“This will take awhile if I go in this direction,” he said.

“I have time,” I said.

And then he pulled the pin on the grenade: “Well, [college-age son] came to us a few months ago and told us he was tired of fighting it—he wanted us to know that he was coming out as gay, and he intended to start openly living as a gay man.”

More often than we’d like to admit, our students are learning almost everything they know about the Bible, Jesus, and the gospel through secondhand sources. They need direct experiences with God, but they’re getting filtered rumors of him instead. Here’s how we’ve moved our teaching strategy from secondhand to firsthand.

Most of my ministry pals want to be on the “cutting edge”—blazing trails, multiplying effectiveness, and awakening fresh faithfulness. In the words of hockey great Wayne Gretzky, they want to “skate to where the puck is going to be.”

PDF download.