The Daily Signal - The Argument for Skipping College

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

Should students go straight to college after High school? Tommy Nelson, Senior Pastor of Denton Bible Church, would argue no. “Colleges now are trying to make you a living, but not a life,” he says. To combat this problem, Nelson has created GAP, a 9-month leadership program where high school graduates can learn theology, life skills, job skills, and more before attending a university. In today’s episode, Nelson discusses why he started GAP, how it operates, and how we can prepare young people to stand against the rise of secularism on college campuses. Visit https://www.dbcmedia.org/ to learn more about GAP. Also on today's show:   We read your letters to the editor. You can leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write to us at [e-mail]. And we share a good news story of a sergeant who ran a race, saved a life, and got engaged all in one day.    The Heritage Foundation is now accepting applicant for the spring 2020 semester. Apply here! The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. All of our podcasts can be found at dailysignal.com/podcasts. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, November 18th. I'm Robert Blewey. And I'm Virginia Allen. On today's show, we talk with Tommy Nelson, senior pastor of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas, about why he is telling young people not to go to college, or at least not right away, and what he says they should be doing instead. We also share your letters to the editor and a good news story about a patriot long-distance runner who managed to save a life and propose to his girlfriend, all will run.

running a marathon. Before we get to today's show, we want to tell you about our favorite morning newsletter. It's called the Morning Bell. And each weekday, the Daily Signal delivers the top news and commentary directly to your inbox for free. You'll be able to read about policy debates shaping the agenda, analysis from Heritage Foundation experts, and commentary from leading conservatives like Ben Shapiro, Michelle Malkin, and Dennis Prager. It's easy to sign up. Just visit DailySignal.com and click on the connect button in the top right corner of the page. We'll start sending you the morning bell tomorrow. Now stay tuned for today's show coming up next. Tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices and bigger government, become a part of the Heritage Foundation.

We're fighting the rising tide of homegrown socialism while developing conservative solutions that make families more free and more prosperous. Find out more at Hays. heritage.org. I am joined on the Daily Signal podcast by Tommy Nelson, senior pastor of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas, about 40 miles north of Dallas. Tommy, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Delighted to be with you. Tommy, you are telling young people not to go to college, or at least not right away. In fact, your church has created a program called Gap that is specifically for young men who have just graduated from high school. And the Gap program, as I've seen kind of described on your website is essentially a nine-month leadership training program to teach theology, life skills, job skills, and so forth.

So why do you think that it's so important for young people to not go straight to college after high school and maybe to consider a program like Gap? Well, you know, and I'm now 69 years old. And when I was young, college was the ticket. You had to go to college. was how you were going to rise. Well, college is a lot different now than what it was then. I can never recall in college. I went to North Texas State University. And I can never recall God, my faith, the Bible being attacked, it was considered rude. Maybe they did it at Berkeley, but nobody did it there. And yet I have worked with college students for almost 50 years now.

and now when a kid goes to college, you have the secular worldview that is set up shop, and secularism says there is no final truth. It is found subjectively within you and how you feel to make you happy, and no one can judge you. That's secularism. And so when somebody comes with an uplifted Bible, the responses like Nebuchadnezzar to people who will not bow to his image. and so scientifically, psychologically, morally, the faith is attacked. And you just see kids, Virginia, that go to college. And if they're not set up yet, which a lot of 18s aren't, they are swept away.

If they are Christian kids, they are ganged up upon by their seniors, and they're now in a survival mode. I mean, you lose your faith, you lose your virginity, you lose your liver in time. and you can lose your life. And so they're not, colleges now are not simply trying to make you a living but not a life. They're trying to get you a living and destroy what you thought was life and the fear of God, the image of God in man, the absoluteness of moral, of absolutes, they're out for you. And so we don't try to keep kids out of college, but we say before you go to college, let us take you in a GAP, God's alternative plan.

And let's take you. And we'll teach you Bible. We'll teach you apologetics. We'll teach you about where secularism came from. America's gone from Calvinism to Armenianism to liberalism to secularism. Secularism was where nobody cares if there's a God. Agnosticism doesn't believe that you can know. Secularism just doesn't care.

And man is now exalted in humanistic secularism. So we just take you and we train you in life skills. We show kids how to dress, how to have etiquette. We show them how to work on the car, how to do blacksmithing. We show you how to do carpentry. We show you how to garden. And we use take a college nine months, and we bring in people, excellent men from all over. And we just teach it.

And we're doing it with men now. In a couple of years, we hope to go to women. We're kind of building the airplane as we fly it. You know what I'm saying? We're not, no one's ever really done this that I know of. and so we're kind of building it as we go. Well, it's so practical to take both that theology side and then just those life skills, those job skills. Right. Yeah, and a kid today, Virginia, can live in a room with a smartphone and never get out of it.

And I mean, he's got access to the Library of Congress. And so a lot of life skills, a lot of people, skills, social skills, moral skills, domestic skills, workplace skills. Kids have just so much today have them removed. You know, there's a verse in the proverbs. It says, an inheritance gained hurriedly at the beginning will not be blessed in the end, meaning when you give a kid too much too quick, it'll ruin him. It's not giving him a chance to struggle. And so we'll take boys, Virginia, we want them to be able to do 50 pushups, 10 pullups, and be able to run a 10K. My son, who is in Homeland Security, he told me that they're getting guys now that their

femurs give way. Their hips give way. Their bones just are not hard because they hadn't been stressed. They've sat around so long. It's been found that kids, something like 70% of the kids in the United States, couldn't get into the military because of their lack of physical fitness. So we make them physically fit, socially adept. We just kind of bring you through a lack of the South. They would take a kid and put him down, make him eat in the basement until he was instructed by a servant and how to conduct himself and how to be apropos in public.

Then they'd let him come up to the adults. And kids now just don't have any life skills. And as I talk with a lot of young guys now, they're not really interested that much in college. But they are just about learning how to live, how to give life skills. And I think men in our country have been so condescended upon that a man is just afraid to assert himself in a home. They're all desperately looking for a male figure with authority and love to set up shop

and say, this is the way it is. It's kind of like in the Bible when you read the book of Proverbs. And Solomon will say, my son. And he'll say, don't do this. Be aware of this. Do this. And he'll give you a little two-line sermons over and over and over just to help you make it through life. So that's what we try to do in the GAAP program.

I had more response to it than anything we've ever had in 47 years of Denton Bible Church. More response by the adults saying we want to get behind this and do whatever we can. I've never seen that bigger response from kids and from adults saying, yes, that's what we've got to have. So we're going with six as kind of a trial run. Then next year we're going to go to 20. Then we're going to open a net to girls and go 40. And I would like someday, Virginia, to see churches everywhere there's an evangelical church to have part of their staff as to somebody to do the gap program. I mean, it's a blinding flash of the obvious.

I mean, you, Virginia Allen, you could do it. You could take a bunch of girls that are 18 years old and start talking to them about morality, about God, about how to be a daughter, about parents, about authority, about being skilled and the person you select to look at for your life partner, you can make a whole lot of difference in a young girl's life. Well, you just have to get a guy that knows his Bible and that knows how we, got from the Puritans to same-sex gender assignment and how we got from an alienable truths that are self-evident through nature's God to where a judge can be censored by the ACLU for handing a Bible to a convicted murderer and show him John 316, which is what we had just

recently in Texas. How did we get here? So somebody has to be able to show them Bible and history, and the devolution of Western philosophy and get the kid ready for the chipper that he's about to back into. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. When he graduates, he's backing into a chipper, and it's going to grind him up if he's not ready.

And you say that you roughly modeled the program after the LaBray Fellowship, which was started by Francis and Edith Schaefer. There's been a lot of places that did this. A Princeton University was begun by what was called the log college of a failure named William Tennant, and it became Princeton, where he took about 18 young guys and just tutored him as young men because he didn't want to send him to Harvard or Yale that had gone liberal. And so he trained him. Libri means the shelter in French, and Francis Schaefer

would take young men and women from Europe that had been devastated through secular humanism that reached Europe ahead of us. And he would take them and walk them through it. And Colorado Springs, the summit ministry by David Noble, the same thing. He looked up in 62, and he says, we're sending kids to college to get threshed, and he would take them and train them. And so there's been things like this all around the country starting to pop up. It's kind of like whatever America pressed to the West.

In the late 1800s, mid to late 1800s, and, you know, gosh, I guess before, because it was realized that we were going to the West, but we had no churches. So we would try to have a, you know, a courthouse, a school, but there weren't any churches. And so we started what was called the Sunday School Alliance to where the men and women would go out, and on Sunday they would take the children in an hour, and they would begin to train them, in the Bible because they recognized that there was such a big gap, a big dearth of knowledge. And it got so well known that pretty soon the Sunday School Association disappeared, and local churches took it upon themselves to say we can do this.

And that's where, I mean, all of us grew up at Sunday school to some degree. And that's where it started, was just a bunch of adults said, we got a problem here. We got kids growing up with no moral guidance. and when America was urbanized and industrialized, you had all kids, who daddy would now go to the factory and kids were loose and you had gangs beginning. And out of that came. YMCA, Boys Club, Boy Scout, things like this.

Sports, baseball, football, to try to get kids under coaches to try to give them some guidance before the system ground them up. And so this is an old, old idea for that matter. heck, Virginia, the synagogue in Israel, when they were surrounded by the pagans, when they were dispersed, they would come together in a common place of instruction, synagogue. And they would instruct the kids on how to be Jews in the midst of Rome and in midst of Greece, in the midst of Persian. So that's kind of what this is. It's an old, old idea that kind of needs to be reborn.

Every church can take some guys, some girls, some couple, and take kids. and parent them and get them ready to step into the chipper that has become the American worldview now. And you started with six young men in September, correct? How's it going? Like I say, we're building the plane as we fly. Okay, great. Are those young men seem to be enjoying the program so far? They have said, I am changed.

And we've only been doing now for two months. Wow. And they are saying, my life has changed because they were taken from a theological, philosophical, intellectual, physical, two, and confronted with an eight. And they were by older, the guy that I have it is called Drew Anderson. He's a former Midland, Texas, Allstate, linebacker in 185 pounds. So you better be tough. A Texas A&M Aggie, a guy who did the stock market and real estate. before he went into the ministry, and he's just, he's a man's man, he loves his wife, he loves

his daughters, and he takes these young men four hours a day, and he orchestrates people coming in and him instructing them. So they're at school. They're four hours a day in our own life college, and they're absolutely loving it because we're exposing them to financial planners, to bankers, to master gardeners, to military men, to surgeons who are Christians that are showing them the way the big boys do it. And their lives are being changed. Have you received any pushback from parents saying, no, my child needs to go straight to college after they graduate high school? And, you know, if you do have parents saying that to you, what are you saying to them? You know, I say there's maybe a few kids that could go straight to college today.

There's maybe a few. I've seen a couple that are so grounded by their parents and Bible theology, life, and social skills that they can do it. But very few. And so we have had zero pushback from parents. We had one kid come in the program because his mother filled out the, uh, the entrance form unknown to him just to get him in. And so all that we ask from a kid, a young man, and in two years from a young woman, is that they have a motor.

They have to be self-motivated. It's not a recovery program. We're not taking, you know, drug addicts and trying to rehab them. We're taking kids. If you've been a drug addict, that's okay. but we're taking kids that want desperately to be successful in life and are not quite sure how to do it. We can't spend our time trying to parent a disobedient child. And so we'll send them home.

If they don't show up to class, if they can't show up on time, if they can't get along with people in it, we'll have to send them home. It costs like $2,500 a year to do it, which would be the lowest junior college education you could get. And so it's not a great fee. But we want them to make a commitment and to stay with us. So we have had no pushback. What we have had is we'll have up to 150 parents come together in a meeting with their particular life skill to say, I want to be able to be used.

if you can use me in any way, use me. We've had guys that are recovering drug addicts that came to us and said, if you can use me, we said, yes, we can. And we get you in there. We have people that will come and teach them about STDs and say, this is what you're looking at if you become immoral. This is going to happen. So we have had huge response from the parents.

And is the program at Denton Bible Church, is that only for your students in your congregation? or could, you know, a young person in Florida? Anybody. Now, if you're in there, you've got to go to Denton Bible Church. Okay. You go to the first service and you don't just get to sit. You become a greeter or you become a usher or you become someone that serves communion

or you become someone that sits in and helps with the infants and plays with the squal and kids. So we're not going to let you just sit. You're going to be in a college group, the college group at our church. church and you're going to be a servant in that group. So it's not a time that you're going to sit and vegetate for a year. You're going to be busy and you're going to serve within the church. Now, if churches want to find out more about duplicating your model or if students want to apply, how can they find out more? You know, I'm not an expert on a computer machine, but they can just go to Denton Bible on the computer and then look at Denton Bible. And then look at Denton Bible.

and look for the gap. And it'll give them, we've made a video because we would get it, we've got a huge number of calls saying, what are you doing? And so we're having people call and we show them. And Virginia, in time,

if it works, we've got to wait and see if it works. It's great on paper, and it looks great after two months, but we're waiting to see. But we would like in time to write on it and to say, here's how you do it, because any church can do this. And it's a blinding flash of the obvious.

It's falling off the log. Young guys are all looking for old guys. Old guys are longing to invest in the next generation. Psalm 71, do not forsake me, O God, until I make thy name known to the generation to come. And so all you've got to have is an intelligent, loving, communicable person that can be funded by a church to say this is your position is to develop the Gap program, because we would like to have in time.

I'd like to have 500 kids a year coming and going in this, to where it becomes something that every evangelical church in our country does is taking the kids in the church and around the church, because they're not just kids in our church. We've got a kid from Chicago, we've got kids from all over, that have come to do this. So we're thinking any church can do it, and every church ought to do it.

Well, Tommy, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it and learning more about the Gap program. So excited to hear. Thank you, Virginia. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the Agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research.

The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each Monday we feature our favorites on this show and in the Morning Bell email newsletter. Virginia, who's up first? Steve Lipson of Tucson, Arizona, writes, Dear Daily Signal, Excellent article by Fred Lucas about the education failures of the Great Society titled Why LBJ's Great Society gets a failing grade in improving education.

The federal role in education should be very limited. Note that the Constitution omits education as a federal responsibility, leaving it to the states and people. The failures of the Head Start program do not mean that it's a bad idea. To begin, it should be a state-level program at the high. highest, not a federal program. Disadvantaged children still need increased opportunities. And Stuart Schmidt writes, we are so bombarded with information in today's media. We have to decide what is the truth on top of being bombarded. Thank you for being a dependable news source

for me. I do not tolerate news manipulation. Your good writers report the information without a manipulative tone. Your letter could be featured on next week's show. Send an email to letters at dailysignal.com or leave a voicemail message at 202-608-6205. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to Scotus 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Kianna Sedman is a Heritage Foundation intern and is back in studio with us today to share a good story. But before I throw it over to Kiana, I want to tell all of our listeners out there that

the Heritage Foundation is currently accepting applications for our Young Leaders intern program for the spring of 2020. It's a paid internship that runs from January through April. So if you want to learn more or apply, you can visitHeritage.org and click on the About Heritage and then go to careers, and you can scroll down the page to find the Young Leaders Program. And I'll also make sure to leave a link in the show notes. You can find out more information. But Kiana, I want to toss it over to you to share a good news story. Awesome.

Thank you, Virginia. I'm really excited to share this good news story with you guys because it honestly feels like a superhero movie with a little hallmark mixed in. This story's hero is Sergeant Mike Nowacki. He has been with the Chicago Police Department for 19 years and decided to run All-State Hot Chocolate 15K in his 50-pound SWAT gear to show his appreciation for law enforcement. But that wasn't the only plan he had for the day. At the end of the race, he wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Aaron Gubola, who was also a Chicago police officer.

So with a ring in his pocket, he began the race. But before the finish line, something happened that he didn't plan on. About 150 yards south of the finish line, I hear people, screaming medic. Noaki veered from the trail and found an unresponsive woman lying on the ground. He and a firefighter quickly jumped into action and began performing CPR until paramedics arrived. The woman was rushed to the hospital and because of their CPR, she survived. It was definitely a serendipitous moment because if I had run a little bit slower or a little bit

faster, I would have never encountered the young lady. Now I know you may be wondering, did he still propose after all of this? Well, here's what he and Gubola had to say about the end of the race. Mostly what I was trying to do as I finished the race was come up with something good to say. And that I was totally thrown off by having to perform CPR. He got out on one knee and I thought that he was hurt. And then he just said, Aaron, I don't know what to say. But Aaron did.

Once she realized what was going on, she said yes. This is definitely a day the couple won't soon forget. Kiana, thank you so much for sharing that good news story. It's so encouraging and what a fun story. All right, well, we are going to leave it there for today. The Daily Signal podcast comes to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. You can find it on the Rurkissue Audio Network. All of our shows can be found at dailysignal.com slash podcasts.

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