, got married. Married now for Thirty three years this year. Two girls. Who are I? I can't believe I'm saying this, but they're twenty seven and twenty five. So I think God wired me to go to difficult places that started in Belfast going and to inner city ghettos with very high unemployment and starting to work with kids and young people. And the business gave me a great platform to grow the business, to be as successful as it could, to be as profitable as we could grow it completely and absolutely with the purpose of seeking the kingdom in the business. So we were never scared of trying to make it as successful as possible. And we saw our business very much as a platform to be salt and light to the people we were dealing with on our staff and all of that to very much Kingdom in the business building profitability so that we could do really cool stuff with the overflow of the profits, but then also using the business as a platform to build freedom of time to go and be involved in other things. Being on the business that allowed me to work in inner city Belfast for many years doing community development work in an inner city ghetto. And it also allowed me some time after that to go pioneering mission, pioneering and Eastern Europe, just after the fall of communism so early 90s, starting to go into Eastern Europe building mission.
Henry Kaestner: So what is that like? So Wall comes down. Lots of us remember just what it looked like on TV and in pictures. And you're one of the first guys in with some others going in. Walk us through that experience that this time in history.
Malcolm Johnston: It was. Actually, over time, a number of business guys. People who were connected, strategic thinkers, entrepreneurial, not scared to jump into a challenge, but jumping into these places where they had been completely controlled through communism. The church had been underground. There was new enterprise system at all. Everything was centrally controlled. And then almost in a flash, it disintegrated and there was absolute mayhem. It was just chaotic. And me and some other business guys went down as practically mission and entrepreneurs, as volunteers with Youth for Christ and Youth for Christ basically said we've never been able to do anything in Eastern Europe. Now it's open. Do you want to go and have a go at it, see what you can do and see if you need to build a team, build a team, if you need to raise money or, you know, find it. But it was kind of like a blank sheet. Go and see what you can do. It was harrowing in many ways. What we find as the churches started to come up from being underground, the poverty was absolutely terrible. We just had to respond to what we saw, especially starting to support pastors and learning to be beside people. And I kind of lived in this strange double life where at home I ran a business that worked with the wealthy and help them build their portfolios and think through what their purpose wasn't and all that stuff. And then this other part of my life, I was working in abject poverty, trying to be beside people that were trying to get on their feet. And I made an agreement with my wife that I would travel short and often rather than go for long periods of time. The kids were young. I couldn't be away for weeks at a time. So we kind of came to an agreement. I would go for maybe five or six days, just flat out doing stuff and then come back into this other world. And I had so many experiences of coming back absolutely broken hearted from what I'd seen on just trying to decompress and just sitting in the office I cried my eyes out with the suffering that we had been thrown into the middle of and trying to figure out how do we be beside these Christian communities and help them to get on their feet. And how do we reach young people and kids in that situation? So it was harrowing and it absolutely broke my heart and I never recovered from it. I start to tell you that talking about things that happened, it will still make me cry. So it was God threw us into a big challenge, first in Ukraine and then in the years that followed that we established a Youth for Christ program. There was great local leaders finding the right people. God brought us to the right people who had a passion for their own country. And we just learned to mentor them. And so we went from Ukraine to Moldova. Right, Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, setting up stuff.
Henry Kaestner: So tell us about the business and the economic environment at the time. And just to put some framing around our time together, you're just really uniquely equipped to talk to us about faith driven investments, investing in Europe. You do investments in other places you and I met in Africa. But you are uniquely equipped to talk about. What does it look like to come into different economies and invest, whether it's an economy like Northern Ireland, which at one point in time, I think had something like 65, did you say 65 percent unemployment?
Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. And that and the inner city ghetto where you work with young people. That was their reality. 65 percent unemployment.
Henry Kaestner: And then fast forward to, you know, behind the Iron Curtain as people are emerging in the state controls so many of the jobs. What does it look like when you're ministering to people that don't have hope? They don't see commerce as a way out. They don't see investments as a real thing. They see a class divide between rich and those they exploit. Just walk us through. What does that look like in your business? Because you've come from wealth management and you understand investments and how it drives economic gain. What's it look like? So maybe we'll go back to Northern Ireland later. But let's focus right now in Eastern Europe. Walls come down you're in with Youth for Christ. You're going around to these different economies, you know, business. You know, Jesus. What did it looked like when you start putting your business and investment skills to work?
Malcolm Johnston: That's a great question. And initially, we were very much we were a charity. You know, we were raising money in the rich world to bring it out into the poor world. We worked a lot with the churches. Even when they were small, they were beginning to get on their feet. And we reckoned that the best thing we can do is work with the churches to help them to do what they want to do in their communities. And we started to do a lot of work with street kids, helping churches to set up projects for the children that were living on the streets in their communities. I absolutely loved that. And I could live lots of lives. I would just keep doing that, getting to know those kids, letting them know that they were loved. And so we set up kind of typical rescue programs for kids that were charity based. The kids were generally coming from absolute squalor. Remember, they lived on the streets literally, or they just find somewhere to sleep in a friends house.
But they just lived in squalor around this kind of typical charity project of, you know, day centers feeding, somewhere warm to stay, hearing about Jesus. You know, it was a safe place for three hours a day and we helped the kids then go to school. And as I watched this program, I realized that when we closed the doors at night and I remember one particular situation, I went to visit one of these day centers in a little village. I had a destitute rural Moldova. And I watched the kids coming in, smiling, laughing. But you could see the pain in their eyes at the end of the program, five o'clock at night. It was getting cold. It was dark. And this little girl that I'd watched in the program, beautiful little eight year old and. When we were leaving, driving away back to the city, this little girl was sitting on the footpath outside the program where we had met in the little church building, and I asked one of the folks explains why she not going home. She said she's no home to go to. And that absolutely broke me. And it was part of God's call, which was these kids do just need projects. They need parents with a job. You know, this is huge sticking plaster. It's typical charity stuff, but it's sticking plasters. Little girls like that need parents with a job.
Malcolm Johnston: It's in the United States equivalent. There is going on a mission trip and painting the church. So you're using sticking plaster is the term that you use in Europe.
Malcolm Johnston: Yeah, yeah. And that was God's challenge to me because, you know, to build the charity programs, the street kids was very, very difficult, you know, to find the right leaders and build the funding. That was all tough. But to start to think through, what did it mean for parents to have jobs? Well, it was about business and what needed to happen to establish business and see businesses growing and these kind of very difficult circumstances. And that was God's challenge to me. I remember clearly it was God's challenge to me was Malcolm, if not you, who? You know, you understand business, you understand investment, and you love these kids dearly. If not you, who?
Henry Kaestner: So, where do you get started? That's quite a challenge.
Malcolm Johnston: It was it actually turned out to be mission impossible before too long. I changed the dial tone in my phone to the Mission Impossible theme tune.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, that's so cool,.
Malcolm Johnston: Because it literally was mission impossible. I mean, it was just excruciatingly difficult to find how to make that work. And this was like twelve, thirteen years ago when the whole idea of impact, investing, social enterprise, enterprise and development, faith driven investors. None of that existed. You know, twelve, thirteen years ago, it was literally a blank sheet of paper. How would we possibly go about this? It was God's call, Henry and Bob and the feel. There are things that showed me that God was absolutely calling us to start to think about this. What the job creation, three billion business to the glory of God look like, and really tough places where the church was tiny business hardly existed, but it needed to happen and it was God's call. But I think it showed me actually in hindsight that God has an amazing sense of humor. You know, it was brutally difficult. I look back and I couldn't look back and paint an amazing picture of success. I think that we were pioneering and I think rather than building success, I think we find every possible way of getting things wrong and things not working.
Henry Kaestner: Tell us about some of those early stories. I love the Mission Impossible phone ring. By the way, I may or may not adopt that or may or may not give you credit once I do. But tell us about some of the early stories. Tell us about some of the mistakes and maybe even some of the victories. Definitely some many victories.
Malcolm Johnston: We formed Angello to gather together people who were thinking the same way, new faith driven people who were thinking the same way, who were looking beyond charity and business people who could see that these places needed business to grow. So we formed Angello without actually really any clue about what was going to be the right approach. And we decided and then at the beginning that we would try to build a small investment fund to invest in small businesses in Moldova. And at that time, we had to build everything from front to back. We had to try to find entrepreneurs, bearing in mind that the country wasn't long gone of communism. So the entrepreneurial culture was very, very early stages and certainly faith driven entrepreneurs hardly existed, you know, in a country where the Christian population is less than one percent. So to find entrepreneurs who are decent business ideas was challenging. And then to find investors who would be willing to invest in small businesses in a place that they'd never heard of. Generally, you know, just a bit everything about it and building a structure. You know, the legal and tax structure that could accept people's money and then deploy up and the small businesses in a place that had never, ever had any inward investment of any kind.
Other than a few, you know, big infrastructure projects through European Bank for Reconstruction Development or something. But this has never been done before. So every piece of it was difficult. And actually people agreed to invest because they knew that I wasn't crazy. You know, they knew that I probably was well intentioned and it was like I probably was well intentioned. We have no clue what you're talking about, but it sounds like this is the kind of thing that should happen. So we'll make a small investment in your fund to getting people convinced to be investors rather than just philanthropists. They understood philanthropy, but the idea of building Kingdom through building business was not something that people really understood much about at the time.
Henry Kaestner: I'd imagine some of that dynamics is because and we see this in United States, so presumably you see some amount of it in Northern Ireland. The concept of building the kingdom through business is a novel concept even here, let alone Moldova. Right. Yeah. And so you've got some vision casting to be done that actually God cares about the marketplace. He actually cares better. Investment dollars. I want to do it in Moldova, but that was had some ripple effect back in as you're building this consensus and building this fund. It must had some ripple effect back in Northern Ireland to right?
Malcolm Johnston: Honestly, Henry, most of the outcome from that was there were very, very few people who understood it. Very few people who, you know, would say we should go to crazy places like that. But I think that generally people did not really get what we were talking about. A few people were willing to invest. They were willing to come with us. But I think that we were probably way ahead of our time. Now, there are more people that have heard of impact investing and, you know, there's few more stories about it. But actually, back then, we were probably ahead of our time. It was desperately lonely, actually, to persevere in what we knew. God had called us, too. And so it was tough.
You know, I didn't bring a huge groundswell of change in people's attitudes to invest in philanthropy. And it didn't. It was lonely. And we had to go to London and into Europe to find people who got it, actually. And most people didn't. They were still in a different paradigm.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. I can empathize with that when we're starting Sovereign's capital. We went and talked to maybe 700, 750 different people and a very, very distinct minority, said, oh, that makes sense. You know, you can actually put investment capital and work with entrepreneurs driven by their faith for some sort of financial return and social impact. And I found myself at times feeling frustrated by that. You must really felt that.
Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. Very much so. It was absolutely mission impossible. And it was really tough, really tough.
Henry Kaestner: Because at least with us, we had some investment ideas lined up. You've got to build a market and demand on the investment side. And you also had to build a market in demand on the entrepreneur side. Right. So how do you do that? How do you take people who've been living under communism for so long? Bring the gospel to bear and help them understand there's a God who love them, but then also that they were created in this image of a God who worked and who was entrepreneurial, who is creative. Tell us generally how you do it. But then give us an example of a company or two in Eastern Europe where you came alongside an entrepreneur and helped them to live that out.
Malcolm Johnston: Lots of things we tried. Didn't work. One of the guys that was involved with us on the team back in the early days, even before Angello got going, he was a tech entrepreneur and he had gone to Moldova with a student ministry to volunteer the student ministry for a short time. And he could see that part of the legacy of communism was a pretty rigorous education system. So students were coming through university.
They were a lot of kids were coming through and learning IT, but there was no work for anybody. They came out of university with qualifications and ended up in the streets. And, you know, there was no work for anybody. And this guy decided that he'd set up a tech company with his own investment and start to hire these I.T. graduates and teach them modern day programing. So they basically built software in Moldova and sell it into first world markets. And so he started this company in the early we had been about 98, 99 at the same time as I went first to Moldova. When they started to recruit graduates from the universities and build a software development company, which was the first of its kind in the city, and began to employ people, pay them decent wages and pay tax. They became the biggest taxpayer in the country and the company grew like wildfire. Actually, they began to recruit more people. They were winning contracts outside the country. Fast forward a few years, a lot of difficulty, a lot of efforts to close the company through corruption and so forth. And actually, I give these guys credit for it. They have just floated that company in the New York Stock Exchange. hat is completely out in the left field compared to anything else that they have seen. But they went the right sector. They spawned an I.T. sector in the country. That's nine, 10 to 15 percent GDP. And it was a raging success. But the challenge with any of those countries is to find entrepreneurs who have got the skill and the experience to grow and scale their companies.
And we made the mistake about 10 years ago of going investment first, make sure we just a small fund and then we needed to find companies to invest into. And on hindsight, we took the wrong approach. We shouldn't have been trying to invest. We should have been doing what we talk a lot more now about had me is building the enterprise ecosystem. And hoping that after a period of time quality companies would come through that process, that were ready for investment. And in hindsight, that's what we should have done.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. And so the work that you and I are now doing in Africa, you know, brought to the Fairview Hotel, we got together in February with an eye towards doing faith driven investments. Where are the great entrepreneurs? Let's invest in them. And I really came away from that trip. Really just encouraged by the opportunity. But then also understand that if we wanted this to really be a thriving marketplace in five or 10 years, we had spent a lot of time thinking about building capacity.
Malcolm Johnston: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I think that's a big lot of our experience is where to start building that capacity and knowing that it's just going to take time. Hard yards building relationships is one of the things that I learned and I'm deeply convinced and convicted about is that in these developing markets, guys with ideas and vision and all of that, how we behave when we turn up is incredibly important. We can really get that badly wrong with our enthusiasm to be agents of change. And I realize that so much of what we've got to do is to empower locally and not Short-Circuit, that by bringing in smart people from outside who can get from A to B faster.
Henry Kaestner: That's pretty tempting, though, isn't it? When you see how it will work in Northern Ireland or the West and then saying, we'll do this, do that, and you can get pretty prescriptive pretty quickly, at least I feel like I can.
Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. We made all those mistakes, and I'm honestly we a lot of it for good reasons. You know, we cared about the poor. We wanted to see community change. And there's times where we just drove too fast. And a lot of what we built that wasn't based on local empowerment fell apart and we had to go back and start again.
Henry Kaestner: So tell us about, again, what brought us together is this group that got together in Kenya focusing on faith driven investments in East Africa. And then as a result of that, taking a step back and saying, gosh, what does it look like to you? Yes. Do some of that, but tread slowly, but also build out the Faith Driven Entrepreneur ecosystem. What are some of the things that they are starting to happen and have happened in Eastern Europe, as you've looked at some of the mistakes that you made and said, gosh, we need to focus on capacity building where some of the initiatives that you have been involved in.
Malcolm Johnston: Yeah. One of the best examples of that is a group of people we're working with right now in Uzbekistan. And that's a little part of the world, Central Asia. That was always fascinating to me, even when we were very much involved in Eastern Europe. We helped to start mission stuff in Kyrgyzstan because they were blessed a lot by having common language and Russian. So it's a fascinating little cluster of countries East Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, very, very close. Islam is rampant, growing, and we find a cluster of Faith driven entrepreneurs who desperately wanted to have partners from outside. And we very readily agreed to this journey, this together, because I could see that they had good local leadership. They were smart. They had a vision for this themselves, not the vision that we had to try to sell to them. And so we came alongside this little group of faith driven entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan. And right now, we're taking these steps with them to build that ecosystem. And they want to have programs in there, like the ones, for example, we saw in East Africa. They want the programing. But right now, what we're doing is standing beside those guys to provide some very small level of loans and to faith driven entrepreneurs almost as a sign of partnership. We're with you. We're gonna do what we can to help you..
And I think that the conditions really exist there in Uzbekistan to build out this ecosystem. And they want to be an example out. ofUzbekistan for the Central Asian region. And that excites me. So that's an example. And a little place like Uzbekistan that just desperately wants faith driven people whose faith puts me to shame. You know, it's just such a privilege to be with, not to try to teach or push, just to be beside. It's such a privilege and honor to be with these guys with friendship, actually, and just a commitment to journey. These are the kind of guys that can really make a difference in their country. And they're so excited that there's a movement happening. So as I tell them about the movement that's happening with, for example, faith driven investors and Faith driven entrepreneurs and that kind of stuff that's growing in East Africa. They are thrilled to bits that there's a movement that they could be part of. That's a great example of it.
Henry Kaestner: Tell me about this dynamic of going in and starting off with some low interest loans with these entrepreneurs. Just really, really impressive by their faithfulness in a really challenging spot. How do you balance coming alongside them and the discovery and the diligence that you would do as an investor if you're looking in opportunity in Belfast or New York? Presumably they don't have data rooms. They don't have audited financials sometimes. How do you come alongside them in a way that's not judgmental or prescriptive, but at the same time leads them towards a world in which they will be ready for more of a buttoned up presentation, maybe more accountability? How do you navigate through that whole dynamic with patience and wisdom?
Malcolm Johnston: Actually, it takes a lot of wisdom to let them come at their speed with appropriate support and. I think one of the things that I've seen most, Henry, is that if we build from where our investors willing to go with what they have with their current perceived wisdom. All right. What is impact investing look like if we go from that point of view of. Existing impact investment capital and an existing impact investment structures investment will never go to Uzbekistan. It's just the demands of the money. The kind of due diligence that's required currently. These frontier markets, the difficult places for the church is small, but for business, that's definitely necessary to see that kingdom built then existing money and how it thinks would never go to these places. Now there's a massive missing segment that is going to continue to be missed.
Malcolm Johnston: I guess I find that a bit depressing as I've watched the sector evolve, as I stay close to people in these difficult places determined that they should find the support that they need. It's a bit depressing to watch the capital with its intentions. Being far away from where these guys are going to be for a long time. And so what I desperately want for these kind of guys who we need to support them with, with rigorous programing incubators and accelerators and mentoring and all that stuff, the good stuff, that there are no great programs available. We've got to push them to really develop their standards and so forth. But there needs to emerge, in my opinion, type of capital that see, that's role as kingdom building, not as a new cool place to find an impact investment, because if the money wants a new cool place to invest, it's never going to go to Uzbekistan or Moldova. Those countries will stay, still, on the frontier because they don't have thriving enterprise ecosystems of faith driven people, because the church is tiny and it's persecuted and they need commitment from people like us to go the journey with them over a number of years, and willing to see capital brought to it that's appropriate to where they are and they can get to us their next step, not holding out capital that says we're with you if you can make it to the fifth base.
But capital that is willing to come to the second base to serve what's happening, what God's doing in that country. So that's one of the things that I see emerging. I think it's exciting what we see emerging with the journey towards building ecosystems. The stuff that we've been talking about is super exciting and it can be done. I've been around it long enough to know that what we're talking about can work on the kind of faith driven people that are building these ecosystems is exciting. The missing piece is the kind of capital that's willing to come. So the faith driven investors, in my view, are going to need to apply their capital to serve in some of these difficult places. Just the way, you know, people like the guys that have followed with me and the difficult places where we've kind of gone with our time and our lives to serve, to see future in these places, capital is going to need to do the same to come to these difficult places and still with rigor and still with proper thought, not just throwing money at stuff that doesn't make sense, but that's what I desire for these kind of guys that will find ways of plugging the gaps with capital that will come to serve them because they are truly kingdom builders.
Henry Kaestner: I want to bring it back to Northern Ireland before we close out. Fast forward to present day in the ghettos. The slums now. Are things better? Over the last 20 years.
Malcolm Johnston: Yeah, they're definitely better, and that gives me hope, you know, as I go into other frontier markets and see difficulty. I see a change comes, mindsets change. Innovation starts to happen. People start to have confidence to build something that isn't going to be wiped out by the next terrorist attack or economic slump. So, yeah, there's been massive change. People have hope now. And people stay to a greater degree when there's a sense of hope. This is a place I can build a future than people choose to stay. And, you know, when I was growing up in Ireland. Ireland was a place that students come out of University and then left to go and build a future somewhere else. Now to a greater degree. People will stay and start businesses and that's exciting to me as I see. Eastern Europe, Central Asia, one of their biggest problems is immigration. Bright people leave and the experience of Northern Ireland is that. when the steps are taken and she and starts to happen, then people even start coming back and bring their skills back with them that they learned elsewhere. I'm going to build a future here. And so, yeah, we see a huge change here in Northern Ireland. There's a much greater understanding between people who are in the past diametrically opposed, that there's a much greater sense of space has got potential.
Henry Kaestner: So, as you said, it's a message of hope for some of the other places that you're investing and that maybe 20, 25 years behind. And I'm very, very grateful for this conversation. I think that a big lesson that I'm taking away from it is making sure that we have a mind of service, that we're not prescriptive or judgmental that would come alongside the entrepreneurs. We work with the right pace to bring them to a place that may take decades to where they are equipped to have the pro forma financials and cap tables and ability to talk about proff stacks and convert's and those types of things. But we need to come along at a pace that is driven by a heart of service and driven by the Holy Spirit. And so I'm grateful for your perspective and your long obedience in same direction and in difficult places in emerging markets. Malcolm, one of the things that we'd like to ask people that are on any of our podcasts is something that they're hearing from God through his word recently that they see really working in their life. And it could be through your Bible time this morning. Maybe it's last week, maybe last month. But what's one thing that you feel that God is speaking to you about now?
Malcolm Johnston: Yeah, I think it's a great question. What God called us into and through in some difficult places. It took me a long time. I'm probably like you. I want to change the world where there's brokenness. And Isaiah 61 is the call of God in my life when there's brokenness and lack of hope and opportunity. I want to change the world. God brought me through a lot of tough stuff of realizing that, Malcolm, all I'm calling you to do is be faithful to what I called you to. You don't need to have a big success story to shout about. Your success is that you were faithful to what I called you. And what God has taught me a lot about in the last while is from man Psalm 27 where David who was a go getter and he was a fighter. He was a king and all that stuff. And he got to the point of saying, in Psalm 27. He said one thing I ask of the Lord this is that I seek and I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days in my life to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in this temple. And that was a go getter who got to that point of saying, this is the one thing I do. And I'm glad to say that God had to break me down from wanting to constantly be getting things done, to be able to say this is the one thing I value above everything else, to learn to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to learn what that means. To actually just gaze on the beauty of the Lord to spend time in his presence in silence, learning to appreciate his beauty, that these nations that I care about, wanting to see them being restored and transformed. God says these are my nations. I'm working. Even before you turned up, I'm working because I'm the God of all the earth. You learn to gaze on all my beauty and realize how big a God that I am. And you just be faithful to what I've called you to today. And don't worry, if you don't see it happen in your lifetime, you just be faithful and learn to gaze on all my beauty and enjoy walking with me. And so Psalm 27, I would say, is the big thing that has meant so much when seeking to learn to walk faithfully, whether there seem to be results or not.
Always is beautiful. I needed to hear that. I have a feeling that a lot of our audience needed to hear that. I'm grateful for your time. I'm grateful for your friendship and your encouragement. And I'm so much looking forward to doing work with you under God's power, not ours, for his glory. And then my sense is that together we'll have an opportunity to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord through the work he's doing in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, in Africa and other places. I'm grateful for the message you had about the mindset that we have in investing in emerging markets. The history, the context. And again, grateful for your friendship. Malcolm, thank you very much.
Malcolm Johnston: My pleasure. Thank you. God bless.