Hitting Close to Home

It never fails to amaze me how just one person can make such an incredible difference for the kingdom of God. Such a person is Nancy Fitzgerald. Many of you have heard me speak of Nancy before. She's the founder of Anchors Away Ministries, a worldview ministry to high school seniors that she started in her own basement in Indianapolis several years ago. Nancy developed a worldview curriculum drawing on several sources, including How Now Shall We Live? Ever since then, she has been using that curriculum to help high school seniors understand and defend their beliefs before heading to college. Now there is even more to the story. Nancy graduated from our Wilberforce Forum Centurion program, which trains Christian men and women around the country "to shape our culture by thinking, teaching, and advocating effectively the Christian worldview as applied to all of life." For her Centurions project, Nancy revised and updated the Anchors Away curriculum. And now she has held her first training session of more than one hundred people who are going to be teaching this course to kids, many of them in their own homes. The curriculum is simple, but it is anything but shallow. It is easy to learn and easy to teach. It is the kind of course that could help high school seniors all across America. And if you have been listening to some of our programs lately about how Christian teens are not being taught even the basics of their own belief systems, then you know just how badly tools like this are needed -- which is why we here at BreakPoint have been working hard on curriculum for youth. The first curriculum off the drawing board is one we have produced with Teen Mania, and it is a great curriculum for teens. I will be telling you more about this in the coming weeks. While our curriculum is for every teen, Nancy and Anchors Away is designed more to help seniors preparing for that critical step into college. Let me give you just one example of the kind of worldview thinkers that we are all trying to develop. Nancy told me the story of one college student who had been part of her Anchors Away program. When she got to college, she took a course on ethics, and a discussion came up about the Colberg-Heinz theory. She was told to participate in a discussion with other classmates on how they would choose four people to be eliminated from a hypothetical group, based, apparently, on their worth. This young woman said that, as a matter of conscience, she could not take part in the discussion. She got into a terrific confrontation with the professor, who told her he would flunk her in the course if she did not do it. But she held her ground. Something about her moral stance and her persistence intrigued her professor in spite of himself. He eventually gave her an A and asked her to explain her beliefs to the whole class. And yes, if you can imagine it, the professor, Nancy told me, has become a Christian. If we Christians were training more of our kids to think and to act this way, I believe our world would be a very different place. We at BreakPoint want to make that vision become a reality. Contact us here by phoning (1-877-322-5527) or by visiting our website (www.breakpoint.org) to find out how you can teach the Anchors Away curriculum to high school seniors in your neighborhood, or find out more about our new curriculum being produced with Teen Mania. You may discover, as Nancy did, that you, as one person, can make an amazing difference for Christ right where you live and on college campuses everywhere.

04/9/06