Summit Ministries 2012

The last two weeks, I had the opportunity to attend classes at Summit Ministries with my little junior class after school got out. At first, I wasn't quite sure that I'd like it at all, and I was actually really worried. This was mostly due to the fact I have 4S, but I was put on anti-anxiety medication before going, so it actually ran quite smoothly. Nice for a change, right?

The basic goal of Summit is to equip young Christians with the ability to think clearly and defend their faith in a way which the world can see as, well, intelligent. So often, kids my age get into discussions and they realize that they actually have no idea why they believe what they believe, so this ministry puts kids in classrooms for nine hours a day for two weeks so they can learn about how the world works and what we can make of it. We were put boy/girl/boy/girl according to age in several rows of desks and were given a honking huge binder to fill with notes on what we were learning. There were one hundred and seventy pages.

First and foremost, we were taught about worldviews. We learned that culture is the result of what people express. Culture is what turns around and influences us in our daily lives, not the other way around. And the American culture, we learned, is what is going to eventually lead us to destruction. "I want it now, therefore, I get it" is sort of our thinking, and so debt and family demographics suffer. Darwinism has dehumanized man, and people are so wrapped up in working to make excess money that they sacrifice having children and creating families. We're not having enough babies, basically.
The six worldviews that influence us today are secular humanism (the happy human), cosmic humanism (new age spirituality), postmodernism, Christianity, Marxism (communism), and Islam. Worldviews are the frameworks of basic beliefs that we have that shape our view of and for the world. They are assumptions about origin, identity, meaning, morality, and destiny. Everyone has a worldview, but most do not think worldviewishly. Every cultural expression communicates worldview ideas, and we need to be intentional to think at the level of worldviews. In other words, always have your brain turned on! Ideas have consequences.
Now, we were taught more in depths about each and every one of these, which I'm not about to get into because they are so complicated and would take too long, but I might get into some of these as the summer progresses and I run out of things to do with myself.

A big portion of our classes revolved around the pro-life view. (Mostly taught by Scott Klusendorf and Dr. Mark Adams.) Making a case for life, and how do defend your pro-life views in five minutes or less.  I'm now going to mostly quote the text in my notes, written by Klusendorf. The first idea is to clarify the issue. The abortion argument can actually be simplified to one moral question: Is the unborn a member of the human family? If it is, killing that life for the benefit of others is a serious moral wrong. It treats a living human being as merely a disposable instrument.
Second, scientifically, we know that from the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the former Planned Parenthood president said, "This all seems so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn't part of the common knowledge."

We can say from a philosophical viewpoint that embryos are less developed than newborns (and, for that matter, toddlers as well), but this difference is not morally significant in the way abortion advocates need it to be in order to justify the killing of them. And so we must consider this next question: Why is some development needed? If human being are valuable as they are developed into, say, a toddler or a child, why would an embryo be any different? If one could justify killing one of them, they are also saying it is justifiable to kill a toddler because he is simply more developed. If a pro-abortion advocate does not also advocate killing a toddler for the same reasons as an embryo, he is assuming the unborn are not human.
Lastly, one can use the acronym of SLED:
Size: Embryos are smaller than newborns and adults, but how is that relevant? Are we going to say large people are more valuable than small people? Men are generally larger than women, but that doesn't mean they deserve rights more than women do.
Level of development: Embryos are less developed than you and I. But again, why is this relevant? Four-year-old girls are less developed than fourteen-year-old girls. Should older children have more rights than their younger siblings? Some will also say that self-awareness makes one human, but if that is true, newborn infants do not qualify as valuable human beings. Infants cannot perform human mental functions, but neither can the comatose or mentally disabled.
Environment: Where you are has no bearing on who you are. Does your value change suddenly when you cross the street or roll over in bed? If not, how can one justify a journey of eight inches down the birth canal changes the nature of the unborn from non-human to suddenly human? If the unborn are not already human, merely changing their location can't make them valuable.
Degree of Dependency: If viability makes us human, then all those who depend on insulin or kidney medication are not valuable and we may kill them. Conjoined twins who share blood type and bodily systems also have no right to life.

One of the other arguments you can use is "Trot Out Your Toddler".
"Abortion-advocate: But what about a woman who's been raped? Every time she looks at that kid, she's going to remember what happened to her. If that's not hardship, what is?
Pro-lifer: I agree that we should provide compassionate care for the victim and it should be the best care possible. That's not at issue here. It's your proposed solution I'm struggling to understand. Tell me, how should a civil society treat innocent human being that remind us of a painful event? Is it okay to kill them so we feel better? Can we, for example, kill a toddler who reminds her mother of a rape?"
Abortion-advocate: No, I wouldn't do that.

Pro-lifer: I wouldn't either. But again, in't that because you and I both agree that it's wrong to kill innocent human beings, even if they do remind us of a painful event? ...I don't understand her feelings. How could I? How could anybody? I'm just asking if hardship justifies homicide. Can we, for instance, kill toddlers who remind us of painful events? Again, my claim here is really quite modest. If the unborn are members of the human family, like toddlers, we should not kill them to make someone else feel better. It's better to suffer evil rather than inflict it...In the end, sometimes the right thing to do is not the easy thing to do. And what's right depends on the question: What is the unborn? We can't get around it."

This is just a taste of the endless lectures we listened to which, as a whole, I found immensely fascinating. I'm so glad I went. In addition to these lectures, we were also either given three hours of free time a day, or a few hours of sports time at the park. And we didn't even have to play sports, we could sit around and play guitar or read if we wanted, which I did in all circumstances. We, my friends and I, met several kids because of playing music all the time. There was Evan from New York, Josh from Connecticut, Austin from Michigan, and several others that just wanted to spend time listening to us jam out to Christian worship songs. We even went busking on several occasions, and made some pretty good money just playing music out on the street.
The food there was a little questionable at times, and I actually lost six pounds because I voluntarily had to fill myself with endless meals of salad because the quality of the meat was beyond my picky taste. We had a staff auction where the people working there sold services in order to raise money to send to Sudan. A different kid named Evan gave $200 along with my class to purchase a round of $400 smoothies and scones! What a way to send Bibles, right?

I also was able to make friends with a few kids from Life Action Ministries. One in particular was Austin Loveing, who's link is here, and I ended up befriending towards the end of the second week. Evan from the smoothies and another girl named Jess were also part of this organization. Let me tell you, they were completely hilarious. I played Hand and Foot with Jess and Austin on the last sports day, and literally couldn't stop laughing. But more importantly, with the increasing intensity of the lectures and meeting this group of friends sort of made me feel like I should be part of something bigger. Like, maybe I wasn't meant to be a counselor, or even an artist. What if God wants me to be part of a ministry like this? What if he wants me to go to the ends of the earth? I have no idea, but the prospect of this seems exciting, and I can't seem to get it out of my mind. When I think about doing to the work of spreading the Gospel, I feel something I haven't felt before. If you all could pray for me this year as I finish up high school and decide where to go next, I'd be very thankful.

By the end of the week, I was really sad I had to go and leave all of the great people I had met as we went our separate ways. I suddenly wished I lived in Michigan, Missouri, New York, and North Dakota...all at once. I'm going to miss everyone so much, but I wish them well as they go off to serve the Lord on their different paths to please the King.