Saturday, July 07, 2012

One of my students, Kelly Schultz, gave me permission to share a letter she wrote to me this week thanking me for teaching her how to persuade others of the Biblical Christian worldview. She was one of 250 southern California high school juniors selected out of 1,500 applicants to be invited to attend the week long event. Out of the 250 students, one boy and one girl were selected to speak at the closing ceremony. She was selected as the girl speaker! She gave an amazing speech and received a standing ovation from the approximately 800 guests. Kelly is a great example of what happens when the truth gets into the mind of someone who is not only bright but passionate about the truth of the Bible, God’s Word. I was very blessed by this letter, I hope you are too!

Mr. Conover,

I know my mom has already emailed you about my camp experience but I wanted to personally thank you for your class and its impact in my life. At YCS, I got to discuss most everything I learned from you, it was almost like I was taking a pop quiz on the entire year. I half expected you to pop through the door and give me a grade on how well I was able to remember EVERY THING from your class!! I mean my focus group discussions covered everything from Mormonism, abortion, homosexuality, evolution, to premarital sex. The best part was that I was prepared for all of it!!! I am convinced that God knew what I was going to have to do at camp and He put you at Christian High specifically to prepare me for it. I had no idea what you were teaching was going to be so incredibly relevant and useful so soon!!

I mean, I knew eventually that I would be in a situation that I would need to defend my faith and discuss the issues we learned about, but I definitely didn’t think it would be at a camp this summer, which was actually really convenient because it was all fresh in my mind. I was the only Christian in my focus group, or at least until Friday when some other students came up and told me they were Christians too and they just didn’t want to speak up. At first I was angry that they sat quietly all week while I had to defend Christianity by myself. But then I realized that they didn’t have the information that I had or the confidence that I have gotten from my education. I noticed that these students I was with, even though they were the best from their school, (250 were chosen out of 1500 applicants) that they could not discuss or articulate what they believed. I have never been so thankful for my education because the difference between the average CHS student and the best from a public school is painfully obvious.

Our first focus group discussion was on homosexuality. A girl asked all the “religious people” to raise their hands, (I was the only one who did), and then she encouraged everyone to be very considerate of me in our discussion because she didn’t want me to feel attacked. I told her right then that I was prepared to discuss homosexuality, and that no one should go easy on me; they didn’t. At first they were all very hostile and confident, coming at me with arguments that you prepared me for, and once I was able to answer their arguments, (I kinda schooled them, with love) they decided they didn’t want to talk about it anymore and moved on to a less controversial topic… premarital sex. They were actually against it and wanted to do a presentation to the camp on abstinence. After they bounced around the topic for a little while I pulled out every single statistic that I learned in your class, like the number one indicator of poverty being the age a women begins to parent a child alone, etc. and they were all impressed and wanted to use all of it in the presentation. So the same girl turns to me and says, “So why don’t we use your information for our part of the presentation, and then you do a separate part on the religious view of premarital sex”.. I was sooooo angry!!! I felt like they were saying, “well since your religious you obviously can’t use fact to prove your point, so we will take all your evidence to make us sound good and you just quote the Bible because that’s all your allowed to talk about”. That’s when I explained to them my belief that you don’t have to separate God and logic because God created logic and that all the information I just gave them I had learned in my Bible class anyway. I wish you were there to see their jaws drop when I said that!! However, we ended up doing our presentation on peer pressure, which is a bummer because the other one would have been really good. But on the bright side, two of my friends from my focus group have contacted me about how they have started going to church.

My room mate for the week, after figuring out I was a Christian started asking me the strangest questions, such as where to buy a new testament because she only had a Bible, and what denomination should she pick if she didn’t want to be baptized, and how did she join “the path”, and if I believed in the flood myth and the “whole creation thing”. Her only religious experiences had been from mormons and she had tons of questions why Christians think that they were the only right religion. Basically, over the course of three nights I gave her the abbreviated ‘Mr. Conover’ crash course in religions and why the Bible is true. I mean I was talking about the hinduism, mormonism, missing links and the grand canyon, the whale bones found on the top of a mountain and the giant clam found in the desert. It was soooooo fun and she was so open to it!! I wished I had my binder from your class with me but all in all I think I got the basics down pretty well. She is now going to a local church

Anyway, I have a ton more stories, feel free to share any of this and take all the credit because I could not have done it with out your class. Thank you so much for what you teach, it has blessed CHS and myself so much!!!
Thank you, Kelly Schultz

If you or your child doesn’t know how to defend God’s Word logically and you would like to start getting educated, so you can begin presenting the evidence to a world desperately looking for the truth, sign up for one of our classes here.

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