Senior Leadership Team
KENT PARKS
PRESIDENT & CEO
READ KENT'S BIO
Kent Parks is President and CEO of Beyond. Kent and his wife Erika worked among Muslims in Asia for 20 years. They regularly lead church planting movement trainings around the world. He also equips people to better understand mission strategy, and biblical theology of missions.
Previously, he served as a strategy coordinator focused on catalyzing Disciple-making Movements among unreached people groups (UPGs) in Southeast Asia. He continues to help facilitate various trans-national, trans-organizational networks focused on Unreached People Groups (UPGs), including serving as Co-Facilitator for Ethne, a global UPG network and as one of the leaders in the 2414 Initiative which is focused on launching “Book of Acts” movements in every unreached people and place.
Kent pastored in Texas for seven years before going to the mission field. He has been a seminary professor and the academic dean of a seminary and has also taught internationally in graduate schools. He earned his B.A. in English and History from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas as well as his M.Div. and Ph.D. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Kent and Erika have two adult daughters and a son-in-law who love and serve Jesus and are active in making disciples too.
LAURA HUMPHRIES
VP ADVANCEMENT
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Laura Humphries joined Beyond in 2010 as Director of Communications.
Prior to joining, she ran her own business and worked in international sales. She has led prayer teams among UPGs and served in leadership roles at other UK ministries.
Born and raised near Atlanta, she attended Emory University with majors in Russian and International Studies. She is married to Rob, a British national, and recently moved back to the Atlanta, Georgia area.
Fellow ESOL Bible class teacher in Atlanta, Helen Jean Parks, encouraged her interest in missions, specifically among the Unreached which led to her first mission trip and desire to serve professionally in the most strategic way among Unreached People Groups.
BRAD WINKLER
COO | CFO
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Brad Winkler joined Beyond in August 2014 as Chief Operations Officer, to work closely alongside Kent Parks to help lead the organization. Brad loves the focused strategic nature of the organization. When asked why he joined Brad said, “I grew up hearing from missionaries who labored their whole life to start one church. Beyond has a strategy that can enable a missionary, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to start thousands of churches and impact the nations. In business, we would refer to a strategy like Beyond’s as best-in-class. In truth, Jesus told us all how to do this in the Bible.”
Brad brings a successful business leadership and accounting background into the operations role for the ministry. During the last few years Beyond has deployed excellent enterprise class business systems and best practice operations to support Beyond’s strategy.
Before joining Beyond Brad worked in IT, telecom and spent 15 years in leadership for The Voice of the Martyrs, including three years oversees. Brad is married to Eileen and they have two daughters.
JUSTIN LONG
DIRECTOR GLOBAL RESEARCH
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Justin’s involvement with missions began in 1990 with the Association of International Mission Services where he developed a database to generate reports about agencies and specific countries. In 1995, he joined the editing team of the World Christian Encyclopedia (2nd edition, David Barrett & Todd Johnson) where he served as a contributing editor for the Encyclopedia and managing editor of the journal, the AD 2025 Global Monitor. He then helped build the missions portal www.strategicnetwork.org, which featured tens of thousands of articles on missions as well as e-groups.
In 2004, Justin and his family relocated to Southeast Asia and for the next four years, he met numerous Unreached People networks, worked on the Ethne (www.ethne.net) conference and began publishing a number of articles about how to reach unreached peoples. In 2009 upon return to the United States, he developed a blog portal (justinlong.org) which features articles, in-depth Cluster Profiles, and the District Survey of the world’s unreached places.