Before he became a radio host, before he started up Prison Fellowship, and before he worked in the Nixon White House, Chuck Colson was a United States Marine. Chuck took the Marines’ can-do attitude into everything he did—including his design of a culture and worldview thinking course called the Colson Fellows Program.
In effect, if you complete this tough, nine-month long program, you will step out on the cultural stage as a worldview Marine.
How does it work? Well, I’m glad you asked.
Every year, people from around the country apply for the program, and we pick over 100 of them who are eager to learn how to articulate and defend biblical truth in the marketplace of ideas. We spend the next nine months putting them through worldview and culture boot camp. They study Christian classics and the best of contemporary writers. They watch films and debates, deepening their understanding of culture, and learning to identify the worldview messages in everything they read or watch.
Colson Fellows also take part in bi-monthly webinars with Christian worldview speakers like John Stonestreet, Os Guinness, Sean McDowell, Nabeel Qureshi, and Joni Earackson Tada. Three times, you will join other Fellows in weekend residencies in Colorado Springs, Orlando, and Washington, DC, to meet one another and learn directly from great worldview teachers. And you’ll develop your own plan that will allow you to use your gifts and what you’ve learned for the benefit of others.
So, who becomes a Colson Fellow?
Professors. Homemakers. Filmmakers. Teachers. Lawmakers. Businessmen. University Presidents. College students. Ministers. They come from all over the world. People like my friend Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, and Gabe Lyons, another friend, author and founder of “Q” ideas.
Christians come from as far away as New Zealand to join the program. After completing the program, Darren Ho, a businessman in Shanghai, designed a Workplace Initiative to help other expatriates integrate their vocation and faith to better serve their organizations—and in the process be a witness for Christ in China.
And Paige Fischer, a culture manager at a pediatric rehab center, also became a Colson Fellow. Paige recently told us that the Colson Fellows Program “has helped me to re-ignite my passion for a world that desperately needs hope. My church has really come behind me recently and is allowing me the opportunity to teach Virtual Axis, [beginning] with the topic of Gender.”
Another Colson Fellow, Chuck Lia, says the program “deepened, reshaped, and expanded my vision of how I could use my work as a coach and mentor to help young teenagers . . . The curriculum is comprehensive, the instructors truly outstanding, and the Colson Fellows themselves a terrific group across the board.”
Yes, the Colson Fellows Program is demanding. But God will use it to prepare you for frontline Kingdom work. This was Chuck Colson’s great goal in the final years of his life: to teach people how to think Christianly about our fallen world, and to use their gifts to begin the repairing the damage in their own neighborhoods and communities.
If you are interested in learning more about the Colson Fellows Program, please visit www.colsonfellows.org. I encourage you to check it out. If you think you have what it takes, fill out an application form. By the way, to make the program even more accessible and affordable, we now actually have regional Colson Fellows Programs in about ten cities around the country.
As a worldview Marine, you will have a role in building up and healing our broken culture. So I really do hope you’ll apply.
Within nine months, you, too, for Christ and His Kingdom, will become one of the few, the proud—well, actually the humble—the Colson Fellows.
Semper fi and Ooorah!
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 6, 2017