Legacy Youth Ministry Resources

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Lowell Challenges Skeptics

I challenge skeptics to find a ten-square-mile spot on this planet where they can live their lives in peace and safety and decency, where womanhood is honored, where infancy, and old age are revered. where they can educate their children; where the Gospel of Jesus Christ has not gone first to prepare the way. If any find such a place, then I would encourage them to emigrate thither and there proclaim their belief. (James Russell Lowell, from the collection of Barry St. Clair)

H.G. Wells on Jesus

?More than 1900 years later,? said H.G. Wells, ?a historian like myself, who doesn?t even call himself a Christian, finds the picture centering irresistibly around the life and character of this most significant man...The historian?s test of an individual?s greatness is ?What did he leave to grow?? Did he start men to thinking along fresh lines with a vigor that persisted after him? By this test Jesus stands first.? (From the collection of Barry St. Clair)

Mother Teresa's Motivation

?We are a contemplative order,? Mother Teresa told a rich American visitor who could not comprehend her fierce commitment to the dregs of Calcutta. ?First we meditate on Jesus, and then we go out and look for him in disguise.?

Abandoned to God, No Early Death

?A life abandoned to Jesus cannot be cut short.? (Missionary Sam Zwemer [1867-1952])

Psychiatrist on Sermon on the Mount

"If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene - if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out the excess verbiage - if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount. And it would suffer immeasurably through comparison. For nearly two thousand years the Christian world has been holding in its hands the complete answer to its restless and fruitless yearnings. Here?rests the blueprint for successful human life with optimism, mental health, and contentment." - Psychiatrist J.T. Fisher (J. T. Fisher and L. S. Hawley, A Few Buttons Missing, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951, p. 273)

Yale Professor on Impact of Christianity

Yale Professor on Impact of Christianity Impact of Christianity, Culture "Christianity has been the means of reducing more languages to writing than have all other factors combined. It has created more schools, more theories of education, and more systems than has any other one force. More than any other power in history it has impelled men to fight suffering, whether that suffering has come from disease, war or natural disasters. It has built thousands of hospitals, inspired the emergence of the nursing and medical professions, and furthered movement for public health and the relief and prevention of famine. Although explorations and conquests which were in part its outgrowth led to the enslavement of Africans for the plantations of the Americas, men and women whose consciences were awakened by Christianity and whose wills it nerved brought about the abolition of slavery (in England and America). Men and women similarly moved and sustained wrote into the laws of Spain and Portugal provisions to alleviate the ruthless exploitation of the Indians of the New World. Wars have often been waged in the name of Christianity. They have attained their most colossal dimensions through weapons and large?scale organization initiated in (nominal) Christendom. Yet from no other source have there come as many and as strong movements to eliminate or regulate war and to ease the suffering brought by war. From its first centuries, the Christian faith has caused many of its adherents to be uneasy about war. It has led minorities to refuse to have any part in it. It has impelled others to seek to limit war by defining what, in their judgment, from the Christian standpoint is a "just war." In the turbulent Middle Ages of Europe it gave rise to the Truce of God and the Peace of God. In a later era it was the main impulse in the formulation of international law. But for it, the League of Nations and the United Nations would not have been. By its name and symbol, the most extensive organization ever created for the relief of the suffering caused by war, the Red Cross, bears witness to its Christian origin. The list might go on indefinitely. It includes many another humanitarian projects and movements, ideals in government, the reform of prisons and the emergence of criminology, great art and architecture, and outstanding literature." Kenneth Scott Latourette, Sterling Professor, Yale University

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