Breakpoint

Christianity has always been concerned about body and spirit, mind and matter, the spiritual and the physical. This was why wherever Christianity spread, believers established hospitals and schools alongside churches. In China, for example, Western medicine was an essential ingredient of the growth of Christianity. Many important Chinese Christians were first introduced to Christianity and Western learning via medicine. Shi Meiyu was born in Jiujiang, China. Her father was a Methodist pastor, and her mother was the principal of a school for girls in the city. They taught her the Chinese classics, as well as Christian literature. They also broke with Chinese tradition and refused to bind her feet. Meiyu's parents were especially impressed with the work of American missionary Dr. Katharine Bushnell. Although best remembered for her groundbreaking book God's Word to Women, Bushnell got her start as a medical missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Inspired by Dr. Bushnell's medical work, Meiyu's father decided that she should become a doctor. To prepare her for medical school, seven-year-old Meiyu was sent to Rulison-Fish School, the premier girls' school in China founded by iconoclastic Methodist missionary Gertrude Howe. Howe was a single woman who had scandalized the male missionaries in China by adopting four Chinese girls and raising them as their mother. Howe lived a very frugal life, saving money so that in 1892 she could take her five best students to her alma mater, the University of Michigan. These included Shi Meiyu and her adopted daughter Kang Cheng. Having tutored them in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and Latin, they passed the entrance exam with flying colors. Four years later, they graduated together as the first Chinese women to receive a medical degree from an American university. Meiyu and Cheng returned to Jiujiang and opened a one-room hospital. It was popular and always filled to capacity. In just the first ten months, the hospital had served 2,300 outpatients and made hundreds of house calls. A physician from Chicago, Isaac Newton Danforth, gave them money to establish the Elizabeth Skelton Danforth Hospital in Jiujiang. Shi Meiyu supervised this 95-bed, 15-room facility for the next 20 years. They treated up to 5,000 patients per month and oversaw the training of more than 500 Chinese nurses. Their work included translating textbooks and training manuals. Two years later, Kang Cheng left Jiujiang to set up a new hospital in Nanchang, the largest city in the province. She later returned to the United States and received a bachelor's degree in literature from Northwestern University and an honorary master's degree from Michigan. She then returned to China and was involved heavily in relief work and social causes until her death in 1930. In 1907, Shi Meiyu returned to the United States for surgery. Her sister Phoebe, also a physician, took over the Danforth Hospital in Meiyu's absence. While in America, Meiyu continued to fundraise for her hospital. A Rockefeller Foundation scholarship enabled her to do postgraduate work in 1918-19 at Johns Hopkins, where Phoebe had gotten her medical degree. With the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1937, many of these believers moved inland and to Hong Kong, which only resulted in the spread of their organization and associated churches. For her part, Meiyu returned to the United States to raise funds for the mission and became one of the organizers of an evangelistic board. Shi Meiyu died in Pasadena, California, in 1954. Her work in medicine, public health, nursing education, ending abusive practices such as footbinding, and vices such as opium addictions, were an extension of her work of evangelism: They were all expressions of her understanding that the Gospel was meant for all of life, not just our eternal salvation. In all of these cases, she was acting out of love of God and neighbor, seeking to improve the lives of the people she served, both for this world and the next.

There are certain moments in history, such as the end of the Roman Empire or the Enlightenment, when it's obvious how much the cultural ground has shifted. Cultural norms that worked before to foster social cohesion no longer suffice. Certain ideas and shared ways of thinking can no longer be taken for granted. At these "hinge points," Christians are forced to remember who we are and to rethink our place in the overarching story of redemption. This is one of those hinge points. The cultural ground has shifted quickly, and it's disorienting. Many Christians struggle to know how to live in this strange cultural moment. Even committed Christians who study the Scriptures and attend church can struggle to make sense of it all. Even those with lots of answers to lots of questions, who've collected many pieces of truth from sermons, books, and wonderful teachers can struggle to know how those pieces fit together within the larger narrative of God's story. Our faith can feel fragmented and too far away, disconnected from day-to-day life in twenty-first century America. It's as if we have logical answers, but people are now asking different questions. It's as if too many Christians know the primary truth claims of Christianity, but not how they fit into our lives. It's as if we have this vast armory of truth, but we don't know how to wield the weapons effectively. Over the next year, the Colson Center will expand the ways in which we help Christians become more deeply grounded in the True Story of reality. This is so that they can better make sense of the world and connect more deeply with others who are committed to embodying what's true and good in this cultural moment. Specifically, the Colson Center will serve parents, grandparents, pastors, teachers, and other faithful Christians who are called to prepare the next generation for the challenges of this cultural moment. I'm humbled and driven by what God is choosing to do through the Colson Center. Last year, during the tumult of 2020, every single program of the Colson Center grew, including these BreakPoint commentaries, our newer podcasts, the quarterly short courses, the What Would You Say? video series, and especially the Wilberforce Weekend. In addition, the Colson Center partnered with the Association of Christian Schools International to train thousands of teachers through the innovative "Worldviews and Cultural Fluency" training program. This effort to "disciple the disciplers" continues to grow and expand, with homeschool parents and educators committed to passing on a Christian worldview to the young people in their care. Over 450 Colson Fellows were commissioned in May, having completed a year of in-depth reading, study, and planning in Christian worldview. By all indicators, the number of Colson Fellows will increase this coming year, with regional cohorts in even more cities, filled with Christians seeking to serve God in the time and place where He has put them. Increasingly, schools and churches are homes for Colson Fellows training, providing opportunities for their staff to shape the work and outreach in their institutions. We didn't choose this cultural moment. Our time and place in history is chosen by God. Because He has placed us here, our moment in history is not an accident, but a calling. We have been invited into His life, His kingdom, His story. Nothing in our lives is excluded from this reality, and He asks nothing less of us than full participation. The Colson Center seeks to serve you and your family, as well as churches and schools everywhere, to rise to the challenges of this moment, and find new ways to ground God's people into that True Story centered on Christ the King. Please prayerfully consider partnering with us with a fiscal year-end gift. Any gift given by June 30, 2021 will, by God's grace, help the Colson Center expand and more effectively obey His calling. Our success is when followers of Christ like you are equipped to be the embodiment and testimony of God's truth, God's goodness and God's story, and live with the clarity, confidence, and courage only a Christian worldview offers. To quote our founder, what the world so desperately needs right now is simply for the Church to be the Church. Thank you for your generosity. Go to breakpoint.org/give.

The scope and scale of the suicide epidemic is unbelievably scary, especially to parents. There's a growing number of suicide, suicidal thoughts, what's called deaths from despair that inflicts our culture. All we seem to be doing is treating the symptoms. Our culture says that the problem is lack of support; so that our government, schools, and even some churches, the social institutions that are supposed to weave the strong fabric of our communities are throwing caution to the wind to do anything to make students feel better. Some are even telling students to abandon their communities and even families to cope with their depression. We're just a culture grasping for answers. Dr. Matthew Sleeth has been researching the issue of suicide in our culture, as well as what the Scripture says about suicide from beginning to end. He presented a very important message for our audience at the Wilberforce Weekend this year. To watch Matthew's full presentation, and to catch more of the presentations from Wilberforce Weekend 2021, visit www.wilberforceweekend.org

A video that made the rounds on social media last week featured a group of Portland educators in a Zoom meeting. After introductions including the obligatory "preferred pronouns," the moderator said, "I'm gonna say something that's not nice and not sweet, but it's true. If you're not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you're making yourself obsolete." She didn't mean that these educators would fade away. As she went on to explain, anyone who disagreed with the new agenda would no longer find a home in Portland education. Plans were in place to ensure compliance. Either hop on the train of ever-shifting progressive orthodoxies or be driven out of work. Being opposed to evils like racism isn't enough. Teachers will have to conform to a very specific script. No dissent allowed. While it's not clear that this particular person wields the power to carry through with her threats, educators across the country face similar pressures. Recently via open letter, a New Jersey teacher explained that she was leaving a job she loved because her district had become "a hostile culture of conformity and fear." Students were expected "to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood." As in Portland, administrators overtly threatened termination for anyone who failed to comply. And, don't get me started on Loudoun County, Va. Increasingly, proponents of critical theory aren't merely looking for a place at the table, they're demanding control over "the menu, the venue, the seating," and the guest list. In response, several local governments have proposed various forms of bans on Critical Race Theory. Despite the hysteria, these bans aren't nearly as confining or controversial as the headlines suggest. Rather, they attempt to protect students, especially the younger ones, from being labeled as racist based on either past evils or on being a member of a particular race. Still, even well-intentioned educational bans are a dangerous game. First, and specific to this case, CRT is merely the loudest version of critical theory at the moment. Given the track record of the LGBTQ movement hijacking civil rights history and successes, we can expect the emergence of CQT ("critical queer theory") any day now. Second, bans grant expanded authority to the state. When it comes to what is taught within public schools, it's "live by the ban, die by the ban." Education is too important to be built on shifting tides of political fortunes. But a more important consideration than these is to take seriously how ideas advance in a culture. Bans may be necessary but they rarely win arguments. The influence of particularly dangerous ideas may be curbed by political power, but ideas are never refuted or stopped by political power (remember prohibition?). Last week on Twitter, Professor Robert P. George offered a thoughtful take on these bans, especially in the context of higher education: "1/ I "teach," in the sense of assign and discuss, work by Marx, Gramsci, and Marcuse. That's not because I think what they say is true. I think they're wrong on all the important points. It's because students need to know about them and students learn from engaging their ideas. 2/ I also "teach," in the same sense, critics of Marxism and other forms of socialism--such as Hayek and Solzhenitsyn. It's important that I do that, not because I tend to agree with them, though I do, but so that students are presented with the best arguments on competing sides. 3/ Professors who expose students to the views and arguments of thinkers on one side and fail to expose them to the best to be said on other sides violate a sacred trust. Whatever our views, our job is not to indoctrinate our students. It's not our job to tell them what to think. 4/ Our job is to encourage students to think deeply, carefully, critically (including self-critically), and FOR THEMSELVES. That's why we must expose them to the best arguments for competing perspectives, including those we oppose, even loathe. AND WE NEED THE FREEDOM TO DO THAT. 5/ Where things really go haywire is when a particular view or ideology is given a monopoly--whether formally or informally--and no critical perspectives on it are seriously considered. When that happens, education has been replaced by the vilest of counterfeits: indoctrination. 6/ At the college and university level (we can discuss the circumstances of K-8 and 9-12 education separately), no perspective or school of thought--be it critical race theory, classical Marxism, Platonism, Thomism, feminism, utilitarianism, libertarianism--should be prohibited. 7/ By precisely the same token--and for precisely the same reasons--no perspective or school of thought should be given a monopoly (formally or informally) or be treated as beyond questioning and immunized from critical scrutiny. No prohibitions; no monopolies. Fair competition." Professor George understands something fundamental about ideas and about education. While threats and intimidation have no place and teachers need legal protection from legalized bullying, to simply counter-censor bad ideas is to fail students. Not only do we risk teaching them not to think for themselves, we undermine their confidence that truth can be known and defended. The root problem with critical theory is not how the American story is told, but in pre-empting any critique or debate. That sort of thinking cannot be successfully countered by emulating it. The only way to fight bad ideas is with better ones.

John and Maria discuss how politics makes a lousy worldview before dissecting stories on deconversion from Christianity and other stories of conversion to faith in Jesus. Maria then shares a recent story of a mother in Tanner Cross' school district to defends the elementary gym teacher with her story from Mao's China. John shares his disappointment that the mother's story isn't given more credence in the eyes of the media. John and Maria also visit on three important movements happening with China. They discuss new findings that some U.S. allies have been complicit in deporting Muslim Uyghur's to China where they joined labor camps. John then makes a prediction that China's new three child policy may turn into a baby-making mandate for Chinese citizens. He breaks down the worldview line, showing how economics is driving Chinese decisions. Then Maria shares a story that many U.S. politicians are likely boycotting the Olympics in Beijing over human rights concerns of the Chinese government's treatment of the Uyghur population. Finally, Maria and John discuss the removal of Queen Elizabeth's portrait at a British school. John breaks down the worldview analysis, showing how media coverage casts an implicit bias, while providing a structure for Christians to view the news with hope and purpose.

The most common refrain in Genesis about God's creation of the world is that it was good. Down through the centuries, many people both inside and outside the Church have tried to say that the material world is less valuable or important than intangible inner truths. This has been one of the main talking points for the new sexual orthodoxy: telling hurting souls that their bodies are somehow wrong. Kathy Koch has worked for years to undermine this demeaning perception. In her talk at our recent Wilberforce Weekend, she reminded us about the wonderful intentionality in the way God "knitted" us together as male and female. For today's BreakPoint, here's a portion of Kathy's talk. I'm Kathy Koch of Celebrate Kids here in Fort Worth, and I want to talk with you about how God made us good. I think God is good and God is a good Creator. And if children, teens, or adults don't know that, then it doesn't matter to them that they're created in His image. In Psalm 139, verses 13 and 14 declare that we have been formed by God in our inward parts. It says in Psalm 139:13 that Father God knitted us together in our mother's womb. Knitting is a precise skill; the knitter knows before starting what he is making, or he'd better not start. Otherwise he'd have a mittens-scarf-hat-afghan sweater thing with no purpose at all. The size of the stitch and the needle, the color of the yarn, and the design of the creation is known before the knitter begins. Do we praise God? Because we're fearfully made? Do we stand in awe of ourselves now? We're not God. Fear in the Old Testament is fear of God. That we would have this awesome respect for the creation of who we are. The verse that revolutionized my understanding of God's creative intent is the end of Psalm 139:14 where David writes on behalf of God: My soul knows very well that I am a wonderful work of the creative intent of God. A fearfully and wonderfully creation made in His image. I have tremendous empathy for young people who live in confusion in a chaotic, messy culture. I believe that if I was young today being called "sir," I might wonder if I was supposed to be a boy. I have empathy for these kinds of teenagers and young adults. We are privileged at Celebrate Kids to talk with those who do not believe they were created good. They do not believe in a good Creator. They don't understand the image of God and it is not their fault. Generations of young people are trying to change what they should not try to change. And they're unwilling to work on the things they could work on because frankly, the adults around them are weak. God is good. Therefore he made me good because I'm in His image and He is fully good! So there's gotta be something here and I choose to not see it as wrong. I don't see it as a mistake. It is a challenge. I'm surrounded by great people and I'm loved well by God, and by people who love me deeply; without that I would question so much. So I'm not a too-tall-Kathy-with-a-low-voice-who-can't-spell-all-that-well mess of a person. I am who I am, created in the image of God, and He is good. What's your story? And what story are we helping young people who we love live? Kathy Koch is founder and president of Celebrate Kids, reminding the Church and the world of the goodness of our Creator and the enduring beauty of His creation. In her words, we see a path forward to loving—truly loving—our neighbors who struggle with gender dysphoria. As she argued, the new sexual orthodoxy encourages hurting young people to change what shouldn't be changed and discourages them from working on the things that they can work on. While giving lip service to the claim that people are perfect just as they are, our culture's fascination with expressive sexual identities leads proponents to argue that the only way we can be truly ourselves is through a radical rejection of our physicality.

Politics makes a terrible substitute for a complete, thoughtful worldview. "God has filled his world full of pleasures," wrote C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least. Sleeping, walking, eating and drinking. It's only when these things are twisted, Lewis argues, that they become sinful. Now, there used to be many things we could do all day long without other people minding in the least: eating fast food chicken for example, flying an American flag from your porch, rooting for a particular professional sports team or athlete, watching a certain TV network, or watching the other certain TV network. Today all of these things are politically loaded, as is so much of life in a culture that pretends that we can't know any real answers absolutely. To the deep, ultimate questions of life, we're still a culture searching for the answers. Of course, we're a people in need of answers. Instead of finding them in the Church or in something transcendent, our culture looks largely elsewhere. More and more we choose to find our answers in politics. I define politics here as more than just the process by which we decide how to govern. The way we understand politics today is more like a game, complete with teams—good guys, bad guys, opponents, fandom, celebrities. All of this is a problem. Politics isn't big enough to answer the questions that we're expecting it to. For starters, politics certainly doesn't tell us the truth about real people. It's common now to think that based on who a person voted for we know everything we need to know about them. And making the problem even worse is what we do with the assumptions we make about people based on who they voted for. It's common now to treat another person's politics as grounds for our acceptance and love for them, or to excuse, or dismiss, or deny their personhood. Or even hate them. Just a few weeks ago, a New York Times opinion writer argued that violent anti-Semitic attacks in the U. S. and abroad were problematic, not because people were being attacked, but because those attacks made it more politically difficult to criticize Israel. In this view, the victims of those attacks were pawns, not people. Just a few days after that, I shared a commentary from my friend Gerald McDermott on BreakPoint about President Biden's speech impediment. We received many positive comments about the commentary, but we also received many many negative ones from listeners asserting that we shouldn't give any cover whatsoever for Biden in any form. That Biden's terrible politics somehow excuses us from having to treat him with dignity and compassion. In this, too, he became a pawn, not a person. We have to note that a person with the right politics doesn't have any more human dignity or deserve our love any more than someone with the wrong politics. Our politics don't determine who we are. It's that we're made in the image and likeness of God. Our politics aren't what makes us human. It's who we were created to be that does. And of course, our politics don't tell us the full truth about ideas. Right now our government and public health experts around the world are trying to decide whether COVID-19 first leaked from a lab in China. That theory has been proposed all along—as early as last spring. But it was categorically dismissed by most of the world's media. Not based on any information, not based on any investigation, not based on any facts, but simply because President Trump said that it might be true. Because of his politics that was treated as proof that it wasn't true. And if we're being fair, many others thought that because President Trump said it, that was proof that it was true. It is culturally and personally dangerous to either unquestioningly accept or dismiss ideas merely because of their political context. Politics doesn't determine reality. And of course, politics can't tell us the whole truth about the world either. This should be perfectly obvious. Politics are powerfully shaped by cultural taste. What was politically unthinkable 10 years ago, for example giving sterilizing cross-sex hormones to a pre-teen, is nearly politically unquestionable today. In other words, politics is just as trendy as fashion is. It's certainly not any rock on which we can build our worldview or our ethics. Politics first and foremost is merely a process. It's a way to do things. It cannot give us the purpose of life. Our political views don't make us human so they shouldn't be the basis of determining who we are willing to do life with or are willing to forgive, or willing to learn from, or are willing to love. Having the right politics isn't the fullness of our calling as followers of Jesus any more than having the wrong ones is eternal condemnation. Our politics today is merely a show, a reality show that doesn't give us the reality about us, or about the world. And let's be honest, the show is getting embarrassing. On the other hand, the way of Jesus is abundant life, and it's not single-pixel, one-dimensional, or fake.

John and Shane field questions ranging from whose to blame for racism in institutions to rises in suicidal thoughts in teenagers. They also wrestle with a question on how to build a theology of being fired and what soft totalitarianism really is.

To paraphrase the author of Ecclesiastes, of the writing of "de-conversion" testimonies, there seems to be no end. In a somewhat recent innovation, many have embraced a different term for deconversion. It's common to hear something like, "I haven't lost or abandoned my lifelong Christian faith," I'm merely "deconstructing it." John Williamson, the host of the "Deconstructionists Podcast," defines this kind of "deconstruction" as "examining your faith from the inside looking for potential weaknesses." He likens the process to prepping a ship before it sails to make sure "it doesn't sink once you get out to sea." In and of itself, to self-examine faith is a good thing. The eleventh century Christian philosopher Anselm of Canterbury spoke of "faith seeking understanding," which is "an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God." Throughout the history of the church, this "deeper knowledge of God" has included a healthy regard for apologetics, and a willingness to ask and seek answers to the hard questions. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of "faith seeking understanding" that's going on in much of the "deconstruction" stories. According to Williamson, the process of deconstruction is also "about taking ownership over what you believe and potentially letting go of some of the things that no longer work." That kind of talk should set off alarms. In place of Anselm's deeper knowledge of God, human autonomy and personal ideas about what is best for us has moved to the center of our faith journey. The primary, and maybe even the sole, judge of what work works is us. Even worse, the criteria that determines whether beliefs or religious practice "works" is determined by us. All of which fails to take into account just how often our actual motives are hidden from ourselves. We may tell ourselves that we struggle with a particular reading of Genesis, while our doubts really lie in our ability to live up to Christianity's moral demands. Or, more to the point within the context of our culture's reframing of the highest goods, we may simply not like that we don't get to pick and choose what to believe. The sort "deconstruction" Williamson describes is more of a demolition. What remains is often a hollow shell of a faith, one lacking any external and fixed points of truth by which we can find orientation in a chaotic world. Legitimate evaluation and questioning doesn't have to take this ultimately destructive form. Christian faith not only allows, but encourages honest doubt. Faith and understanding mature as life is lived, and as we learn more of how to connect God's Word with this world, in humility and repentance. In fact, the Greek word rendered "repentance," metanoia, literally means to change your mind or perspective. While we may point to a time and place in which we came to faith, conversion continues as an ongoing process of seeing, understanding, and trusting God's purposes in ways we had previously missed. Paul described the process to the Corinthians when he said that, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways." Doubt is a constant companion for some of us, and take many forms. In many ways, intellectual doubts are the least difficult to deal with, in the face of doubts about God's goodness or the emotional struggles that accompany a particular difficult life situation. Throughout Scripture, God is revealed as One who meets people at the point of their confusion and doubt. Consider how he responded to Mary and Thomas. He silenced Zechariah's demanding spirit and rebuked Job's comforters' presumption. The Christian faith is big enough to honestly face the most difficult questions and the deepest despair. What's required of us, as Hebrews 11 says, is that we "believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek him." A wise mentor once pointed out how differently Proverbs describes seekers, those pursuing the truth and willing to reckon with it when they find it, and mockers, those cynical truth even exists and committed to their skepticism even if it hit them between the eyes. Get the approach right and ask all the questions you want. After all, God's big enough for the questions and the doubts. Get the approach wrong, and we won't be able to hear the answers that are there over the noise of the bulldozer we are taking to our faith.

One of the most important effects of embracing a deliberate, self-conscious Christian worldview, and losing the sacred-secular distinction so many Christians have absorbed from the world around us, is seeing the depth, the breadth, and the width of the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every sphere of life. Once we see life this way, our understanding of serving Jesus is radically re-shaped in light of the unassailable, undefeatable, and advancing Kingdom of God. Once Chuck Colson embraced that vision of the Christian life, he poured it into every single BreakPoint commentary, each and every day, desperate to help Christians think clearly about cultural issues and trends from a Christian worldview. And, during the last decade of his life, Colson decided that the best way He could advance this vision would be replication. That's why he invited Christians to study with him through what is now called the Colson Fellows Program. Inviting Christians to take a deep dive into Christian worldview over a ten-month course of study, trained and mentored by top Christian authors and thinkers, he saw class after class of Christians become the kind of culture-shaping leaders that could look at the world around them, effectively analyze, critique, and discern what was happening, and become catalysts of cultural influence and change for Jesus Christ. What makes the Colson Fellows Program so different and so vital is that it's not just an exercise in learning new things, as important as that is. Commissioned Colson Fellows are, well, commissioned. Because the training includes a teaching project, a three-year planning process, and self-inventory on who God has made them to be, they are able to apply a Christian worldview in real-world, practical ways. Here's how the program works: Those who are accepted learn how to articulate and defend biblical truth in the marketplace of ideas through intensive instruction on worldview and cultural analysis. They read both Christian classics and the best contemporary writers, many of whom they interact with on frequent webinars. Colson Center faculty includes folks such as Os Guinness, Joni Eareckson Tada, Dr. Glenn Sunshine, J. Warner Wallace, Jennifer Marshall, and Scott Klusendorf. And, in what may be the best part, Colson Fellows study together, either in one of 45 Regional Cohorts around the country or, for those with no local cohort available, through one of our Online Cohorts. So we have doctors and business professionals learning alongside of academics and lawyers, who are also learning alongside of pastors and educators. The cross-pollination of applied faith is rich, indeed. Those who complete the program join a network of more than 1,500 commissioned Colson Fellows, who have studied with us and are living out a deeper faith in a broken world. This network includes people like Colson Fellow Kristin Waggoner, one of the leading religious freedom attorneys in the nation, who represented Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips before the Supreme Court. In fact, my interview with Kristin about religious freedom in this age of coronavirus airs today on the BreakPoint podcast. Colson Fellows Program Director S. Michael Craven likes to say that as people study with the Colson Fellows, many have this moment of conversion. Serious-minded Christians who have been walking with the Lord for many years discover more clearly, some for the first time, that they are a part a much larger story—one that certainly includes, but goes beyond our personal salvation in Jesus Christ. Christians often say, "I've invited Jesus into my life," but the reality is that Jesus invites us into His life. His purpose. His restoring work in the world He created. To this life, His Life, we are invited to join Him in the work of making all things new. If you are stirred in heart and mind around this kind of faith, this kind of life, come to ColsonFellows.org to learn more. We respond to all inquiries and are happy to answer any questions you may have. We're taking applications now for next year's class of Colson Fellows.