Bill Lawrence has been a successful physician for many years. Yet he recently gave up his Arizona practice in order to become a chaplain to prison inmates. Why? Because Bill, a long-time Prison Fellowship volunteer, spent the past year studying Christian worldview, and God used that process to call him to full-time service.

Bill is among the first graduates of our Wilberforce Forum's Centurions program. It's designed to equip an ongoing fellowship of one hundred mature Christians each year, enabling them to advocate the Christian worldview in all of life. Each student studies how worldviews influence economics and work, marriage and family, popular culture, the arts, politics, and the like. They learn how to contend for the truth through apologetics, teaching, and critiquing false worldviews.

This program is urgently needed. One of the reasons the Church is having so little impact on culture today is that too many Christians view their faith only in terms of a personal relationship with Jesus. George Barna's research backs this up. His 2003 national survey found that only nine percent of born again Christians even hold a biblical worldview. And flawed worldviews have fatal consequences: Barna found that Christians who don't embrace a biblical worldview are more likely to condone things like premarital cohabitation, homosexuality, adultery, and abortion.

The Centurions aim to change that. The inaugural class is made up of people ready to do serious battle for God. For instance, software consultant Rick Hooten recently hosted a worldview education seminar for some thirty Houston pastors. He introduced them to the concept of a biblical worldview, encouraging them to promote worldview education in their churches. Dayna Garner hosts a weekly television program called "Worldview in Focus." She recently spent thirteen weeks teaching biblical worldview to her Albuquerque television audience based on the book How Now Shall We Live?

Sean Copley, a Maryland graphics designer, is developing a worldview curriculum and animation series for Christian television. Sean says: "I believe this is where my calling resides . . . teaching worldview in reference to the arts and pop culture, specifically to youth."

Many Christians believe we change cultures from the top down-get righteous leaders, they think, and you'll have a righteous society. But throughout history, the greatest movements have started from the bottom up-ordinary people talking with their friends and before their church groups and reaching their kids.

The great abolitionist William Wilberforce-for whom our Forum is named-understood this. He knew it was not enough to take on the evil of the British slave trade, but to effect a permanent change, there had to be what he called a "reformation of manners," a moral renewal in England. His decades-long efforts led to the abolition of slavery and, ultimately, to the second Great Wesley awakening, which revived the Church and the culture.

Our Centurions have the potential to accomplish the same-to raise up an army of Christians equipped to call the Church to greater faithfulness to God and to change our culture one person at a time by defending biblical truth. The good news is that there are one hundred of them out there right now doing it, and hundreds more are on the way.