Not far from Guatemala City is Central America’s biggest landfill, known as “The Dump.” There, some 6,500 children wake up each morning beneath cardboard and corrugated metal. There’s no running water, and their first job of the day is to scavenge for food and anything they can resell. They are the survivors of nearly four decades of a civil war that destroyed farming villages.
Into this nightmare stepped Edgar Guitz, who in 2016 became the first Latin American to become a Colson Fellow. His participation in the Colson Fellows Program gave him the worldview foundation he needed to begin a ministry for these children: orphans, kids with mental or physical disabilities, the abused and the abandoned, the desperate and defeated.
Edgar had already spent 25 years working in the “scavenger community,” but in 2016, he says, “The Lord put it in my heart to launch Generation to Generation Network. I understood from the Lord that this is my new and expanded personal calling.”
Generation to Generation provides education, health care, and community support services to the poorest of the poor. Among those Edgar has influenced is Bilsan Ramirez, a 24-year-old man who has mobilized 70 volunteers to serve 1,500 children. Edgar calls him “a young leader of the next generation.”
The content of the Colson Fellows Program gave Edgar all the necessary elements for this new ministry from the Christian worldview perspective. This was very important, Edgar says, “Since I don’t have formal training in theology.”
Colson Fellows develop a personal three-year plan, using their unique gifts to pursue Christian worldview in their communities. Generation to Generation Network became Edgar’s project. He has also passed on his worldview training to 10 other partner ministries.
The world often ignores these desperately poor children or sees them as not worth helping. But Edgar knows these children are made in the image of God, and we’re called to serve them as we would Jesus Himself.
I hope Edgar’s story will inspire you to consider becoming a Colson Fellow yourself—where you will spend nine months in a structured study program about worldview. You’ll share ideas, experiences, and fellowship in an online forum. And you’ll attend three weekend residencies in Phoenix, Colorado Springs, and the DC area, with worldview leaders like Glenn Sunshine, Joni Eareckson Tada, Sean McDowell, and Jim Daly.
If you think you don’t have time for such a program, know that the Colson Fellows Program is specially designed for busy people. At the end of nine months, you’ll know how to explain and contrast the Christian worldview to other worldviews in a winsome way.
And like Edgar, you’ll develop a program that allows you to share your worldview training with others. Chuck Colson, who founded this program, did so, as he put it, “to equip serious Christians to think seriously about all of life’s issues and to become change agents to strengthen the church and in turn the culture for generations to come.”
The Colson Fellows Program is an intense but deeply rewarding experience. But once you complete it, you will be on the front lines of Christian ministry and influence. The program has equipped some 1,200 people to influence areas of law, family, the arts and sciences, medicine and government.
Please come to ColsonFellows.org to learn more. Applications are due on May 31 for the nine-month program beginning in August.
I’ll be there, and I hope you will be, too, learning how God can use you to redeem your own community and put together an action plan for kingdom work.
BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life. Begun by Chuck Colson in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print. Today BreakPoint commentaries, co-hosted by Eric Metaxas and John Stonestreet, air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Feel free to contact us at BreakPoint.org where you can read and search answers to common questions.
Eric Metaxas is a co-host of BreakPoint Radio and a best-selling author whose biographies, children's books, and popular apologetics have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Publication date: February 20, 2018
