About Doug Perry
Born in 1967, Doug came to Jesus on Easter Sunday at Pisgah Baptist Church in Excelsior Springs, Missouri when he was six years old. Doug's dad, Bob Perry, was his pastor growing up. Soon after the family moved to Mexico to be missionaries for the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Doug grew up a minority, learning Spanish playing in the streets, seeing Christians up remote villages who were happy - even when they had nothing but Jesus. He's never been a sucker for the "American dream" that a bigger house and a boat will make you happy. It was a great childhood filled with amazing sights and pyramids and mountains and lakes and artisans and so much more.
In 1980 they moved back to Excelsior Springs after illness in Mexico made it clear they couldn't stay any longer. Bob became pastor of First Baptist Church in Excelsior Springs. When he was 16 years old, at a church camp that summer, Doug felt that God was calling him to full time service for the kingdom. It was as loud as he'd ever heard the Lord. During high school Doug ran track, played tennis, competed in the Math Club, received top honors in state competition for solo and ensemble performance, and was a cheerleader his senior year. After graduating high school with a 4.0 GPA, he was accepted to William Jewell College and was awarded the Hester Scholarship, the largest single scholarship on campus awarded once per year for a person going into pastoral ministry.
In the summer of 1986 Doug went with the other three Hester Scholars to represent the college at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Dallas, Texas. It was the most devious, underhanded, political, manipulative thing he'd ever seen up to that point. He remembers being in a hotel room with his father and several other pastors and watching them on their knees, weeping for how much they felt God was grieved by the whole thing. (During the 80's there was a massive takeover attempt in the Convention by fundamentalist elements - which was pretty much succesful and still resulting in litigation and charges to some of those leaders even now.) At that moment, sitting on the bed in a hotel room, watching respected pastors weep, something snapped off of Doug. Looking back now, we'd call it a Red Dragon - a religious spirit that makes people loyal to their religious system and sure that they are right. He never again felt that kind of faith in the "system" of religion or the Southern Baptist Convention. (In fact, just about everybody in that room ended up leaving the SBC and starting the Missouri Cooperative Baptist Fellowship or other new independent groups.)
He finished at William Jewell College with majors in Religion and Psychology (mostly Industrial and Organizational Psych), but never really did rekindle a passion for ministry after that. After graduation he moved back in with his parents, who by that point at moved to Herndon, Virigia where Dr. Bob was the Director of the Mount Vernon Baptist Association of churches. To pay the bills while looking for a "real job," Doug started driving deliveries for a new multi-restaurant delivery start up called "Takeout Taxi." Very quickly he was promoted to Vice President of Marketing and was in charge of all the desktop publishing, print advertising, TV advertising, shirts/hats/logos/car signs, business cards and anything else needed. He also ran the corporate operation, tracking and radio dispatching as many as 100 drivers to 50+ restaurants on a weekend night. But he hated the Washington D.C. area and longed to work with college kids. He realized that he had been shaped more by the leadership opportunities, networking and friendships in the extracurriculars in college, then learning in the classrooms. He applied to two programs that offers a Masters degree in Higher Education Administration - one was the University of Missouri - Kansas City and the other was George Mason University in Northern Viriginia - leaving it to God as to where he should go. Well, thankfully, God picked Kansas City and sent him back home.