Colson’s Centurions program inspires Floridians to become cultural ‘change-agents’

Feb 24, 2009
CAROLYN NICHOLS
Newswriter

Chuck Colson (left) & Gary Johnson

Jacksonville (FBW)—Florida Baptists are among the graduates of a program designed by Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, to equip men and women to understand and express a biblical worldview. According to a recent BreakPoint commentary, Colson hopes Centurion graduates become “a veritable movement of cultural change-agents.”

According to BreakPoint.org, Colson began the Centurions Program in 2004 to “equip serious Christians to become change-agents to strengthen the Church and, in turn, the culture for generations to come.”

The Centurion Program now claims 500 graduates who have completed a 16-book reading list, participated in weekly teleconferences, and attended three weekend conferences in Washington, D.C. during the one-year term.

Gary Johnson, director of missions of the Miami Baptist Association and a recent Centurion graduate, told Florida Baptist Witness he enlisted in the program after seeing an ad in World Magazine and sensing a need “to be pushed in my personal study.”

The Centurion Program requirements nudged Johnson out of his comfort zone, he said, by forcing him to read “things I probably would not have picked up on my own.” These books included Cornelius Plantinga’s Not the Way It’s Supposed to be: A Breviary of Sin; Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue by Robert Johnston; and What We Can’t Not Know by J. Budziszewski.

Movies on the course syllabus included the expected “Amazing Grace,” the biopic of William Wilberforce, and the unexpected, “The Matrix” and “Life is Beautiful.” Program participants were asked to delineate the worldviews of the authors, and compare and contrast them with a biblical worldview.

Johnson, a 1980 Luther Rice Seminary graduate, said Centurion conference speakers were “more academic” than he was accustomed to, “challenging and excellent without exception.”

Each centurion graduate is required to design and carry out a project that teaches others to articulate a Christian worldview and also “engage and shape the culture at every level,” Colson said on BreakPoint. Johnson wrote a ten-session course on the importance of a biblical worldview. Johnson taught the course, written to target a young adult audience, during a weekend at Jubilee Community Church in Miami.

Patricia Webb, a member of Ancient City Baptist Church in St. Augustine, also wrote a course of study as her Centurion project. Webb taught “Politics and Christian Faith” on the four Thursday evenings preceding the November 2008 elections. Fourteen participants from several denominations received a DVD of the course that Webb hopes will enable them to facilitate groups of their own. Webb’s group will reunite in the spring to further evaluate biblical worldview and culture, she said.

“We need to know how to recognize the clash of worldviews, and how we accept these things into our lives without realizing it,” she said. “I wanted to peel off the layers so I could see how things influence culture.”

Webb, who holds an MDiv from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, is academic dean of St. Augustine Bible Institute and College, and also teaches Family and Consumer Science at Lake Asbury Junior High School in Clay County. She heard about the Centurion Program on a BreakPoint broadcast.

Susan Thielke, also a recent Centurion graduate, learned about the program from her pastor, Frank Ellis of King’s Baptist Church in Vero Beach. The self-described entrepreneur retired in 2000 to Florida after a career as an executive with Pan American Airlines, and as owner of a real estate company in Long Island, N.Y.

Thielke introduced Ellis to Focus on the Family’s Truth Project, which also teaches the need for a Christian worldview. With Ellis’ approval, Thielke taught the 12-week course to 14 church leaders, who then taught the course to other small groups. With dozens of trained leaders, the church promoted the Truth Project with the hopes of 300 attending; 400 came.

“At the end of the Truth Project, the question is asked, ‘Where do you go from here?’” Thielke said. “Frank said to me, ‘Why don’t you apply to be a Centurion?’”

Thielke, who also studied apologetics at Liberty University, chose to start a company that will produce videos, music and drama with a Christian worldview, Framework Production Inc, www.frameworkproductions.com. Her first challenge is to raise the required $35,000 in a gloomy economic environment. “My corporate background gives me the chops to do that, although I didn’t know the economy was going to tank,” she said. “Maybe God wants to slow things down so that I can read more books.”

When interviewed, Thielke was deep into Frank Burch Brown’s Good Taste, Bad Taste and Christian Taste. Envisioning a production company, she broadened her reading list to include books that applied to her area of interest, she said. Meanwhile, Thielke is pursuing producing a video “marrying” William Cowper’s poem, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” the music of musician Kelley Coppage, and video footage of U.S. Airways Flight 1549’s landing in New York’s Hudson River.

Along with the required reading of the Centurion Program, the conference speakers—”the best apologists in the country”—proved to be surprisingly accessible by e-mail for her questions, and they inspired her project.

“I would not be thinking about a production company if it weren’t for the Centurion Program,” she said. “I am hoping the contacts I made there will open doors to help in this ministry.”

An application for the 2010 class is available in Sept. at www.breakpoint.org.

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