Preaching: One of the critical things the church needs to be doing today is helping people to develop a Christian worldview—to learn to think Christianly. Do you have some counsel to pastors about ways they can help their own congregations to develop a Christian worldview as they are listening to sermons?

Colson: We truncate Christianity. We reduce it to something easy and manageable—it’s a relationship with Jesus, and that’s all the matters. I’ve got my relationship with Jesus, and you’ve got yours. It isn’t [easy and manageable]. It’s an overarching view of all reality. And therefore, as I quoted Kuyper earlier, every square inch in the whole dominion of human existence, He claims. So we’ve got to begin to see the whole world through a Christian lens.

I wrote a book called How Now Shall We Live? a number of years ago that takes those four questions and dissects them and shows how all other worldviews compare. I think if you read that book you’ll come away convinced that the biblical worldview is sound and makes sense. So pastors can introduce books like that. They can introduce The Truth Project, which is done by Focus on the Family—an excellent resource. They can enroll in one of our courses. Rick Warren and I did a wide-angle course on the biblical worldview. It’s sort of a shortened course in six sessions. We were the unlikely pair—me, the Ivy-educated, pin-stripe suit, blue blazer, and Rick with his Hawaiian shirt and no socks.

Preaching: Rick doesn’t own too many pin stripes.

Colson: No (laughter). We did a very good series that’s had a really good ministry—a good life. It’s being used in churches. We have Web sites at Breakpoint.org or Prisonfellowship.org. You can learn about what’s called The Wilberforce Forum, where we teach biblical worldview. We teach it on an annual basis to a hundred centurions. We’ve turned out 400 graduates so far, most of whom are teaching biblical worldview. So one thing a pastor could do is send somebody from his church to the Centurions Program and then tell them to come back and teach it in the church.

Pastors are very busy. I know the pressures that are on my pastor. But you can assign laypeople the task of reading these books, preparing themselves and equipping themselves and then set them up to be teachers inside the church.

Preaching: In addition to your own pastor, who are some of the preachers you enjoy hearing?

Colson: Oh my, I love to listen to Alistair Begg. He’s one of my favorites. Ravi Zacharias is wonderful. He’s more than a preacher. He’s an apologist. Charles Stanley is a magnificent preacher. I shouldn’t start the list because I’m going to leave out at least 20 people. Joe Stoll—who has just left a church in Chicago and gone over to Cornerstone—is one of the great preachers in America. He’s one of the most articulate defenders of the faith. We’ve got really a great cadre of frontline preachers across America.

Preaching: Do you have any words of counsel to pastors out of your own experience, out of the work you’ve done?

Colson: The principle thing I have to say to them—but you’d also have to say it to their lay-leadership—is to worry more about spiritual depth than church growth. There’s too much recruitment going on just to get people in the church. And I think pastors most often suffer because they’re under pressure from their own leadership, their deacons and elders. It’s the people who want the biggest church in town more than the pastor. So I would simply say: focus on making disciples, transforming them.

Bill Hybels announced recently that he had failed over all the years of the Willow Creek movement because they hadn’t made disciples. They had brought people into the church, but they hadn’t been transformed. It was a very courageous thing he did. He’s using my new book, The Faith, to catechize his congregations. Rick Warren is emphatic about the need for discipleship and deepening faith and small groups, study groups.

I think there’s a real sense of unease in the church today that we’ve got lots of numbers, but we don’t have people who are really change agents and who are really witnesses of transformed lives. One thing we’ve done at Prison Fellowship is we’ve redone our vision, mission and values statements to reflect not just reaching as many people in the prison with the gospel as we can but to really make disciples—to see them become transformed.

Transformational discipleship is a buzzword that I would love to see the church pick up. My advice to any pastor would be to work on spiritual depth. Growth will come, but depth has to be the most important thing.