About The Warrior Class
“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not be terrified or intimidated, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
– Joshua 1:9
Please check out our 6-minute video describing THE PROGRAM
In Luke 6:35-36 Jesus sets the tone. In it He tells us to love as He did – even when we encounter difficulty. Though, as Paul describes it in Ephesians 6:10-17, we are on a war footing against powers and principalities, our battle is not against flesh and blood.
Our every motivation should be to bless and pray for all those He places in our lives. This is especially true in the type of hostile environment that many colleges present. In so doing we pave the way for the true love and joy of the Lord to roll in and change hearts and minds. In the end we can be used by Him to change the atmosphere so that our college experiences can be sweet and fruitful on God’s terms – surrounded by His grace.
Sadly, “College” has become, in large measure, the place where nascent faith has gone to die. Studies differ but all seem to agree that a minimum of 70% of students arriving on campus with Christian leanings are overwhelmed and, challenged by peer pressure and the secular influence of their professors, lose their faith.
Instead of “lambs to the slaughter” faithful students need to be carefully prepared to not only “weather the storm” but also, and more especially, to challenge the prevailing mood of the academic world. In this way they are more likely to thrive and grow in their faith while influencing others to stand strong as they seek Godly wisdom and direction in the critically important time of exploration and learning that the “college” years represent.
Evidence of how far we have fallen, is exhibited by the mission statement of this nation’s first university, Harvard, published at its founding and based on John 17:3 and Proverbs 2:3. It reads as follows:
“Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisdom, let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seek it of him.”
Since that time, post secondary education in this nation has travelled far from its original high calling of preparing young people to become productive citizens and leaders based on a search for God’s wisdom.
For example, twenty years ago a major university Chaplain, Scotty McLennan, famously and sadly bragged that, while many students had arrived on his campus believing that the Bible was the inerrant word of God, by the time they had graduated they had been disabused of that notion.
The thesis of McLennan’s book, Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning, stands against the prospect of true deepening of Christian faith for late adolescents and young adults. Instead it celebrates the possibility of spiritual growth through eastern thought and a dismantling of the faith that brings eternal life.
Psalm 95:10 describes the current condition:
“For forty years I was angry with that generation; I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways.”
-Psalm 95:10
Though the pendulum has swung to the extreme side of “astray” God’s way is always to restore what the locust has eaten. The Warrior Class, we believe, is part of a major move of God to reclaim colleges for Christ.
In the movie “God’s Not Dead” a single student, isolated, threatened and marginalized by his professor and deserted by his “friends”, is called upon and used by God to refute the notion that “reason” had disqualified faith as a basis for learning.
The triumphant process that the good Lord used to see that claim defeated will be replicated in classrooms and in young hearts in colleges all over this nation. That is what this initiative is all about.