Global by birth, experience, and education
Kelly E. Nix was born in Lima, Peru, to American missionary parents and grew up across national and cultural boundaries. He is a citizen of both Peru and the United States from birth. His formative years were spent in Peru, Costa Rica, and the United States, experiences that gave him an early awareness that identity, language, faith, and belonging are often more complicated than a passport or a mailing address can explain.
At twelve, he moved from Peru to Costa Rica. At fourteen, after his father’s missionary career ended, he moved again—this time to the United States. That transition became one of the defining experiences of his life. Decades later, the questions raised by displacement, cultural identity, loss, and home would become central themes in his memoir The Wind in the Casuarina Trees and in his continuing work with adult Third Culture Kid themes.
His global perspective is not only biographical. Kelly holds a Doctor of Business Administration in Global Business and Leadership from Crestmont University, complementing a lifetime formed across cultures with formal doctoral study in global organizations, leadership, and cross-cultural business. He also holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Western Governors University, and he also holds degrees in psychology and computer science. He is currently completing a Master of Theological Studies.
More than four decades of preaching, pastoral leadership, and theological education
Kelly entered ministry while still a teenager and has now served for more than four decades as a preacher, pastor, missionary, teacher, administrator, translator, and writer. His ministry has crossed congregational, educational, missionary, and international settings, giving his theological writing a practical orientation shaped by years of preaching, counseling, teaching, and pastoral responsibility.
He has served as founding pastor of Alamo City Apostolic Church in San Antonio, Texas, since 2008. Before relocating to San Antonio, he spent seven years in a previous pastorate in Missouri. His pastoral work has included church planting and development, ministerial training, preaching, teaching, administration, and the long-term work of building congregational life.
Since 2006, he has served as President and Dean of Graduate Studies of the Institute of Conservative Apostolic Theology (ICAT), which he helped establish to provide serious theological education within a conservative Apostolic framework. ICAT began in Independence, Missouri, and later relocated to San Antonio. Its work reflects a conviction that rigorous theological study and practical ministry preparation belong together.
Kelly also serves in leadership with the Worldwide Pentecostal Fellowship, including the Global Missions Council and Education Council, and has participated in broader council leadership. His missionary and international ministry experience has kept him closely connected to churches and leaders outside the United States as well as to the needs of Apostolic education at home.
Scholarship designed to be useful
Kelly's academic career has included both teaching and senior educational administration. From 2015 to 2024, he served at Apollos University as Vice President and Dean of the School of Business and Management, overseeing faculty and academic programs, teaching graduate and doctoral business courses, chairing dissertation committees, and participating in program development and improvement.
From 2011 to 2019, he served as an adjunct professor of religion at Wilson University, where he taught theology and contributed to curriculum development. These roles, together with his work at ICAT, helped shape an educational philosophy that values careful scholarship while resisting unnecessary academic obscurity.
Serious study should not require inaccessible writing. The goal is to preserve rigor while making scholarship useful to the church, the classroom, and the reader who genuinely wants to understand.
That philosophy is reflected in the Apostolos Academic Library, a growing series of textbooks and reference works intended for Apostolic colleges, ministry schools, Christian schools, home educators, pastors, teachers, and independent students.
Intercultural communication as lived experience
Before and alongside his academic and pastoral work, Kelly built a professional career that repeatedly placed him at the intersection of cultures, organizations, and communication. At Children International, he worked as a field content manager, writer, translator, and interpreter, coordinating international content work and multilingual communication across multiple countries. His responsibilities required more than translation of words; they required translation of context, expectations, and meaning across cultural boundaries.
He later worked in business, higher education administration, real estate investment, sales, organizational leadership, and executive operations. His tenure as Chief Operating Officer of Stratis Bio concluded in July 2026. Across these roles, his professional work reinforced the same themes that have marked his life since childhood: communicating across cultures, leading across difference, and helping people understand one another in settings where assumptions do not always travel well.
Kelly speaks and teaches in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. His books on intercultural communication grew from this combination of personal history, professional practice, multilingual experience, and formal study in global business and leadership.
A catalog that reflects an unusually broad life
Through Apostolos Publications, Kelly writes across several fields that might initially appear unrelated: Apostolic theology, biblical doctrine, church history, holiness and Christian living, spiritual gifts, intercultural communication, and Third Culture Kid identity. In his case, those subjects come from the same life. They reflect decades spent moving among different cultures, pastoring churches, teaching students, working internationally, studying organizations, translating ideas, and asking how faith is lived faithfully in the real world.
His Apostolic works are written from a conservative Oneness Pentecostal perspective and seek to combine biblical conviction with careful research and accessible prose. His intercultural books draw on the practical realities of communication across national, linguistic, and organizational boundaries. His TCK writing is more personal, exploring displacement, identity, belonging, memory, and the lasting consequences of growing up among different cultures.
Apostolos Publications was established to give these projects a coherent home and to build a long-term catalog of serious but readable resources. The Apostolos Academic Library extends that mission into textbook publishing, with volumes designed for formal courses as well as independent study.
Kelly and his wife, Valerie, have four children and ten grandchildren. He continues to pastor, teach, write, publish, and participate in Apostolic educational and missionary leadership from San Antonio, Texas.
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