Worldview ministries prescribe proper thought, belief, action
Charles Colson was President Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man” and “evil genius,” and the first aide imprisoned for Watergate-related crimes. He converted 50 years ago after reading C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity,” was released in 1975 and the next year started Prison Fellowship, now a $61 million international ministry.
In 1991, he founded Colson Center for Christian Worldview, now a $7 million ministry with its office on the Focus on the Family campus in Colorado Springs.
What’s your worldview — your understanding of the world and how it works? Everybody has one, claim the dozens of Christian worldview ministries, which give young people training in the foundations of proper thought and behavior. The Colson Center is one of four such ministries in the Pikes Peak region.
While they differ in their approaches, they share a passion for apologetics and conservative political activism.
While popular, worldview training has its critics, including evangelical satirist Joel Kilpatrick, whose “A Field Guide to Evangelicals and Their Habitat” said the purpose of such training is “to dispense with contradictory ideas with as little thought as possible.”
Worldview also informs voting. Christian pollster George Barna said that “nobody is going to confuse Donald Trump with Jesus Christ,” but Christian conservatives “believe that the Trump portfolio of policy positions much better reflects the biblical worldview.”
Summit Ministries: The $13.5 million ministry calls itself “America’s leading organization equipping young adults” and has hosted some 45,000 teens in its summer sessions since 1962. Sessions contrast Christianity with five “counterfeit” worldviews: Islam, secularism, Marxism, new spirituality and postmodernism.
Its Bible curriculum is used by 600 Christian schools serving 60,000 students, as well as home-schoolers. And “in response to ongoing cultural upheaval,” Summit also has partnered with Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council, which was started by Focus founder James Dobson, to create a study series for FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview. “How We Live” explores reality, truth, identity and society. “Proper thought drives proper practice and belief,” a Summit news release said.
Jeff Myers, a Summit alumnus, is the ministry’s president. He says a biblical worldview starts with these foundational truths: 1. God exists. 2. Reality is real. 3. Truth is knowable. 4. Jesus is the truth.
“If someone is using the human faculty of reason in a coherent way with God’s revealed word, then they’re doing the work of biblical worldview thinking,” he said.
“A worldview is a pattern of ideas,” Myers said. “What you believe about God will determine what you believe about the nature of reality itself. What you believe about reality will have a strong impact on what you believe is right or wrong, which affects how you see everything, from the value of life to how economic systems and political systems are formed to how people become mentally healthy and form healthy societies.”
Summit alumni include Michele Bachmann, the former congresswoman who attended an adult conference and now leads the law school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, Michael Porter Jr. of the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, “Blue Like Jazz” author Donald Miller, anti-abortion activist Lila Rose and Colson Center President John Stonestreet. Summit once claimed that 95% of its alumni remain active in church into adulthood.
Colson Center for Christian Worldview: The center emerged from the Centurions, a group of hundreds who Colson mentored until his death in 2012, and works “to equip Christians with the clarity, confidence and courage they need to live like Christians in this cultural moment.” The center declined to answer questions for this article.
Stonestreet joined the staff in 2010 and was named president in 2015. He graduated from Bryan College, which was founded in Dayton, Tenn., after the 1925 Scopes evolution trial. He later earned a degree in Christian thought from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and has become a go-to expert and popular speaker on worldview issues.
The center’s 2023 conference featured Myers, Colson’s daughter Emily and a representative of Alliance Defending Freedom, a Focus-aligned Christian legal group setting precedents through Supreme Court rulings on abortion and LGBTQ rights. Sessions covered leadership, food, spirituality and health, God’s creation of the cosmos, abortion, work, family, fatherhood and “How to implement a worldview discussion in the classroom.”
The center created a worldview program that Christian school teachers can use for their professional development. Stonestreet has said the program is designed so that “school leaders will be equipped to teach and disciple students to love God and their neighbors more.”
The center also alerts its constituents to legislation on issues such as abortion and transgenderism and occasionally asks them to call elected representatives.
Biblical Worldview at Charis Bible College: “Worldview is what we believe,” said Alex McFarland, who directs the Biblical Worldview courses at Andrew Wommack’s Charis Bible College in Woodland Park. “Apologetics is why we believe and how we present, explain and defend the faith.”
He says Young Earth Creationism “is essential to a Christian worldview.” This view, based on a literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2, says God created the cosmos and everything in it in six 24-hour days, meaning the cosmos is less than 10,000 years old.
McFarland started studying worldview as a new convert and college student who grew troubled when friends questioned his belief in Jesus, the existence of God and the seven-day creation account found in the Old Testament. He says the argument for worldview and apologetics is stated in two biblical passages:
“See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy” (Colossians 2:8 NIV); and “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15b NIV).
At Charis, worldview offerings are based upon Wommack’s belief that America was founded as a Christian country and needs to reclaim that heritage through “the Seven Mountains of Influence,” which argues that Christians should rule in all areas of life, including government, business and the arts.
“We’re in a battle of worldviews,” McFarland said. “If this subject were talked about more, we could save America.”
Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project: Focus’ primary worldview project is a 14-hour video series for churches and schools that offers a biblical perspective on truth, science, theology, anthropology, history, sociology and labor relations.
The series sees the world as engaged in a cosmic battle between competing worldviews: Christianity and atheistic naturalism. It also claims that scientists know deep down that humans did not evolve from lower forms of life but intentionally twist the truth: “Fallen man ignores the plain evidence of objective scientific inquiry and promotes the atheistic philosophy of evolutionary theory primarily because he is determined to do as he pleases without answering to a higher authority.”
The Truth Project promotes American exceptionalism as a biblical value. A session on “The American Experiment” says: “Here on these shores, and here alone, people with a strong Christian worldview have been afforded an unparalleled opportunity to create from scratch what they considered an ideal system of government.”
Summit Ministries in Manitou Springs. “What you believe about God will determine what you believe about the nature of reality itself,” says Summit Ministries’ president.
ABOVE: Andrew Wommack Ministries operates Charis Bible College in Woodland Park.
LEFT: Focus on the Family’s headquarters in Colorado Springs. Focus’ primary worldview project is a 14-hour video series for churches and schools that offers a biblical perspective on truth, science, theology, anthropology, history, sociology and labor relations.
