Summit Ministries

Blogs: The View from Here

October 8, 2008

Producing Vision - some ideas...

I have become a fan of what is happening at Prestonwood Christian Academy. Why? Well, first, we have had some of their grads at our summer conferences.  One of those graduates, Bryce Taylor, is a sophomore philosophy student at Yale. However, he is not just a student, he is engaged in actively living out and proclaiming the Christian worldview on that Ivy League campus. Check out his latest adventure with the Yale Daily News here. And, don't miss the article he wrote as a freshman here.

This is the sort of grads Prestonwood, and Summit, is seeking to produce.  Students who realize that Christianity gives us more than a way out of this world - it gives us a vision for active engagement with, influence over, and transformation of it.  

Unfortunately, many times Christian students get the impression that we are merely saved from, and not to.  They miss the "re" part of the salvation words that sprinkle the Scriptures: renew, regenerate, reconcile, redeem, etc.  They miss that Christ not only came to save us from death, he came to save us to life - and abundant life at that! 

This, of course, is a central reason for the comfort level so many "Millennials" (and X'ers too) have with living duplicitous lives. Happy to claim Christ, but live as if He is irrelevant; committed that Jesus is their Savior, but uncomfortable with concepts like truth and morality and absolutes. It's all very Seinfeld-ish actually: life is a series of disconnected episodes with no flow or story line or consistency.  Proverbs warning is clear: "When there is no vision, the people cast off restraint."

What's the answer?  Larry Taylor and Dan Panetti at Prestonwood get it: give students a vision of how the faith they have makes sense of the world.  Push students out - teach them to engage ideas and social issues, challenge them, etc. Through their Student Leadership Institute they are doing this.  And, they can teach you to do it, too, through their conferences and training seminars designed for other Christian schools and organizations. FInd more about it here. 

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