I have good memories of church youth camps, retreats, and mission trips. I have seen the Lord greatly bless these on occasions when I have had the privilege to serve with others as a counselor or in leadership positions.

While in seminary, I presented an idea to Ben Wilkinson who was with the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship. The idea was to have summer student evangelists. He recruited a half dozen of us fellows and we traveled around conducting youth services and retreats. I remember I had a couple of sermons against easy believism and decisional regeneration, and the rest of my material was taken from J.C. Ryle’s Holiness. It has been 35 years, and someone mentioned to me this week his family’s fond remembrance of one of those weeks, so I guess Ryle’s material bore some fruit.

Upon graduation from seminary, Wayne Herring, Wayne Rogers and myself were disappointed in the lack of knowledge of the Reformed Faith in youth in the Presbyterian Church in the United States, so we began the Reformed Youth Movement. Each summer we held one or two conferences with speakers like Al Martin, John Reisinger, Palmer Robertson and Jack Scott. With the formation of the Presbyterian Church in America we saw some return to a knowledge of the Reformed Faith that had not been present in the PCUS. Although all of the original organizers of RYM have long since resigned, the Reformed Youth Movement continues today, and many who have been used profitably in it have been associated with Reformed University Fellowship, a good campus ministry.

Around the early 90’s I learned of the Life Preparation Conference in Atlanta led by Gary DeMar and Gary North. My wife and I, together with other parents in our congregation, sent our children to it. Besides profiting from instruction from these men and others like Greg Bahnsen, they also got to know their teachers personally and spend time with them.

When it appeared that DeMar and North were not going to continue this conference, I wrote to them and told them our church would like to do something along the order of what they had done. They had no immediate plans to continue, so in 1994 the Christian Worldview Student Conference was born.

CWSC’s emphasis went beyond the Reformed fundamentals; its goal was to assist parents and churches in ministry to their youth by helping them develop a Biblical Worldview. Students would learn there were answers to all the humanist garbage on various campuses and they would be encouraged by the numbers of fellow students who were in the battle with them. Young people from all over the United States and some foreign countries have come to this conference and have benefited greatly. At CWSC students have met their future spouse, formed lifelong friendships, come to understand their calling in life, and received great instruction in applying God’s Word to all of life. Consider this list of teachers and recognize that listening to them will bear fruit, by God’s grace: Calvin Beisner, Joel Belz, Norm Bomer, Michael Butler, Gary DeMar, Richard Ganz, Ken Gentry, George Grant, Peter Leithart, Joseph Morecraft, Howard Phillips, Tom Rose, R.J. Rushdoony, Andrew Sandlin, Steve Schlissel, Herb Titus, Gene Veith, Ed Welch, Steve Wilkins, Douglas Wilson and others. Even though these men may not agree with each other on everything, they are good men for whom I thank the Lord.

I don’t believe it is true that youth conferences and such produce little fruit. Folks who say this need to broaden what they observe, talk to a few more people, maybe come into town a little more often.

Conferences like CWSC bear fruit and they break many of the rules that some in the patriarchy movement hold so dear. CWSC is a giant youth meeting(not good), it gathers students together with their peers(not good), it is age segregated(not good) and it allows fathers to delegate responsibility to others to teach their sons and daughters for a time(not good).