The Ministry That Refuses to Be the Last Link
For nine decades, a Colorado Springs ministry has run on one stubborn instruction its founder gave a sailor: don't just learn it - teach the next person, and make sure they teach someone too.
In 1933, a young lumberyard worker in Southern California was teaching a U.S. Navy sailor named Les Spencer how to memorize Scripture, pray, and live out his faith. It went well enough that Spencer asked if he could bring a shipmate to be taught too. Dawson Trotman's answer became the founding sentence of an entire ministry: "You teach him."
That refusal - to be the last link in the chain, to keep the teaching for himself - is the whole idea. Trotman called it spiritual multiplication, and it turned a personal habit into a global organization. Nine decades later, The Navigators operates in more than 120 countries with roughly 6,000 staff and ministry leaders, a publishing house, a Bible-memory system used around the world, and a genuine castle in Colorado Springs. Almost none of it looks like a crowd.
01 / What it doesThe bet on one person at a time
The Navigators is a Christian discipleship nonprofit. Its stated purpose is compact: "to know Christ, make Him known, and help others do the same." What distinguishes it from the broader world of churches and evangelistic campaigns is method. Rather than gathering large audiences, the organization builds what it calls life-to-life discipleship - one person walking closely alongside another through Scripture, prayer, and ordinary shared life, until that second person is equipped to do the same for a third.
The theological engine is a single verse, 2 Timothy 2:2: entrust what you've learned to reliable people who will be able to teach others. Read as an instruction, it produces generations - not of families, but of disciples. The organization measures itself less by how many people it reaches and more by whether the people it reaches go on to reach others.
02 / Who it servesSailors, students, and first responders
The ministry began with the military - the Navy men Trotman discipled before Pearl Harbor - and that stream still runs, now serving service members, veterans, and first responders. From there the work fanned out into the places where people already gather. Campus ministry launched in 1951 at the University of Nebraska, working out of a fraternity house, and remains a flagship: in late 2025 the collegiate mission announced 26 new campus ministries in a single push.
Beyond students and the military, The Navigators runs discipleship in workplaces, neighborhoods, and church communities, and a global arm that operates across cultures - including in countries where open religious work is restricted, and low-profile, relationship-first ministry is the only kind that fits. The through-line is that the audience is never a stadium. It is a person, and then the person they bring.
03 / The problem it solvesWhat happens after the crowd goes home
The Navigators' most quietly influential contribution is a word the wider evangelical world now takes for granted: follow-up. When Billy Graham's crusades filled stadiums, the hard question was what to do the morning after - how to turn a raised hand into a lasting, growing faith. The Navigators built the system that answered it, and Lorne Sanny, who would become the ministry's second president, directed the counseling and follow-up operation for Graham's campaigns.
That is the problem the whole organization is organized around. Attention is easy; formation is slow. A crowd disperses; a disciple who was taught to teach does not. The Navigators exists in the gap between a decision and a durable, reproducing life of faith.
04 / Products & servicesA memory card, a paraphrase, and a castle
For an organization built on relationships, The Navigators has produced a surprising amount of durable product. The Topical Memory System - 60 core Bible verses across five topical packs, available as cards, print, and apps in multiple translations - is one of the most widely used Scripture-memorization tools in the world. It is discipleship distilled into something you can carry in a pocket.
Then there is NavPress, the ministry's publishing arm, founded in 1975. Its best-known title outgrew its parent: The Message, Eugene Peterson's contemporary-language rendering of the Bible, has sold in the millions and is quoted by people who have never heard of the ministry that published it. And on the real-estate side, the organization's Colorado Springs headquarters sits on Glen Eyrie, a castle estate built by the founder of the city, which The Navigators has run since 1953 as a retreat and conference center alongside the youth-focused Eagle Lake Camps.
05 / Business modelFunded by the people it disciples
The Navigators is a faith-based nonprofit, funded primarily by individual donations and staff-raised support, supplemented by earned revenue from NavPress publishing, the Glen Eyrie conference center, and Eagle Lake Camps. It has been a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability since 1980. Because it is classified as a church, it does not file a public IRS Form 990, so precise financials are not publicly posted; third-party business data lists annual revenue in the neighborhood of $163 million, which should be read as an estimate rather than a filed figure.
06 / How it's differentMultiplication, not audience
The Navigators shares a market with other parachurch ministries - Cru, InterVarsity, Young Life, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes - and its publishing overlaps with the broader Christian book industry. What sets it apart is the insistence on generational depth over reach. Many ministries are built to draw a crowd and count it. The Navigators is built to disappear into a relationship and count what that relationship produces two and three steps down the line.
That is also why it is easy to underrate. There is no signature stadium event, no televised face. The organization's fingerprints are on other people's movements - the follow-up system behind a famous crusade, a Bible translation on a shelf, a memory card in a soldier's pack - more than on its own brand.
07 / Expertise & where it fitsNinety years of patient method
The Navigators' expertise is the thing it has practiced longest: how to move a person from a first decision to a mature, reproducing faith, and how to keep that process running across cultures and generations. In the ecosystem of American faith, it sits at the quiet, structural end - not the pulpit or the platform, but the scaffolding of discipleship that other churches and ministries lean on.
Its 2025 leadership handoff reads like a status report from an organization that thinks in generations. Joe Maschhoff was commissioned as the sixth international president, for a ten-year term, succeeding Mutua Mahiaini - the kind of unhurried succession you plan when your core metric is whether the work outlasts the worker. Founder Dawson Trotman didn't get that luxury: he drowned in 1956 rescuing a girl at Schroon Lake, New York. The photograph that ran afterward reportedly carried the caption "Always holding somebody up." For a ministry built on never being the last link, it is a fitting epitaph.