The Three A's of the Abbey

As the summer is nigh upon us, I have been thinking about what exactly I want to speak to parents about this summer with regard to our program. Our team from the Abbey is in full promotion mode at camps over the next seven weeks, and I wanted a compelling way to say our story in a way that was both memorable and concise. The following is what I came up with. I would love to hear any feedback from you who have heard about our program. If you want to share a link of this without this commentary at the top, thank you in advance, and please do it from our Abbey blog! 

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At Worldview’s Bridge Year Program, we really want to impress on students and have them take away three primary things from our program:

1.     To apprehend their faith. The word apprehend has two meanings, both of which are extremely applicable to the Bridge Year. The first meaning is: “To take hold, or to arrest.” We teach using the Socratic method, which means that the classroom is driven by dialogue and questions and answers rather than a monologue of lectures. Because of this, students have to prepare ahead of class in order to do well academically, which teaches initiative and responsibility for studies.

The second meaning of apprehend is: “To understand or comprehend.” We use classical literature for our reading, and our curriculum constantly revolves around examining the foundations of the concepts being dealt with, the biblical understanding of the subject, and the consequences of those foundations on modern society. We want to create students who understand the roots of order and civilization, so that they can better identify the worldviews found in our culture and provide an answer to them with truth and grace.

2.     To apply their faith. If students grow in academic and intellectual knowledge but miss out on the practical difference that makes in their lives, we consider ourselves to have failed. Our students participate in formulating their own evangelism tools, synthesizing their own biblically correct zoo and museum tours (courtesy of Bill Jack), and participate in numerous hands-on leadership practicums such as a camping trip, rafting trip, and high ropes course where the concepts they are learning in class have the opportunity to be implemented in real-life scenarios.

On top of these, we require students to have a certain number of community involvement hours per week. We call it community involvement very intentionally because we don’t want students to segregate doing evangelism and being in an everyday community, but rather our goal is for them is to go into the community and make friends with people who may not be believers. Doing this allows them to put a face and name with a different worldview than their own, which brings the element of compassion to what they are learning.

3.     To articulate their faith. In this present culture, our safe areas in Christianity are shrinking, and more and more as we identify ourselves as Christian we will be viewed as bigoted, judgmental, and close-minded. We want to train up leaders who not only apply the Christian faith to their lives, but can speak eloquently, persuasively, and coherently on what Christianity is and the practical consequences it has on our lives. It is vital that we stand firm on our beliefs about abortion and homosexuality, but beyond standing firm, we want to speak as to why we hold those beliefs in such a way that communicates care and love for those around us. We believe that Christianity has consequences not only for the future life but for this present one, and we want to train leaders who can stand, lead, and give a consistent defense of their faith in truth and grace.

As 2 Corinthians 10 reminds us, we wage a war against ideas and lofty arguments that set themselves up against the truth of God, and whomever it is in the next generation who can speak well to give an answer to the questions of society will lead the culture – and that is what we’re doing at Worldview Academy’s Bridge Year.

When I was a freshman in college I was in a Psychology 101 class, and the professor stood up on my second day of class and stated that there wasn’t room in her classroom for religion.

I had been to Worldview Academy at that point for multiple years, and I knew she was wrong, and I had learned to identify that a statement like that was as close-minded as she thought that I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the answer; I had it from camp. What I didn’t have was experience; prolonged practice of being put in situations where I knew in a situation like that what to say and how to say it.

That is why I view this program as so important. I want every student who comes through our program, if they are ever faced with a situation like that at college, in the workplace, or in the public square, to know how to stand and speak in that moment. This program will routinely and methodically put students in a place of pressure so that when opposition comes, it will not be as if something strange is happening, and it will not be the first time they have pushed themselves to stand.

That is our vision. I hope you will consider us for your future.

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Please pray for us this summer. Staff teams are on the road currently, and camp kicks off tomorrow! 

Two Weeks Left

Time has absolutely flown this spring. I can’t believe my last update to you all was in January. I can’t believe we have less than two weeks left in our semester. I can’t believe I’m about to be packing up my room for the summer.

Since Spring Break, life has been pretty consistent at the Abbey, with of few notable exceptions. The weeks have involved meetings with students, teaching twice a week, guy’s Bible study on Thursdays, attempting to do marketing via Facebook, Youtube, and our blog,  and answering calls on application and admissions questions. The exceptions have been a couple weeks ago when I had the opportunity to go teach at Teenpact in a role where I was the responsible adult on the team (imagine!) and had the opportunity to teach some evening sessions, and this past week when Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, came to visit.

Looking forward to the summer, it doesn’t look like things will be slowing down too much! I will be travelling with Worldview this summer, but my job will be solely to represent the Abbey at the different camps and network with faculty members as well as administrators on the different campuses we will be on to get our students college credit. Right now the plan is to go to Illinois, Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. If you are around our camp locations in those states, I would love to meet up with you during the week and catch up! Shoot me a call or an email, and we can see if we can make it happen.

It has been an incredible year. I have learned so much about relationships, management, marketing, and finances that I will have the opportunity to apply and improve upon next year, and I think they will be lessons that I will take with me for the rest of my life.

Please be in prayer for us.

Our hope is to have 24 students next year, and which is twice the size of our student body this year! Please pray that God would bring us students who would be good for our program, and that God would grant wisdom and a willingness to risk for our vision to students who would be considering us. 

Please pray also for our finances. With 24 students, we are considering buying a 15 passenger van to transport students and gear on our various trips, we are hoping to pay our faculty members next year instead of having them only on support, and we had an extremely minimal marketing budget this year that we would like to expand on, and we can’t do any of this without students or donors who catch our vision and want to be a part of what we are doing.

Thank you so much. I know you have kept my team and me in your prayers for the last year, and I know we wouldn’t be where we are without the prayers of the faithful.

A great way to keep up with me over the summer besides just this blog would be to check out our Abbey blog and our Facebook page, where we will be posting updates on our events, recordings of Worldview Faculty lectures and interviews, and devotions that we run across that we think would encourage our followers.

Thank you again, and hopefully I will see you soon!  

Devo: Finishing Well

Students have 7 weeks until the end of the semester starting today, and as a result I thought a devotional on the subject would be appropriate!

Hello friends! Here is a brief video of some of the fun that we have had at the Abbey this past fall and some of the things I have been working on in my spare time!

First Semester Down!

Friends,

The first semester has come and gone! It is hard to believe that we’ve made it through the first semester, and that we are half way done with our first year with Worldview at the Abbey. The semester in review has been a huge opportunity for growth, learning, new relationships, adjustments on the fly, and grace, grace, and more grace.

Since my last update Thanksgiving has come and gone, and then students finished up their last several weeks of work. Finals per usual were stressful for everyone, but Hannah and I worked to create a few stress relievers intermittently, including a Christmas party, a pumpkin smashing escapade, and ice cream snacks.

The class that Hannah and I have been teaching finished well too. Students presented a paper on their top 3-5 vocations, the research for which included salary levels, interviews with people currently in those vocations, and degrees or recommended qualifications to get to that career. The writing guideline can be found here. Hannah and I are using the prompts and guidelines that we put together this semester to form a more comprehensive curriculum for next year already, and I’m hopeful that these lessons can be formatted to share with any Worldview Academy student who is interested in answering the question of what vocation to pursue.

Christmas has brought a welcome break for our team and for me a pretty hectic travel schedule to visit friends and supporters in the next several weeks. This week has involved being with my entire family under one roof (which hasn’t happened for over a year), and the coming 2 weeks include traveling in a loop across Texas to see friends that I haven’t seen since I left for Colorado.

I will hopefully be back in Canon City on January 4^th, will be picking students up on the 6^th, and will begin my first day of teaching economics on the 7^th! I am incredibly blessed and excited to have the opportunity to use my passion for entrepreneurship and background in finance to teach students this semester, and I can’t wait to get started. In preparation for class I have been going through a curriculum that our Provost, Jeff Baldwin, has used before, but much of the introductory concepts are being formulated by me from resources from my college days in finance. For a list of books we will be getting through this semester, checkout the syllabus on our website.

Please keep my team and me in your prayers this Christmas season! Everyone is either traveling or having relatives visit them, which is absolutely enjoyable, but as I’m sure you understand, sometimes not very restful. Please pray that we would be rejuvenated in Christ and will be ready to return to a new semester.

Please also keep our spring semester in your prayers, as we have much work ahead of us, and I anticipate being very busy. We are hoping to find 24 students for our class next year, so pray that the Lord would send students our way who will be serious about their education and about growing in the Lord. We will definitely be trying to come up with ways to get our name out in the spring, but in the end we recognize that it will be the Lord who will bring students and parents our way that are willing to trust us with two semesters of their lives. If you know if anyone who would be interested in our program, please point them to our site, or encourage them to come visit us! 

All in all, this semester has been enjoyable, challenging, and full of grace. I absolutely love the team I have been working with, and we have seen progress in students and in the program. Thank you for your faithful support, both financially and in prayer. We must be with both as we continue to move forward and seek to grow this program, and we wouldn’t be here without you. 

Below are a few pictures of some of our adventures from the semester! 

Student Vocation Research Assignment

Supporters,

I wanted to give you a snapshot of the personal development class that my coworker Hannah Hall and I have been teaching on Fridays. So far the class has included personality and spiritual gifts tests, 20 minute speeches on who they are, time management seminars, interview tips, and this assignment.

Their final assignment for this semester is a research paper on 3-5 vocations of their choosing and includes interviewing people in those fields, finding out what average salaries are, and what job paths and degrees are common to their career of choice. Our goal through assigning this is to help give students direction on what they will be wanting to do after graduating out program so that they will spend less time in undeclared majors or floating between majors and careers because they don't know what they want or didn't realize what they were getting into. Feel free to read through this rubric to get a feel for the assignment!

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Devotion: Wage War

Wage war

Life will be War:

Throughout scripture, and particularly in the New Testament, we find the Christian life compared to warfare, and we are told to make war on our sin and against the world.

Colossians 3:5
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Hebrews 12:12 (Bonus – Read verses 1-12)
Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

2 Timothy 2:3-5
Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. 

We know though that where radical muslims and Christians many years ago took this literally, Scripture clearly states that this should not be how our war is waged.

1 Peter 3:15

but in your hears honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. 

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete. 

Ephesians 6:10-12 (Bonus - read through verse 17)

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestly against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 

Mark 1, Luke 4

·      After Jesus is tempted, he sets the stage for his ministry. First he speaks in the synagogues, then heals, then casts out a demon. Right away he establishes that the order he will bring is not the military power that the Jews had been looking for.

We must train:

Worldview Faculty member Dell Cook works at a Christian school in North Carolina, and he also coaches football there. During my first summer on staff with Worldview, I asked him why he coached, as I knew it took up a lot of time to be good at it, and I knew Dell wasn’t someone to spend time like that without forethought. He replied by saying that he taught football because it taught young men principles of war. Students needed to know that in life there are some things that aren’t going to be handed to you, and that you will have to fight for with everything that you have because not everyone will win. Football teaches them that there are some things in life that you fight for, and you train for. That there undertakings which are insurmountable when you start, but by training, discipline, and teamwork you can accomplish greater things that you ever could on your own. And there are things you can’t expect, but you can train to be the sort of person that overcomes.

Application:

·      Are you waging war? Are you taking steps in your life to actively combat sin and grow closer to Jesus?

·      How does scripture say that we overcome our sin? What is needed in order to do that?

·      Are you seeking to listen to the Holy Spirit and then act on those convictions? What is one way you did that this week?

·      Are you doing things that uphold and reinforce the fruits of the spirit?

Our tendency is to make a list of do’s and don’ts, but the important thing to remember is that growing in the Christian walk is more closely affiliated with who we become in honor, integrity, and the fruits of the spirit rather than having a checklist or numerous boundaries that keep us “safe” but never force us to think or trust in the daily provision of Christ. 

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This is a devotional that I lead with students this past week at Worldview at the Abbey. Students participate in daily devotionals usually lead by local pastors or leaders within the community that I sometimes have the opportunity to fill in for. I hope this can be an encouragement to you all.