R. Lane Lender grew up in a Christian home in Southern California with parents who were committed believers. They were public school teachers and life for the family was always centered around Christ and the church. In high school, Lane sensed a calling into full time ministry while attending youth camp. From that time on, he set on a path of preparation for ministry. After graduation from Seminary in Texas, Lane returned to Southern California with his new wife Keren and together they planted a church. Lane pastored the growing congregation from 1993 to 2005. In 2005, sensing a call into church planting mission work, Lane and Keren moved to the Middle East to live and work in a Muslim country living in a Muslim neighborhood with their 2 kids. It was out of this experience in the Middle East when God’s Love Story Visual Bible (GLSVB) was birthed. Lane, along with some helpful partners, conceived, produced, and began distributing GLSVB free of charge for missionaries and believers in very difficult places. Lane and Keren, based on their experience in the Middle East, began teaching other missionaries and believers how to effectively share the gospel with Muslims without creating dangerous situations for themselves in the countries where they lived. They were also involved in training and equipping short term mission teams with effective tools for getting into gospel conversations with Muslims in the countries they were visiting.
In 2016, due to family responsibilities, Lane and Keren moved back to the United States to the State of Texas and began pastoring a church there. Continued work on GLSVB has been hampered by inconsistent and sometimes non-existent support for the project. But the good news is that the first phase of GLSVB has continued to be used to this day. It is available in 7 different languages and counting. GLSVB resources can be downloaded for free at www.hikayaat.com (Hikayaat is Arabic for stories). Presently, due to the limitation of financial resources, production of new GLSVB stories has come to a stand still. It is Lane’s intention to restart production again to complete this valuable resource for missionaries and believers around the world by… (1) raising the funds through the sale of God’s Love Story Book Series and (2) through the generous donations of partners who believe in GLSVB as a valuable resources for the evangelism and discipleship of Unreached peoples around the world.